Teaching Myself To Float

Today’s guest post comes from my friend Carrie M. As I’ve been thinking about floating, a sentence has popped up in my head over and over again.  “Much of my life has been a battle to the surface.” It is a struggle to let our true selves rise to the surface; it seems safer to keep as much as possible hidden beneath. Carrie’s authenticity is magnetic. People are drawn to her, and I seek her in my life because I know she’s in the battle, too. But she’s winning. And the person who has surfaced is strong, beautiful and holy, even in her easily admitted brokenness. Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, “authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.” Our work doesn’t have to be original. It’s power is in our authenticity. You’ll see this on display in Carrie’s thoughtful response to the question, “Who taught you to float on your back in the water?”


I first learned to swim in a hot tub.  My parents sat in a circle with their friends, and for some reason I don’t recall my brother and I were allowed to join them.  Before long, we were dunking under their legs, circling the tight perimeter of the tub in the swirling, scalding water.  Like most of my childhood memories, this one is just a faint impression more than a crystalline event; awash in too much alcohol on the grownups’ part and too little supervision for the kids.  In fact, though I can’t recall what it might have been, when I think back to swimming in circles in the turbulent hot tub, I have the distinct impression of danger and risk… as though one of us had been on the brink of something harmful and foolish and the grownups weren’t behaving the way grownups ought to behave and therefore hadn’t put a stop to it.  Though perhaps that’s just my general impression of my childhood.


For several years in early elementary, I took swimming lessons held in the morning at the city pool, before it opened to the general public.  I hated those lessons mostly because I was always so cold.  Unheated water at nine in the morning didn’t feel very good to me, and I’d have preferred to be home with my library books.  But eventually the lessons ended and I spent long, hot afternoons at the tiny city pool.  My friends and I would have “tea parties” on the bottom of the pool; trying to sit face-to-face on the peeling cement while attempting to get through the pantomimes of a whole tea service — pouring, adding sugar, stirring, drinking (with our pinkies out, of course), and nibbling the tea cake before coming up for air.  We were impossibly buoyant in those days, always trying to back paddle water towards the surface so that we would stay below.  I guess we were buoyant because we were full of laughter.  And joy — like air — makes you float.  But when I tried to float on my back, I always felt like I might drown.  I’d tense up and sputter and flail and hear my Dad’s voice saying I’d never be able to float on my back.  Something about how I was “built like my Mother.”


I taught myself to float on my back two years ago.  Twenty-five-plus years after learning to swim, I was finally calm enough and centered enough in my own being to realize that floating on my back was something that literally had to come from within me.  Deep breath in, rib cage stretched wide — I would float to the top of the pool.  Slow exhale, compressing abdomen — I would slowly sink.  I discovered I could even control how deeply I’d sink by holding my breath steady. And so I floated on my back and stared at the expanse of West Texas stars in solitary wonder, my heartbeat sounding like a drum in my ears under the water.  He said I’d never float because I was like my Mom.  And it took me over twenty years to realize that he was wrong.  I’m not really like my Mom, at all.  I believe I deserve to take up some space in this world.  And when my lungs fill and stretch and my place expands, I float to the top.  And when I shrink in and exhale, trying to be as small as possible, I sink.  Maybe she sinks.  But I can float.


Oh my goodness. So beautiful. Thank you for sharing this, Carrie.
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