Tossed, Not Sunk

What Shakespeare, Ovaltine, and a Fading Tattoo Taught Me About Self-Rescue

I didn’t expect to find God—or anything close to him—while watching British television. But there I was, thirteen, cross-legged in the basment, absorbing Jane Austen by way of Kate Winslet. British heartbreak has a way of being tidy, restrained, exquisitely contained. People whisper about love while staring out of rain-streaked windows, and somehow that feels more devastating than a screaming match.

That’s where I first heard it—Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, spoken with an accent that made it sound like gospel:

“It is the star to every wand'ring bark… it looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

I kept that line the way some people keep pressed flowers. I didn’t fully understand it, but it felt sacred, like a map I wasn’t old enough to read yet. At twenty-three, after my first divorce, I inked it on my arm, convinced it meant I understood something about love. But the irony didn’t hit until nine years later, as I signed divorce papers for my second husband, a Pisces.

Love wasn’t the star. Survival was.

"Fluctuat nec mergitur." Tossed, but not sunk. The official motto of Paris, etched on a silver ship cresting red waves. It’s been around since the 1300s, but it came roaring back in 2015 after the terrorist attacks—a reminder that a city can crack, burn, and bleed, and still refuse to drown.

I look at my own arm, at the fading brown ink, and I think—yes. Tossed, but not sunk. The fading feels like proof, like the body is doing its job, turning over cells, regenerating. Validation hides in strange places when you’re rebuilding yourself.

Because here’s the truth no one tells you: saving yourself isn’t about perfect skin or DEXA scans or how many pounds you can deadlift. Those are just transactions, dopamine hits for the body but not for the soul. The real healing happens in quieter ways—molecular, energetic, the way your cells vibrate when they finally believe you’re safe.

“You will be changed,” the Bible promises. The Tao whispers it, too, just in different words. Transformation isn’t a diet. It’s a frequency.

Maybe that’s why I needed the tattoo back then. A Sharpie wouldn’t have been strong enough to hold the code.

But codes aren’t always what you think they are. Ralphie, in A Christmas Story, thought he was decoding a secret message that would change his life. Instead, after all his careful spinning of the decoder pin, he got:

“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

I drank Ovaltine as a kid, too. But by the 90s, the decoder rings were gone. All we had left was sugar in a canister, dressed up as health.

The “Healthy” Lie We All Drank

Ovaltine was marketed as a nutritional halo—vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, B-complex! Mothers thought they were nourishing us. But the truth? Two tablespoons gave you 12 grams of carbs, almost all sugar. Add water, and you were basically drinking vitamin-fortified hot cocoa.

We believed it because the adults believed it, and they believed it because the commercials told them to. That’s the thing about health halos: they work best on the people who love you.

Now, decades later, scientists are calling Alzheimer’s Type 3 diabetes. The brain, it turns out, doesn’t like decades of insulin spikes. High sugar diets train your cells to stop listening, to stop using glucose for fuel, to die faster.

When you feed children “healthy sugar” daily for years, you’re essentially programming their metabolic systems to burn out early—not just in the body, but in the brain. Synthetic vitamins never saved us. They gave us the illusion of safety while our cells drowned.

And now? The same generation raised on health-marketed sugar is the one battling midlife brain fog, early insulin resistance, and cognitive decline years before our grandparents did. We weren’t decoding anything sacred. We were just decoding ads.

Decoding, For Real

But still—sometimes I think about Ralphie, hunched over his decoder pin, and I wonder if the message wasn’t completely wrong. Maybe “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine” wasn’t the tragedy—it was the warning. A reminder of how easily we believe what we’re told is good for us.

The real decoding happens later, in adulthood, when you start noticing the things that don’t add up—when you look down at a fading tattoo and finally understand it wasn’t about love, or heartbreak, or even Shakespeare.

It was about resilience. About training your cells, your brain, your life to stay afloat even when the waves keep coming.

Tossed, yes. But not sunk.

I used to think healing meant building a new life so shiny and perfect no one would suspect how much I had lost. Now I think healing is simpler, quieter. It’s drinking water that’s actually alive. It’s making your nervous system feel safe for the first time in decades. It’s buying a green tulip lamp that feels like musky cilantro because it makes you happy at 9 a.m. on a Sunday.

Healing isn’t heroic. It’s cumulative. It’s daily, invisible, molecular.

And sometimes, it’s standing in your kitchen, arm tattoo fading, whispering to yourself—like a spell, or a prayer, or a secret message you no longer need to decode:

Tossed. Not sunk.