in response to Why so many adults never learned to swim | The Guardian (theguardian.com)

On Being Bad at Swimming

2 points · November 2026 · 1 comment

I learned to swim at thirty-one, in a municipal pool that smelled of chlorine and other people's patience. The instructor was nineteen. She said, you're fighting the water, and I said I knew, and she said, then stop, as though that were a thing a person could decide.

It turns out it is. Not in the pool, at first. In the car park afterwards, sitting with wet hair and the engine off, I decided to stop fighting the water, and the next week I floated for four seconds before the panic came back.

What I want to say about this is not that I learned to swim. I did, badly, and I still swim badly, with a stroke my instructor described as committed. What I want to say is about the four seconds.

There is a kind of water the people at the pool called glasswater — the surface first thing in the morning, before anyone has been in it, so flat you can see the lane lines through it as if through a window. I only saw it once, because I was never first. Someone opened the door ahead of me and there it was, and then she dived in and it was gone.

Floating is like that. It exists only until you notice it. The moment you think I am floating, you are already sinking, because thinking is a kind of fighting. The instructor knew this and could not say it, because she was nineteen and had never in her life had to decide to stop.

I am still bad at swimming. I am better at the four seconds.