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Guest post: "Swimming gave me back my sense of self when IVF had taken it away"

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MumsnetGuestPosts · 12/01/2017 15:36

Learning to swim was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do - not least because I had believed I could do it already. With the positive attitude of someone who had conquered five marathons driven by little more than grit, cluelessness and a determination to prove everyone wrong, I hopped in the sea two and a half years ago assuming all would be fine. It really, really wasn't. I had an almost immediate panic attack, swallowed enough water to leave me retching for hours and held my breath for longer than I had since I watched Jaws.

I couldn't swim. I could merely 'get from one side of the pool to the other without drowning'. And I was very far from being able to swim continuously, head down, for more than a single length. Even that one length rendered me puce, panicked and gasping for air by the time I slammed my hand on the tiles at the far end of the pool. Worst of all, unlike my attempts at running, I knew it wasn't my fitness that was the problem. It was all down to terror, and technique: and it was this deadly combination that meant I didn't just have to learn how to swim properly … I had to learn how to breathe properly too.

Later that summer I committed to a course of swimming lessons - thirty-six hours over nine months, starting from scratch in the pool and ending up back in the sea, swimming between the two piers of Brighton. It wasn't just physically exhausting, it was one of the biggest mental challenges of my life. The experience of taking on a new skill - especially one that leaves you so vulnerable and requires you to don swimwear throughout the year's darkest months - is exceptionally gruelling.

The admission that you can't do something, that you need help, and that you look daft attempting to do it was crushing. The lessons were exhausting and for a month at a time I would feel as if I were getting nowhere. It took until October for me to have the confidence to shove my face in the water and properly exhale. When you're scared, your instinct is to hold your breath, to cling to the air you have in your lungs, and to see how far you can get that way. But when you're trying to learn to swim, inflated lungs are effectively little more than a giant bag of air you're dragging along with you, slowing you down. Convincing myself that to exhale would be to survive, that I could do it, that it was worth it, was months' worth of work.

It took until spring before I could swim even half a kilometre in the pool, and there were still a few wobbles when I finally made it back into the sea. But in the process of learning to swim I learned more about myself than anything else. I found a renewed confidence in my ability to take on something entirely new, that it would be worth it even if I didn't excel, that it had more to offer me than merely exercise and that hanging out in swimwear could eventually be relaxing rather than borderline traumatic. And it had an even bigger impact on tethering my body and mind: it's not that I discovered how swimming relaxed me, it's that I discovered that you can't swim stressed. In order to get anywhere you have to repeatedly empty your lungs of oxygen under water; you have to have that faith in constant, rhythmic exhalations, until your breath is calm and your body is moving in synch.

And it was this, during a time while I was undergoing a turbulent couple of years of IVF treatment, that proved to feel like a superpower. To feel free in the water was my solace while my body shape changed and my mind whirred with anxieties. Slowly, as I swam in the sea almost daily despite the onset of winter, I learned the amazing things that my body could still do - it could conquer fear, it could swim after all, and it could feel free and weightless when on land it felt anything but.

Above all it reminded me that it was still worthy of confidence and pride, regardless of whether I was carrying a baby or not. I might not have coped with last year if I had not had swimming: it returned me to my sense of self, in a body I could respect as mine, when nothing else could.

Leap In: A Woman, Some Waves and the Will to Swim by Alex Heminsley is published by Hutchinson on 12 January, £12.99

Leap In is one of our non-fiction picks for January - apply for your free copy.

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Surreyblah · 12/01/2017 16:06

Lovely story! Congratulations on the publication of your book!

I too took swimming lessons and got a lot out of them. It was anazing to learn to swim without inhaling loads of water or hurtin my neck from avoiding going under.

And like you I found exercise a solace in difficult times with fertility.

Haven't swum in the sea properly since childhood. You have inspired me to do so! Thank you.