you are five years old. you are at the pool, a place that you love. adore. the shimmery water is great. the toys are bright and colourful and plasticky in that lovely squeaky way. everything is going awesome until your stupid teacher comes over and yells at you. "come to the big large scary adult pool" she shouts, "the one where people are serious about their swimming." you almost pee the pool green. another girl does pee the pool green. for weeks you are told to swim this way and that. get the puck at the bottom of the pool tina. tread water for 10 seconds tina 20 seconds tina 30 seconds bbblloobbb-lbbboobb-ina. you keep running behind, you keep losing your breath, you keep almost drowning and swallowing big gulps of gross chlorine water. you hate this. when can you go on the slide?! you are the slowest in your class. you hate this so much so you tell your parents that you don't want it anymore. you drop out and stop swimming. fuck swimming.
this mentality ends up following you to every single gym class you will ever take. you are always, always, always painfully picked last. every single goddamn time. with good reason. you are always the last to finish the track. nobody ever has breathing fits after those laps like you do. not even the real asthmatic children. what a loser. you were the last to finish that cross-country skiing field trip, and they had to wait for your ass so they could bus home. loser. you have basketballs thrown in your face that bruise your nose and knock you out and the kids laugh at you. the girls laugh at your training bra. choo choo! the ball is never passed to you, and this is now your fault. you are blamed for never trying. "all i want you to do is try tina, and you never do." and all you want to do is smack that motherfucking bible-thumping gym teacher right across the face. but you don't. instead, you just stop trying. when you can barely cross the monkey bars without your shoulders falling off and you are a social retard in every other way, why bother?
nobody likes you. and nobody ever will.
as the years go by and you lose less confidence in your athletic abilities, you wish to learn how to swim again. you have been to the pool since, to play and have fun and go on the slide and look at other girls in the locker room and compare breasts and vaginas. you hate your body and hate your bathing suit. you hate your blindness because you can't wear your nerdly little glasses in the pool without them breaking. but as life goes on, you keep thinking, wow i wish i knew how to swim. with a little encouragement from your best and only friend (who is like the most athletic swimmer you know), you take lessons again. they put you in one of the lowest classes again, was it yellow? orange? some infant level like that. you are in a class with kids half your age.
this is the most embarrassing thing ever, especially since you're juuuuuust on the verge of puberty and you're exposing so much skin and you are so awkward and mortified and oh my oh my oh my. some of the younger kids are stronger swimmers than you. and they're five years old! and so after barely passing red, and hearing horror stories about maroon, you decide to throw in the towel. what's the point of swimming anyway? you say to yourself. besides, i look ugly in a bathing suit.
to be continued...
