When I was seven or eight years old the biggest fear in my life, aside from natural disasters, Christ, and my next door neighbor, were the weekly swim lessons my mom mandated me with. Every week I'd pretend to fall asleep in the passenger seat while Mom drove to the east side of town singing along to Amy Grant completely unconvinced of my unconsciousness. It never worked. She never looked at my peaceful darting eyeballs under their lids and drove past the pool. We'd walk through the back gate, past the poorly painted mural of The Little Mermaid (which makes my current fear of mermaids so much more involved) and toward the pool where some girl, probably not as old as I am now waited in a blue one piece swim suit with a highlighter yellow whistle around her neck. The chlorine fumes made my eyes burn, but I was usually crying about something else long before I was waist deep in water.
"Kick, kick, kick, breathe..." or something like that. That's how you learn to swim. That was the whole lesson. For weeks that felt like months. For an hour that felt like a lifetime. I cried, panicked, faked sleep, and faked illness to get out of it. Why? Because I didn't like to do things alone. I didn't like not knowing anyone. I didn't like putting my trust in a teenager with a whistle and sharp fingernails. I didn't like being told to jump off that fucking diving bored that cannot have been as high as it seems in my memory, looming over what was most likely eight feet of water. I don't like doing a lot of things, but the fact remains, I have to and I learned how to swim.
So, I start this today because it's Wednesday and it seems as good of a time as any. I have reservations and insecurities and a mess of other emotions that will soon become all too apparent as I fill the page (does that make sense when we're talking about the internet?) with words. I have been reluctant to create a space for all of the nonsense in my head to be shared, beyond my control, but it's now or...well... it's happening isn't it?
Lately, I have been floating quite well on my own, but it should go without saying that I wouldn't have learned without being thrown into it all by other people, situations, etc. I will hopefully be as consistent sharing as I am at rationalizing why I should keep it all to myself.
So this is for anyone past or present who has reminded me to kick, kick, kick, breathe...
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