Immersion

July 10, 2025

I tried to scream,

          but my head was underwater

Recently, I’ve been learning how to swim.

When I tell people I’m learning how to swim this summer, most people’s reaction is: “What? You don’t know how to swim?!” This reaction is perfectly fair, as most people learn how to swim before they’re even aware they can do such a thing, and here I am, an adult who doesn’t know how to swim. I’m not sure what is more shocking: the fact I’m an adult, that I was the third-oldest student at the school, or that I made it this far in life without needing to learn swimming. I tend to learn basic skills quite late—maybe at this point, it’s not so surprising I learned how to bike at the age of 16.

Anyhow, better late than never!

MIT requires that all their students pass a swim test in order to satisfy all their physical education requirements. The swim test consists of swimming 100 yards continuously. I heard from somewhere that the theory is if you fall into the Charles River, which is right next to campus, you’ll be able to swim out of it, because it’s 200 yards wide (so the maximum distance you’d have to swim is 100 yards, which is if you fell in right at the middle). However, the Charles River varies by width depending on where you are, so…

But anyway! I actually really like this requirement because swimming is an important, potentially life-saving skill. And honestly, if it weren’t for this requirement, I probably would not have learned how to swim.

Now, the reason why I didn’t learn how to swim until so late is because I’ve always been afraid of the water. I had some adverse experiences in the water when I was young, which stuck with me throughout my life. In kindergarten, I was at my classmate’s birthday party, and he had a pool. One of my best friends tried to teach me how to swim there, and let’s say it did not go well. I guess that experience must’ve been really bad, because I don’t remember attempting to learn how to swim again until much later. Maybe around third grade, my parents put me with a swimming instructor at our local pool, because they couldn’t teach me. My experience with this instructor was also quite bad, since I remember him pushing me too hard and insisting I could go a bit with his support. I couldn’t even float on my back, so once again, I lost more trust in myself. It got so bad that I couldn’t complete all the lessons, because I would refuse to go by making up excuses, such as saying the weather was bad.

I wasn’t even comfortable with having my head submerged in the water. It brought me immense panic; when I visited Lake Tahoe with some friends a few weeks ago, I decided I would suffer a little on purpose because I seriously needed to get comfortable in the water. Though I could dip my head in the water, it wasn’t fun at all—later, when I wanted to learn how to float on my back with assistance from one of my closest friends, right as I was about to try, I got flashbacks to inhaling a bunch of water and flailing around at that kindergarten birthday party. I couldn’t do it.

I needed serious help, so I started taking lessons from another instructor.

I told her I had zero experience with swimming—I don’t think she fully believed me at first, but my struggles in the water immediately became evident. She tried to gauge where I was at by asking me to swim forward with a kickboard, and within the first ten seconds, I flipped over, flailed around trying to grab the kickboard for dear life, and I think(?) she had to guide me back up.

This experience forced me to accept that when sinking, probably the worst thing to do is to fight against the water.

Anyhow, my instructor realized I was actually starting from nothing, so we did some exercises with me submerging my head under the water and breathing out steadily. We slowly built up more skills, like kicking forward while using the kickboard (which went a lot better a second time!), along with kicking backward also with the kickboard.

I slowly began to trust my body more. Before, I only had evidence I couldn’t swim and that if I tried to, I would sink. But now, I was building up pieces of evidence that I could swim, or more like that I wasn’t always going to sink upon entering the water. It was exhilarating to learn how to move my body to stay afloat. I didn’t really do sports growing up—only ballet consistently for a few years—so I didn’t know how to coordinate my body to do the things I wanted it to. I was learning how to do that with swimming though, and thinking of ways to change and adapt to what was happening. For example, if my hips lowered, I knew the rest of my body would also lower and I’d sink, so I needed to learn how to pull them back up. Apparently, this can be done by lowering my head into the water more, which was counterintuitive to me at first, because if I lower my head more, wouldn’t I sink?? But apparently, your body moves with how we align your head, so lowering your head actually lifts your hips in the water!

I also had to rewire some paradoxes in my head: for instance, when I submerge my head in the water, my instinct is to close my eyes. However, I hate having my eyes closed in the water, because not only can I not see, but I felt unsafe from not being able to see. To me, water was the enemy, so I felt safest when I could stand up to it by fully engaging with my senses, which includes… being able to see! Learning to rewire my instincts to open my eyes upon submerging my head in the water was another unanticipated challenge for me.

I still have a long way to go, but at the time of writing this, I can kind of do backstroke for 50 yards without any support, kind of do freestyle stroke without any support for… maybe three stroke cycles, and breaststroke with support. I’ve been picking up these skills a lot faster than expected, and I think it’s mostly because my instructor is phenomenal. She’s encouraging (not in an overdoing kind of way), and pushes me at a challenging (but not overwhelming) pace.

Most of this is a mental game. It will become a physical challenge too, as swimming is a tiring sport, but for now, getting over the mental hurdles I’ve programmed in my brain is my biggest task. Every time I go for another lap, I still feel like I need to overcome the activation energy caused by fear, the what if I sink and can’t do this? The thing is, almost every time, I do sink halfway through, because I’m not very good yet. I need to accept that I will sink, but that it also means I’m closer to not sinking.

There’s this quote I really like that I saw somewhere: if you knew you were going to fail thirty more times, how quickly would you try to get through those thirty times to hit success? And it’s the uncertainty of how many more failures that complicates things, but it’s a finite number, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

On the topic of failure, I think another reason I’ve made more progress with swimming this time around is because I like the thrill of combatting this mental barrier. When I was really young, I really hated things that were difficult. I didn’t like working on things I was bad at, because I wouldn’t feel good about myself. With swimming, I would feel bad about myself whenever I sank, because it was another point to the fact I couldn’t swim. Also, inhaling pool water just didn’t feel great. The trick is to not view myself poorly if I wasn’t good at something. For example, I certainly wasn’t very good at video production, but I didn’t have any expectations for myself to be good when I started, because I was just recording random things for the sake of it.

Honestly, I still instinctually don’t really like doing things I’m not good at! But for me, part of the joy about growing up is recognizing what I picked up when I was really young, and correcting actions that do me no good. It’s like finding faulty files in a computer and overwriting them with fresh, newly-updated versions.

Swimming has turned into something bigger, perhaps from how I instinctively like to turn small things into larger lessons. Being in the water was probably one of my most deeply-integrated fears, but the lessons I got from other places are coming together, neatly bundled to tackle more: trusting myself and others, focusing on what I can control, adapting to the environment, and so on. While I still really hate the feeling of inhaling water, I love the feeling of progress more. Past me would’ve never expected me to say this, but that’s what excites me about swimming!

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