Fear of Deep Water

Swimming. An activity that can be very relaxing, and, at the same time, straining and very good for your body. Since I was a kid, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with swimming. I enjoy the process of swimming, and I can swim, but as soon as the body of water is deeper than my height, it’s a hard no-go.

From what I know from friends, it’s not that common to have swimming lessons at school in Portugal. However, I was weirdly one of these lucky bastards who actually always had swimming lessons since the age of 4 or 5. I can’t really recall the specifics.

What I can very good recall is that in one of the first - maybe the first - swimming lesson I ever had, the teacher pushed us to the swimming pool without any warning. It was horrible. Since then, I did not go to any other swimming lessons during elementary school. They were, after all, an extracurricular activity, and therefore not mandatory. This may have been the start of my fear of deep water.

Years passed and I went to the next school at the age of 9. There I had swimming lessons as part of the physical education (PE) classes. This was mandatory so I just went. However, I was always the only one in class that never knew how to swim, so I guess the teachers took the lazy route and never taught me.

A few years after, a teacher and a classmate were kind enough to stay some time after the class to help me learn how to swim. And how marvellous I found it. I enjoyed it so much I joined the swimming club for the next two years. It was on Wednesday afternoon. That I recall very well. There I improved my swimming, learned diving for swimming, etc.

There’s just a caveat: the pool was always quite shallow. A meter and twenty centimeters to be precise. This, on the deepest part. This was also the only swimming pool available in the whole municipality, so it’s not as if my lessons could ever encompass the idea of swimming in deep water. This was… maybe 2015 or 2016. I can’t recall this dates precisely.

Since then, I have never swum a single stroke. Until last Saturday. We went to a recreational swimming pool that goes from very shallow to 1.80m depth at the deepest point. That’s a few centimeters taller than me. I could always just jump. The good thing: I can definitely swim, at least freestyle. And I feel reasonably comfortable inside the water.

However, as soon as I tried going to the deep water, I just mentally entered into panic mode and asked Chris to push me back. In retrospect, it seemed fine: I stood afloat the whole time, but panicked when I wanted to leave to the non-deep area. What should I have just done? Started swimming. That’s the problem: I’m not used to it.

So I’m thinking about taking swimming lessons, especially to get comfortable in deep water and be able to manage unlikely scenarios where it may be necessary to swim. I want to be able to comfortably swim on deep water. In addition, I’ve also been thinking on going swimming once a week or so. The problem? Swimming laps here are always in deep water. So I do really have to become comfortable if that’s something I want to do.

It feels weird to do swimming lessons as an adult, a bit embarrassing even, especially when everyone around me can swim. But if you look at the stats, you’ll see that 40-55% of adults don’t know how to swim (ranging from study to study). So it’s actually not out of the ordinary. I just happened to come from a sea-side country to another sea-side country and therefore the majority of people in both countries know how to swim.

I have just payed the registration fee for the classes. Just the process of filling the form and making the payment made me feel nervous. I really hope that this will help, since I have fond memories from the swimming club and I think it’d be a nice addition to going to the gym.