Swimming

The expats told me the Germans were batshitcrazy with their Outdoor Summer Swimming Pool Madness and I would freeze, FREEZE I TELL YOU if I dared set one toe in that water. They told me I would Weep. They told me this was an Insurmountable Cultural Difference and if one had not been born German, one would never adapt.

They told me this many times, wearing their “save yourself while you still can” faces.

But it was so hot, for so long, that one day I decided to screw the expats and brave the wilds of the outdoor summer swimming pool. That water had sat consistently at well above body temperature for a couple months by now, and there were squillions of Germans and Turks frolicking in the water, squealing, and having a grand time.

It only cost 5.50€. If I didn’t like it, I could take my toe out and never do it again.

The hardest thing to change was my mind. Recognize that although everyone else in a trusted cohort described an experience one way, I might perceive it differently.

Sure it felt cold at first, but that was because our skin was hot. After a couple of minutes, it felt glorious.

I was embarrassed to be swimming in my undies and a sports bra, but I had no bathing suit and no money to buy one. (I had the white bikini I had bought in Rome, for Sicily, but Italian bathing suits aren’t for swimming. They’re for rising out of Boticellian clamshells like a cross between Venus and Sophia Loren, with maybe a little Ursula Andress thrown in. Italian bathing suits are for coming off, not for staying on!)

Fortunately this was Germany; everyone was too busy being cosmopolitan to care. There were the Muslim girls, partying like it was 1850 in their long swim bloomers and swim turtleneck dresses with long sleeves and hoods, some of them wearing their headscarves too, yes actually in the pool. There were Prussian women wearing only bikini bottoms and nothing else (and I was the only one who cared). There were babies in diapers, Slavic teenaged girls in BDSM bikinis, fat men in gold Speedos, sporty muscular types in demure racing suits, women sprawled on the patio with their tops undone like well-roasted beached whales, Arab boys chasing each other on slippery turf…this was a true Anything Goes environment and I sighed with relief.

I realized to my surprise that I had traumatic emotional baggage around swimming because it was tied to a time in my life wherein I had been particularly saddled with parental abuse. As my body went through long-dormant motions, the emotional memories embedded in the time associated with those muscle memories flashed back to life as if happening in the present moment. But it was finally the right time to process all that. I had my scary somatic experiencing, and told myself, “you’re safe here, this is your chance to rewrite the script, let’s hear it for neuroplasticity. We’ll take the same movements and overwrite healthy new associations with them. See these trees? They’re thousands of miles away, in a completely different country where no one can get you. See all these people? None of these people have anything to do with your past. Bring peace to the past. Graft a happy new story on to traumatic cell memory.”

Somatic experiencing is a powerful psychological tool and can cut through the crap infinitely faster than years of talk therapy. But the very speed that can be so valuable can also feel terrifying, too intense, too much. It’s like you’re the bug hitting the windshield and you’re seeing your entire life unfolding before you right before you smash into the glass. But when the time is right for a little somatic experiencing, I, for one, really have felt like old stories get rewritten and emotional traumas dissolve. It sucks and then you’re done. You’ve made it through the fire, you’re on the other side, and you can enjoy the entire rest of your life frolicking through the daisy fields, at least vis-à-vis that particular issue.

So I had my intense emotional experience in the Kreuzberg Sommerbad, and everything released and I felt myself opening up and feeling light and happy and free.

This swimming stuff was great!

When I got out of the pool my head felt amazing. Perhaps this was what it was like to be stoned…I was tripping on some chemical cocktail, and I loved it.

From that day on I was Miss Swim Every Day. It helped that I threw out the word “swimming” in my mind and replaced it with “water meditation you do in lap lanes.” Because “swimming” was about what other people inflicted: counting, exercise, going fast, breathing on the right, going by the book. Nice girls swam, because nice girls were “athletic” (the ultimate not-me word), not to mention “goal-oriented” (ugh), and “diligent” (gross). I was not down with all that, and now that I was an adult, I didn’t have to try to be someone I wasn’t. But this glorious new aquatic experience had nothing in common with what I had previously understood as “swimming.” It needed a new name. This was my new tango practice, my new somatic meditation. Wherever I go, there I am, so all my Stuff was still waiting right there for me, exactly the same as in any other physical/artistic/spiritual practice. I would work on the same stuff I always work on, except now I could practice it in an environment with a different distribution of gravity.

Every day I go swimming, it’s different. It’s like hitting a yoga mat. Every day I have a different insight. And every day I blow my mind.

Swimming keeps me sane. When I miss a few days, I get anxious, and then I get depressed. Swimming and daily Vitamin D pills. Better living through science! I don’t care if it’s all in my head: it’s working.