Day 7 - Lifebelt

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

This is the latest instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I’m doing with Megan Macedo, writing every week day in February. One of the directives is to avoid perfectionism and publish your pieces to your audience, so here we are. I hope the series provides food for thought. Thank you for being here.

My grandmother couldn’t swim but she could float. I don’t think I ever actually saw it happening, it just went down in family folklore. I assume she never went in deep water, that it might be frightening to be in water that you can only float in. But maybe she felt secure, even out of her depth.

To be alive in the world and function relatively well suggests some kind of faith in one’s probable safety, instead of always assuming the worst will happen. My brain is not on board with this kind of reasonable approach. I’ve always battled with various anxieties, but last year after some unexplained symptoms and a health scare, it tipped into all-consuming health anxiety, the most crippling fear I’ve ever felt. Every sensation in my body was put under great interrogation, all of the time: pain, fullness, emptiness, pressure, weight, tightness, frequency, fatigue, every gurgle, every pulse, every tickle.

Of course, when you’re turning up the volume of your attention, when queries are constantly being raised, all physical sensations are amplified. Such close monitoring make it very difficult to tell what’s happening by itself and what’s being inflated by fear.

I can’t float - whenever I try, I sink. During the Covid pandemic, when we were stuck at home in our corner of the city, I used to fantasise about swimming in a body of water, any kind. It was in many of my dreams and I spent an unhealthy amount of time looking at online videos of oceans and lakes and rivers. I felt my heart would burst out of its watery depths, create a torrent of its own, if I couldn’t get into the water soon.

In summer 2020 there was a brief lifting of restrictions and my husband and I drove our daughter to one of the nearest beaches we could find, a 90 minute drive from London. I felt like I was salivating to step into the sea: when I lay back in the smooth water, sobs rose from deep within my chest, rivulets, an arterial release of this finally realised longing.

Maybe it was the new baby growing inside my belly and shifting my centre of gravity, but when I lay back in the water, I found that floating felt more possible than before. At first my legs sank as usual, but I realised that if I let go a little, if I released the weight of my head further back, the water held me.

I like the idea of trust actually being about things that are trustworthy, and by trustworthy I mean 100% guaranteed to be FINE. I understand that unfortunately we don’t get that in life. I am still pissed off about this and I am still learning about trust, but it’s supposed to be more about our lack of control, right? We are never, were never in control of all the people and processes around us. Life is short, the outcomes of things are not in our hands. Can we live, can we thrive in this chaos? Perhaps we can thrive BECAUSE of the chaos?

My therapist recently remarked on how I was attempting to “cover all bases, playing into the illusion of control”. It felt like a jolt at first, this terminology, like someone pulling the plug on my fantasy and the water pouring out. But then it felt freeing, as if I didn’t have to, simply mustn’t, hold on so tight, that my dear old, over-active brain, held in this tired head, could do with leaning back, trusting in the mad, churning water underneath.