Last week, I went scuba diving for the first time.
When the opportunity was presented to do some diving with friends in Aruba, I thought about it for a long time.
When I was 16 years old, my mom's best friend and business partner died in a diving accident. She was an ever-present second mother. Her passing blasted an irreparable hole through literally all aspects of life.
My relationship with deep water, and the ocean in general, became very complicated. Over time that fear faded away, for the most part. But certainly, I never considered diving myself.
The fact that I was still scared of it in my mid-30s made the decision for me, so I said yes.
I was not entirely comforted when the solo instructor showed up at the port to pick my friends and I up in his beat-up SUV (he apologized that one of the back doors was broken), a haphazard assortment of gear tossed in the back. I was very nervy, so we were all quiet on the drive to the beach.
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| Here's the beach we dove from. You can see where the water gets deep because it gets darker - that's where we swam out to |
After being strapped into gear and an all-too-brief skills introduction to "how to not die in the water" and "what to do when things go wrong," we swam out to the first dive spot on the surface and went under.
There's nothing like diving. It's an exercise in maintaining absolute calm. Only your equipment is keeping you alive, which you must trust completely. You must trust your dive partners completely, too, to rescue you if something goes wrong.
Everything is slow and deliberate.
Breathing, slowly. Air from the regulator is pulled by intentional intake of breath, not unconsciously like above the surface. It's easy to feel like you don't have enough if you panic.
Moving, slowly. It's easy to bump into each other or obstacles, or get separated.
Communication, slowly. There's no talking under water, so everything is achieved by line-of-sight hand signals.
The greatest risk for new divers is what our young instructor eloquently called "going smooth-brained." When the water closes over your head and you start to achieve some depth, your unconscious brain starts throwing out alarm bells. This is a good thing, normally, since it reminds you that you need to come up for air.
Your brain does funny things when it's desperate. It's happened that new and poorly-supervised divers have ripped the regulator out of their mouths and kicked frantically for the surface, drowning before they got there.
Gravity impacts you differently and your sense of up and down changes as your inner ear struggles to adjust to the pressure, so vertigo can make you confused and disoriented. You have to master all of those impulses to dive successfully.
When we hit our first depth and sat on the sandy bottom, looking up at the surface, it was like no experience I can possibly describe. Once you overcome the first few minutes of panic and give yourself over to the experience, being underwater is wonderful. Existing down there is effortless, as long as you don't fight it for control. The surface feels very far away, physically and mentally. You become quite detached from it all. It's quiet in a profound way. And the things you can see up close!
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| Our instructor shows off a sea urchin |
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| Fish! |
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| I'm as elegant below the water as I am above it (ie: not) |
Once we went a little deeper, I stopped equalizing properly. Basically, that means my ears wouldn't pop. It's incredibly painful. I tried every trick our instructor showed us, but it wasn't happening. Not surprising - I had a lot of ear infections as a kid thanks to underdeveloped Eustachian tubes, and there's some pretty bad scarring.
I really, really hate giving up. Like, compulsively. But, the harder I tried to equalize, the more my heart raced and the more air I needed to take in - and then the vertigo started. I signaled the instructor for help.
He brought me back up to the surface slowly while my friends stayed below, took my gear (except for my mask and fins), and told me to go back to shore while they completed the dive. It was a pretty long way back to swim by that point, but the fins helped.
Was I sad I didn't finish the dive? Yeah. Am I still happy I tried it? Hell yes.
I only made it down to about 10m, which is nothing, really, but.
Fear is a leash. It stops you from making decisions and forces you into a state of reaction, and I resent it. I feel that I wasted more than a precious decade of my life being ruled by it entirely.
This one was a big one. Every time you overcome a fear, you cut a tether that can jerk you around and interrupt your ability to proceed according to your own will.
Life is too short to avoid fear. Maybe I run towards fear too much now, and maybe that's just as bad as running away from it. When you choose to turn and face it, though, you get to confront it in your own time and on your own terms. That's worth it for me.
Will I do it again? Maybe, if I can figure my ears out. Some people do better the second time. But no matter what, it's territory I can say that I've taken back for myself. And I'd like to think that Sherry would've been pleased that I did it.
