Testing testing testing
I want to tell you it was a dramatic fear, born of some near-drowning in a lake with a name I've since forgotten. It wasn't. I just never learned, and then it became a thing I hadn't learned, which is a very different, much heavier kind of not-knowing.
My mother tried, twice, at a public pool with peeling paint and a lifeguard who looked perpetually unimpressed. I remember the smell of chlorine more than I remember the lessons. What I actually learned, in those two summers, was how to hold my breath and hope no one asked me to do anything else. I became excellent at looking like I was about to swim. I was less good at actually swimming.
For twenty years, this was a fact about me I managed rather than addressed. I sat on the edges of lakes. I wore the right swimsuit to the right pool parties and found reasons to stay on the dock. I told people I "wasn't really a water person," as though it were a preference, like disliking cilantro, rather than a fear I'd built an entire personality around avoiding.
The decision to finally learn came from nowhere dramatic. A friend was training for a triathlon and needed someone to sit at the shallow end of the community pool twice a week, mostly for company, occasionally for moral support. I went along for the first session with no intention of getting in the water. By the third session, I was standing in it up to my waist, gripping the edge like it owed me money.
The instructor — hired for my friend, not me, though she took pity on me anyway — said something in the second week that I've thought about more than almost anything else anyone has told me as an adult.
I want to tell you it was a dramatic fear, born of some near-drowning in a lake with a name I've since forgotten. It wasn't. I just never learned, and then it became a thing I hadn't learned, which is a very different, much heavier kind of not-knowing.
My mother tried, twice, at a public pool with peeling paint and a lifeguard who looked perpetually unimpressed. I remember the smell of chlorine more than I remember the lessons. What I actually learned, in those two summers, was how to hold my breath and hope no one asked me to do anything else. I became excellent at looking like I was about to swim. I was less good at actually swimming.
For twenty years, this was a fact about me I managed rather than addressed. I sat on the edges of lakes. I wore the right swimsuit to the right pool parties and found reasons to stay on the dock. I told people I "wasn't really a water person," as though it were a preference, like disliking cilantro, rather than a fear I'd built an entire personality around avoiding.
The decision to finally learn came from nowhere dramatic. A friend was training for a triathlon and needed someone to sit at the shallow end of the community pool twice a week, mostly for company, occasionally for moral support. I went along for the first session with no intention of getting in the water. By the third session, I was standing in it up to my waist, gripping the edge like it owed me money.
The instructor — hired for my friend, not me, though she took pity on me anyway — said something in the second week that I've thought about more than almost anything else anyone has told me as an adult.
For twenty years, this was a fact about me I managed rather than addressed. I sat on the edges of lakes. I wore the right swimsuit to the right pool parties and found reasons to stay on the dock. I told people I "wasn't really a water person," as though it were a preference, like disliking cilantro, rather than a fear I'd built an entire personality around avoiding.
The decision to finally learn came from nowhere dramatic. A friend was training for a triathlon and needed someone to sit at the shallow end of the community pool twice a week, mostly for company, occasionally for moral support. I went along for the first session with no intention of getting in the water. By the third session, I was standing in it up to my waist, gripping the edge like it owed me money.
The instructor — hired for my friend, not me, though she took pity on me anyway — said something in the second week that I've thought about more than almost anything else anyone has told me as an adult.
For twenty years, this was a fact about me I managed rather than addressed. I sat on the edges of lakes. I wore the right swimsuit to the right pool parties and found reasons to stay on the dock. I told people I "wasn't really a water person," as though it were a preference, like disliking cilantro, rather than a fear I'd built an entire personality around avoiding.
The decision to finally learn came from nowhere dramatic. A friend was training for a triathlon and needed someone to sit at the shallow end of the community pool twice a week, mostly for company, occasionally for moral support. I went along for the first session with no intention of getting in the water. By the third session, I was standing in it up to my waist, gripping the edge like it owed me money.
The instructor — hired for my friend, not me, though she took pity on me anyway — said something in the second week that I've thought about more than almost anything else anyone has told me as an adult.
For twenty years, this was a fact about me I managed rather than addressed. I sat on the edges of lakes. I wore the right swimsuit to the right pool parties and found reasons to stay on the dock. I told people I "wasn't really a water person," as though it were a preference, like disliking cilantro, rather than a fear I'd built an entire personality around avoiding.
The decision to finally learn came from nowhere dramatic. A friend was training for a triathlon and needed someone to sit at the shallow end of the community pool twice a week, mostly for company, occasionally for moral support. I went along for the first session with no intention of getting in the water. By the third session, I was standing in it up to my waist, gripping the edge like it owed me money.
The instructor — hired for my friend, not me, though she took pity on me anyway — said something in the second week that I've thought about more than almost anything else anyone has told me as an adult.