When I was five my mom took me for swimming lessons, the teacher was a bit on the crazy side but hey, who am I to judge? Anyway five year old me and miss crazy pants (a suitable nickname if you ask me) didn’t exactly see eye to eye. Surprise right? Well the story goes that one day five year old me wasn’t kicking hard enough or blowing enough bubbles or whatever the accused crime was, and the teacher was tired of my so called antics. Her solution was to throw me into the deep end, literally. She took me to the middle of the pool in its deepest section and let go, she swam away as she watched me sink to the bottom of the floor. My mother, horrified at what she saw before her immediately began screaming and cursing at the teacher, demanding that I be retrieved immediately from the bottom of the black stone pool. I remember it was black stone because it was the kind that had those little pieces of glitter in it, and they made pretty patterns with the sunshine as I was sinking. I also remember it was a thatch house with three garden stools on the lawn. Don’t ask me about the Pythagorean Theorem but I know that there were three garden stools.
Anyway, clearly I was retrieved from the bottom of the black stone pool and lived to tell the tale. I took on water though and very nearly drowned. Needless to say I was not sent back for another swim lesson with miss crazy pants. There was another occasion, after I was taught how to swim properly, by a non-crazy pants teacher, where I was at a friend’s house swimming with my brother. This friend happened to be a boy whom I thought was just swell. I was seven, forgive me. And as my mum and his mum were friends my brother and I had been invited over for the afternoon to swim and play and do whatever it is seven year olds do. We’d recently returned from a trip to the lake where I had perfected my deep end swimming at the lake houses pool, therefore I was feeling rather confident in my swimming levels that afternoon. So seven year old me thinks that taking my brother, four into the deep end and teaching him the ways of a master swimmer, which clearly I was at this point in time. Long story short there was one of those kid proof net things over the pool and it hadn’t been take out full, so when my brother and I got to the deep end he panicked and in an attempt to get himself up he started pushing me down and my foot got caught in the net. I was caught in the net and started taking on water again. My brother got out quickly but I was still trapped. The parents had gone inside whilst this was going on so I was only retrieved from the pool a few moments later. I remember that I was in shock and sugar is meant to be some magic cure for shock, so I was given sweet milky tea in a purple cup with cows on it. My favourite cup, when this family later migrated I was given this cup. I can remember the cup; don’t ask me what the capital of Venezuela is though.
The things in common between these two incidents are things I also remember. I remember the way sunlight caught the water, the way I sort of just floated, calm and unafraid, how I was so shocked by what was happening that my response was delayed and inadequate but mostly I remember feeling heavier, heavier as the water filled my lungs and dragged me down. This sense of knowing that this is bad, that I should be fighting but feeling so weighed down that fighting seems futile. Feeling so…drowned.
I can’t count how many times I’ve felt that way, not because I was swimming and it went bad. Because I was drowning in the way I felt. The way I felt so inadequate, that no one loved me or that if I really did drown I’d be doing everyone a favour. Drowning in pressure, pressure that exists only on the inside of my head, pressure that I’ve built up so high like a jenga tower that one more block with collapse everything. I can’t tell you that I’ve stopped building the jenga tower or that I’ve learnt how to swim to the top. What I can tell you is that my lungs are a lot bigger; I can tell you that I take deeper breaths when I’m breathing feeling. Most importantly though, is that I’ve learnt how to hold my breath.
