Swimming above water

I am autistic. In my case, as is often but not always, that comes with significant sensory processing disorder. I sense so many things deeply, often in ways that surprise and provoke outright hostile disbelief from the statistically more normative brains around me.

Autistics dealing with sensory overload can be sensory avoidant, trying to feel less by exposing ourselves to less, or sensory seeking, deliberately seeking maximum sensory input, usually in a controlled and self-guided way. The stereotype of us all wandering around in giant headphones shows this paradox: it is as likely silently off as it is blaring Scandinavian death metal.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Water has been a paradoxical sensory space for me my whole life. I was raised in a water-loving family, near a beach, with grandparents with a lake house, with a mother who self-identified as a fish, preferring water over land.

But it was a mixed experience for me. I feel at no greater peace than when floating surrounded by water. Yet the sensation of remaining wet even minutes after exiting the water is torturous to me. Floating in water is ethereal joy, but swishing board shorts hitting me over and over again in slightly new ways, creeping up and bunching unevenly, allegedly supportive mesh lining feeling like sandpaper against the very parts it “protected”…

I was exposed young to salt and fresh and chlorinated options. The salt made you float more, but salt, plus sand, plus greatest travel time back to home, made the ocean a painful place to have just gone swimming. The pool held the least surprises, but chlorine burns even when within legal limits. The pond was my favourite, but the wooden dock was painful to my bare feet.

As an adult, I have come to fully love the water. I swim daily if possible. I swim year round or, at least, immerse in water year round. I make no greater claim for the health benefits of ice water swimming than I love it. But I love it.

I have learned to love it with coping mechanisms that account for the things that made it such a mixed experience in childhood. I wear swimwear that is soft and fits snuggly and does not move. I get changed immediately upon leaving the water, using a changing robe to do so even on public beaches. I have found peace with the water.

There is also an emotional conquest since childhood. Self-consciousness that my body was wrong, somehow, since everything about me was wrong to adolescent peers, meant I spent high school blocks away from the ocean beach, but would never swim on the best summer days for fear that someone from school would see my imperfect, but in retrospect utterly unremarkable for better or worse, teen shirtless body. As an adult, I have learned in equal measure to value the possible opinions of strangers less, and to spend less time with anyone with a proclivity to express unsolicited opinions on another’s body.

I do not swim to be sexy. I swim to be free from the sensorial onslaught of unexpected swishing clothes and air breezes, for the sensorial choice of immersion in, more or less predictable, water.

I also do not swim to be fast.

In my local pool today, a kindly intended lane mate noticed I had no goggles and was not putting my head in the water as is “proper” during the breast stroke, which I was otherwise doing quite well, keeping up with his pace in our shared “fast” lane — generously named, admittedly.

My self-consciousness is not so conquered that I enjoy small talk with new acquaintances in swimsuits. I found myself, as I caught my breath at the end of the lane, trying to find the most polite way to say, “I know, but I do not care.”

I do not care because I do not swim to be fast.

That is another part of the paradox of swimming from my childhood. Once it was noted as something I enjoyed doing, the foster parents with whom I was living supportively tried to convince me to join a swim team. Competition motivates some people, but for me, it always ruins pleasures. Swim teams have coaches who tell you how to do things right.

There is a time and a place for doing things right. Even for doing them better. But not everything has to be done the right or best way.

Years ago, I learned that I hate competition, and I hate the feeling of goggles. So I swim laps wrong, slowly, and happily. I swim with my head above water.

Swimming is what made me think of this, but it is not the limit of this principle. There are people who, whether we want them to or not, will endlessly tell us how to do things right, how to do them better. Yet for all of us there are some things where perfectionism, if these self-appointed teachers are even correct about what is perfect, is not a viable option. Our choices are between doing something “wrong” or not at all.

Unsolicited advice needs to be met with a firm, a sincere, “What if I don’t?”

What if I am not the fastest lap swimmer at the community pool? So what.

What if I could have beat my personal best time at the small cost of hating every moment of it? What if some fashion judge or body shamer or homophobe thinks men should all wear swishing sandpaper lined clown shorts in the pool? What if, what if, what if…

I know this principle is true for all people, but amplified in each moment of autistic life: do I do things the way others insist they ought to be done, or do I do them in way that works for me?

It took decades for me to find peace in the water, and now I know of no greater peace. I am going to, happily, swim wrong forever now.