Ep.23: Reset
With the easing of Covid lockdown David returns to work and my days start to stretch uncomfortably wide. The familiar sense that I should be doing something, anything, haunts me. I draw up a list of possibilities but none of them appeals. I disregard taking the bottles to the bottlebank because it involves lifting so that’s an easy escape, plus accompanying my pathological need to ‘do’ is the reality that I should be practising the art of ‘not doing’ if my back is to heal. The resulting suspension, of being caught between doing and not doing, makes twitchy and irritable. I’m floating and there’s no sense of purpose to either my guilty doing or the not doing everyone keeps nagging at me to perform.
It’s a glorious day, fat fluffy white clouds drift lazily across the pale blue sky and the loch sparkles. Fuck it. I’m tired of this internal whine that I seem to have had on repeat for the past few weeks. I’m sick of feeling sorry for myself because I’ve had cancer. Cancer is a total cunt but I’m letting it eat me up. As the house martins dance and swoop round the house I fold, push and press myself into my new wetsuit then grab a towel and head down the hill. What I need is a reset button.
The wild swimming planted itself in my life quite by surprise. One evening sitting by the loch the desire the wade in was overwhelming. I could feel my body leaning into the idea of icy water soothing the angry tangled muscles on my back and breast. Having taken root the idea became a clean and simple need. I needed to swim in the loch. So I ask David for a new wetsuit for my birthday so I could start to swim because, while I may be daft, I’m not quite daft enough to think that swimming in 5 degrees without a wetsuit would be much fun.
My new, super thick thermal lined wetsuit arrived well in advance of my birthday. I tried it on, wincing at the contortions I have to make to get it over my left shoulder and arm. It feels brutal and harsh to push and snap myself into the tight neoprene and my back buckles with the compression but I know this is what my body wants and needs. I decided that my first swim in the loch will be on my 50th birthday. My birthday treat will be to swim. On a day where celebrations are muted by lockdown my only desire was to go into the water. But the weather isn’t kind. The loch is choppy and waves crash onto the pebbles along the shore. The water is slate grey and angry. We huddled in the shelter of the scrubby trees while I struggle to put on neoprene boots, 4 of us because David’s brother and sister in law have smuggled themselves into our company for the afternoon. I’ve been scratchy and difficult all day, miserable at turning 50, uncooperative when David and B try to gently persuade me towards any kind of celebration. I’m panicky that I won’t get my swim, the only thing I’d promised myself, but everyone happily troops down to support me when I decide its time.
As I totter into the waves I’m waiting for the cold to hit. I’ve swum in the loch without a wetsuit in the past, most memorably when I coaxed David and a handful of friends into a New Year’s day ‘dook’ 18 months ago, each of us barely able to stand it long enough for the requisite full submersion. Can it really only be 18 months since then? Each time I look back to my life before cancer I wince. I can’t even type it here without crying with grief for the loss of that carefree cancer free existence. I long to be able to run shrieking into these waves again. Long to do anything which isn’t shadowed by fragility and discomfort.
To my surprise the loch wasn’t cold, certainly nothing like as cold as I was expecting. Perfectly warm in my new wetsuit, even when I’m immersed up to my neck, I raised my arms in triumph and they cheer and laugh on the shore.
It was brief but beautiful and I now know that the loch isn’t too cold I feel I’ve been given an escape. Any day I want I can walk down to the water and swim. I walk down through the coconut scent of the gorse bushes that line the track, cross over the road then drop down to the shore. It’s a walk I’ll do time and again over the coming days and weeks, so much so it almost becomes meditative and each time when I emerge back out of the cold water and climb back up to the house I feel changed. The water has sanded at my rough edges somehow, just like the softened edges to the glacial stones on the shore, I too am softening, edging my way towards some personal peace but I’m not there yet.