enough out of the water to breathe, and in between I was working hard and
burning oxygen. And when
you burn too much too fast, your brain shuts
down and you will black the fuck out. Our instructors called that, “meeting
the wizard.” As the clock ticked, I could see stars materializing in my
peripheral vision and felt the wizard creeping close.
I passed that evolution, and soon, finning with my arms or feet became easy
for me. What stayed hard from beginning to
end was one of our simplest
tasks: treading water without our hands. We had to keep our hands and our
chins high above the water, using only our legs, which we’d swirl in a
blender-like motion, for three minutes. That doesn’t sound like much time,
and for most of the class it was easy. For me, it was damn near impossible.
My chin kept hitting the water, which meant the time would start again from
triple zero. All around me, my classmates were
so comfortable their legs
were barely moving, while mine were whirring at top speed, and I still
couldn’t get half as high as those white boys
who looked to be defying
gravity.
Every day it was another humiliation in the pool. Not that I was embarrassed
publicly. I passed all the evolutions, but inside I was suffering. Each night,
I’d fixate on the next day’s task and become so terrified I couldn’t sleep, and
soon my fear morphed into resentment toward my classmates who, in my
mind, had it easy, which dredged up my past.
I was
the only black man in my unit, which reminded me of my childhood in
rural Indiana, and the harder the water confidence training became, the
higher those dark waters would rise until it seemed I was also being drowned
from the inside out. While the
rest of my class was sleeping, that potent
cocktail of fear and rage thrummed through my veins and my nocturnal
fixations became their own kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. One where
failure was inevitable because my unchecked fear was unleashing something
I couldn’t control: the quitting mind.
It all came to a head six weeks into training with the “buddy breathing”
exercise. We partnered up, each pair gripped one another by the forearm, and
took turns breathing through just one snorkel. Meanwhile,
the instructors
thrashed us, trying to separate us from our snorkel. All of this was supposed
to be happening at or near the surface, but I was negatively buoyant, which
meant I was sinking into the middle waters of the deep end, dragging my
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