I THINK, I KNOW i am normal…

Water.

My Parlous Plunge

I would first like to preface this and other such writings in this hopefully expanding diatribe of self-loathing and depravity that this is merely an outlet to channel this negative current that resides within me. The current helps operate this almost automaton like functionality enabling my emotions to be harmful, not only to myself, but to the people that truly care for my best interest. I am not a literary scholar, and I am very in-tuned to the fact that I might not know exactly what I am doing, in regards to my writing (and life to a extent).

However, take all my feelings and emotions with a the tiniest grain of salt. My voice is my own and how I react to my reality is based on the memories that I have personally lived. I am not a survivor, a hero, someone who fell down a well and started identifying as a well after reluctantly escaping. I don’t have a clear political agenda or want to soapbox a cause other than my own irrational touts about myself. This is just a recollection of thoughts and ideas about who I think I am and why I became the morose person I am today. Hopefully shedding a light in an already dim and claustrophobic mindset.

I was four years old living at my Nana and Papa’s house with my parents in the county of Riverside, California circa 1991.

The house in question is as far removed from my memory that a thick haze roams around most of the one story home. The living room, kitchen and hallways lined with doors leading to unfamiliar rooms have been covered in a residual fog. However, vividly, I remember a large wooden door at the front of the house that opened into the backyard with a modest peanut inspired pool with old tile and concrete around its borders. Placed around the pool were large ceramic Spanish vases plotted with succulence and cacti.

My clarity comes from my first moment of feeling scared, brave and accomplished during my young and thriving (until this present point) lifespan.

After watching Disney’s “The Jungle Book,” when I was four years old at my Nana’s house, I would get this insatiable urge to go swimming. However, it wasn’t even the entire film that triggered this now all too familiar sense of obsession I have with any category and plethora of subject matter.

The specific scene was when Baloo and Mowgli are singing the “Bear Necessities” down the lazy river. Baloo floating on his back coasting while Mowgli relaxed on his stomach. The scene made me feel serene and calm or another emotion that my adolescent brain was too ignorant and/or slow to understand, but, I felt it. A powerful emotion of want and desire that was accessible and easy to obtain.

I would rush and grab my swim trunks, change and rush out of the sliding glass door leading to the outside. The backyard was bright and hot most of the year and surrounded by the sun-pale vases was the shimmering and inviting waves of my grandparents modest but beautiful pool. The pool had a standard depth-level arrangement. Three feet in depth descending at a max depth of six feet, also know as the “deep-end.”

I did not come from a family full of prolific swimmers or athletes which, if I did, would make things so much worse for my self esteem since I am two times the size of the shark that beat Michael Phelps in swimming. Regardless, I was taught to swim at a very young age. My skill being at near prodigy level allowed me and my three year-old sister to swim with very little supervision. My own hubris is to blame for the events to follow, which has been taken a twenty-six year sabbatical ever since.

Fear is a sensation that has lingered and festered inside myself making it difficult to face even the basics of our own reality. Working at a job in order to earn enough income to help provide for myself and my family, dealing with spontaneity (good or bad) and facing people eye to eye eliminating my personal comfort-zone. These simplistic and minute issues that most of our privileged society deal with chokes and suffocates me. A liquefied terror that manifest from my memory when I was four and I accidentally swam into the deep-end of the pool.

Just like anyone with a sibling, it is easy to get caught up in the pressure of teasing and taunting. My swimming ability was only just blossoming, and though my threshold for excitement was attempting to touch the bottom of the 3ft shallow-end with my toe without completely submerging my head, a challenge from a sibling can change your mentality of staying afloat to taking the plunge. Climbing along the edges on opposite sides of the pool, my sister and I would guide our way to the deep-end. Once our bodies were perpendicular with each other in the widest and deepest part of the pool, on turn, we would jump towards the center daring each other to jump further before swimming back to the cold and comforting stone tile of the ledge.

Nothing was at stake, no one got extra cake after dinner if someone was declared a “winner,” in fact, no one was really paying attention to us at all.

It was the carefree and wild times of the early nineties; Bush Sr. was in office, the “skip-it” theme was the most annoying song to get stuck in your head, Fox was actually creating good television content in “Married with Children,’ “The Simpsons” and “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Kids were also more trusted to not get themselves killed playing with each other with minimal surveillance by their respected guardian. Otherwise, you’d be in big trouble.

Playing the role of older brother, I was ready to cement my dominance over my younger three year-old sister and go to the actual center of the pool and float before finally swimming back to the edge. In theory, this was going to craft the foundation of my benevolence. My sister would see me not as an older brother, but as Trident himself. However, in execution I found myself in the center of the deep-end panicking, whaling my arms and trying to keep afloat. I believe this to be my first anxiety ridden panic attack.

I knew how to swim. What difference does it make whether I’m paddling in the reachable shallow or flailing in the treacherous deep-end? My mind went blank as I knew that the surface was not mere inches, but a few feet away from my outreached toe. The taste of chlorine fused water gargled and swashed inside my sensitive throat and developing pallet. I could clearly see the repercussions for my careless mistake: I would have to be rescued, apologize to my sister for making her cry, get punished and have a “talkin’ to.” I really did not want to have to go through that hassle of being shamed into regret and forced myself to focus on my situation. I closed my eyes and paused while my voice echoed in my sparse head, “if you can swim in the shallow-end you can swim in the deep.”

I calmly took the biggest breath I could and darted my head and shoulders out of the water. Holding out my arms I began to float. My small paddles helped me swim towards my sister and the safe ledge of decorative Spanish tile.

I wanted more than anything to get out of the water, but my confidence from my “brush of death” gave me an adrenalin boost and the energy to swim the entire pool. I was able to suppress my fear and anxiety of the deep-end to an extent that I was more comfortable and eager to confront my irrational thoughts. I was stronger and more focused than I may have ever been while I was lapping the oblong-shaped oasis.

I, at some point in my conjured memories, want to be able to confront all my uncertainties and illogical fears. I don’t have any huge revelation or deep-seeded confession to proclaim. I am a thirty year-old man that wants to feel as normal as possible. I want to live and thrive in happiness. I want to smile more and have pride in myself.

My four year old self is the person I want to emulate. His confidence and bravado enabled himself to react in a rational manor. In my current state, I tend to only see the torrential negativity of my surroundings. I feel as if I am being perpetually water boarded unable to give an answer to, “why do you act like that?,” or “what is wrong with you?” Hopefully, this little exercise will help disperse my cloudy demeanor and think and react in a more clear and “normal” matter.

Now, this whole situation could have lasted no more than ten seconds. I was most likely not in any real danger and my sister probably didn’t seem to think much of it. Although, in my head this was an ordeal. My reaction to my own anxiety and depression can slow down the traumatic, embarrassing and heart wrenching moments of my existence which helps to feed off the negativity my mind is desperately craving. Depression feels like a filovirus that crystalized and deposit spores into the brain making its inhabitant lethargic and empty.

I feel I am at my mentally lowest point in my life. My goal is to recall my exhausted thoughts of my past and maybe figure why I feel the way I feel. If I can invoke my more certain and confident younger self in order to remember to take a deep breath, relax and keep telling myself, “if you can swim in the shallow-end you can swim in the deep.”

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