I walked into the hotel pool area, my heart pounding as loud as a drum in a marching band, with the cool, muggy air enveloping my body and stifling my ability to breathe clearly. I was walking into my first swim lesson that I had ever remembered, let alone my first time spending a long amount of time in a pool. When I walked onto the pool deck, what I saw immediately made my heart sink. A young, African-American guy with a thick, black beard was soothingly convincing a young toddler to float and turn over, a toddler! I felt like I was the dumbest kid on earth, (who was a rising sixth grader!) one who didn’t even know how to swim!
All the past summers as far back as I can remember at every summer camp, I would never even dip a toe into a pool, I would never go into the pool, I was the only kid who never went into the pool, I thought I was the weirdest person ever. I was always scared of the water because I thought that I would drown or worse. The voice of the other male instructor at the other end of the pool told me to enter the pool which snapped me out of my flashbacks, so I timidly walked over and clutched the metal railing while inching my way down the baby steps into the pool. The surprisingly warm water greeted my body as I descended into the pool.
The lesson went by fast, with my instructor convincing me to go on my back and float, with him supporting my head. After that lesson I felt a tiny bit proud but with a whopping side of fear about what would happen next. Those short half-hour lessons went by, week by week, month by month, and over the period of a year with two different instructors, learning many more strokes from freestyle to breaststroke. But soon I was finally going to face my second biggest fear: the big pool.
From when I had started to that current time, I had always felt comfortable in the small, warm hotel pool but was quickly growing out of it. At my last time in the small hotel pool, my instructor told me that I was going to be going into the bigger pool. When those words came out of his mouth, I felt a jolt of fear in my heart, one that made me fear the future once again. Once I had walked into our cavernous neighborhood indoor pool the next week, all I could think about was how deep the water was going to be that I was swimming in and drowning in the pool. To my shock, when I went out into the cold, warehouse-like pool, I saw that I was swimming in some of the same depths as in the hotel pool. My biggest challenge yet, diving into very deep water was going to happen just a mere few weeks after.
On that day, after swimming for a half hour and told to go to the diving area, my heart started pounding as loudly as the first time I first went into the hotel pool. When I got over to the diving area, everyone else started diving and I just watched while my instructor slowly persuaded me to dive in a little bit. When I dived in, it felt like was in an aquarium, with it seeming like the pool had a endless bottom pit, with no where to go. I also felt like everything was distorted. like when you use the wrong glasses and everything gets distorted and out of proportion. After that, when I pulled myself from the strong hand of the deep pool, I had a newfound sense of pride, that I had just overcome something that had plagued me my whole childhood.
To this day I am still taking swim lessons on how to dive better, do flip turns and swim faster and stronger. But, I have never really wanted to share my story of courage because I didn’t know how people would react, if they would be supportive and champion me or be negative and make me feel that I wished I hadn’t shared my story. But now I feel more liberated than ever.