Drowning at Life

I never was a strong swimmer.

I failed as many rounds of swimming lessons as I passed - yellow once, orange twice, red somehow passed on the first try, maroon failed once, et cetera, all the way to my Bronze Cross. (This was before the system reverted to numbers and lost a great deal of its mystic charm.) My mother described my pace in the water as ‘leisurely,’ and it was anything but - it was grueling. I had no upper body strength, and my legs had yet to mature. I clawed at the water and got nowhere. I kicked with everything and barely moved. The other children, taller and stronger, would glide past me, making it all look so effortless. I kicked with all my might to keep my head above water in the shallow end.

If ever there was a perfect metaphor for suicide, to me that’s it: my seven year old self, kicking and kicking and never being able to touch bottom, then slipping underneath the chlorinated water of my neighborhood swimming pool.

There were lifeguards, of course, in the metaphor and in real life. Drowning children are not to be tolerated - and if I were in enough distress and showing signs of imminent death, I would be removed from the pool and toweled off. I could cough and sputter and blow my nose and wipe my eyes, and then, obediently, I would be placed back in with the other children. Intervention was only as long lived as it took to ensure my safety and get me back into the water.

If I was prevented from drowning and kept in the water, eventually I would learn how to swim.

I wanted to swim so badly and could not understand why, for me, it seemed an impossible task. Eventually, I grew to hate it; I just wasn’t any good at swimming. I couldn’t reach the bottom, and my body wasn’t strong enough to master the strokes. Why the hell should I keep swimming?

The answer was an unconvincing ‘Because I said so.’ Lessons were prepaid, quitting was blasphemy.

The other children gawked at me when I told them I wanted out: But swimming’s so fun!? The lifeguards agreed.

And I kicked, and I sputtered, and I inhaled water with every breath.

If you can’t touch the bottom, four feet might as well be an ocean of depth. And if you’re too weak to make it to the side, fifteen metres may as well be the Pacific. I kicked and I clawed for breath, for life, and then the water rose up past my eyelids.

Being saved from drowning was torture.

(...And somehow, eventually, I did learn to swim.)