Made a new friend yippee

Some updates and random thoughts

(I know half the semester’s already gone by since my first blog . On the first day I wondered if I’d get slapped in the face again by uni. I definitely have been.)

Right now I have three main commitments. There’s uni, my job (swim teaching!), and swimming. It’s getting hard to balance uni and swimming – there’s training six times a week and four of them start at 4:45am. But I put myself back in this sport because I couldn’t go a day without being bothered by the thought of it. Maybe because it’s all my mum talks about at home, so I’m constantly being exposed to it, and constantly being reminded that compared to my younger siblings, I’m – simply – old. Most of the attention goes to them, because they have more potential in ‘making it’. Maybe the reason I stubbornly stayed here is because I clung to the possibility that I could still ‘make it’.

I didn’t want to get older. I didn’t want to admit that I was/am crossing the threshold between two chapters of my life. I didn’t want to admit that I’ll never get to live the life my fifteen year old brother revels in (training every day with a close-knit group of friends, belonging in a big, bustling squad of people almost all within a year of each other, going to competitions together, and being a budding star).

Because of this, uni also bothered me, in a way I can’t quite justify – I sound stupid trying. It really bothered me. Why? To be among other adults? Because it reminded me that I was also one and could never be a kid doing sport again? Because being an adult meant I now had no choice but to prioritise other things?

In my first year creative non-fiction subject I wriggled my way out of doing ‘proper’ research by just doing autoethnography (researching yourself lol) and writing about myself. Since swimming was at the forefront of my mind then, I just wrote about that. And now looking back at that piece, I sound so angry it scares me. I was: angry at my body. Angry at myself for making the choices that led to this body. Angry at uni for being a marker of my body getting older. Angry at my own friends (non-swimming) for not being the swimming ‘family’ I so wanted. Angry at the swimming people I knew for not being friends with me the way my brother’s friends were friends with him (because to me it seemed to further prove that even if I was in a squad, I would never have friends like that again. That I was getting older. That everyone was growing up and growing apart.)

I felt out of place at my job too. Maybe it was the feeling of having shorts and a rashee on in the pool. Or always standing upright. I wished I could be my own students – still swimming. Still at the beginning of the athlete’s lifespan.

Now, though, none of it bothers me anymore.

I’m still in the process of figuring out why. I think I’ve figured out a little.

I made a new friend at work.

Swimming with him is my favourite thing to do in the world.

Swimming with him makes me feel a certain relief.

It’s like he pulled me from a dream and put me back in my own body, one I haven’t properly inhabited in years. It’s like I shed, at some point, all the thoughts that used to rot in my core, until words flow off me like water rather than seep inside and mould. I still remember what I thought about and what it felt like, but it doesn’t bother me anymore, it just doesn’t. I see the thoughts from the outside, I give them a nod, and they don’t try to touch me.

Now, I can just exist.

This has a lot to do with him agreeing to swim with me, I reckon. Thank you, Tom, I guess. You’ve made it easier for me to exist.

Anyway I’ve just spent ages writing this to put off the million actual things I have to study for, so see ya later