I'm a Pole Dancer now
How open water swimming invites me to radical self-acceptance
Before you get into it, I want to give you a content warning. This is a story about hope and connection and acceptance, but there’s a brief description of my experiences of mental ill health in the first few paragraphs. If you’d rather skip those paragraphs, then you might like to begin reading at “Becoming a Pole Dancer” (or if you’re listening, skip to 2:42). Or, if you’re not up for it at all today, please skip this article with my blessing.
How suffering led me to the sea
While working as a phone counsellor throughout the lockdowns of 2020, I found myself becoming more and more mentally unwell myself. I’d been in the job for a few years before lockdowns started, and had always felt like I’d managed the stress well. I’d had a few depressive episodes over the years, but nothing lasting more than a few weeks. But suddenly in 2020, instead of talking to people about their problems all day, the problems I was hearing about all day were a mirror image of my problems. Lockdowns, isolation, anxiety, loss of identity. The job I’d always managed to find some emotional distance from when I needed it, suddenly felt very close to home (literally as well as figuratively - I had also started working from my lounge room as our office was closed down). And it was in this context that the at first familiar encounter with feeling depressed quickly became a lot more than that.
Having coached hundreds of people through it before, I knew all the ‘right’ things to do - and I did them. I connected with counselling, and made a decision with my GP to start taking antidepressant medication. These things both did wonders for me (well, slow and kinda hard work wonders), and were a big part of getting through that really acutely tough time.
But as I began to emerge from the fog, I knew that there was going to be more puzzle pieces to fit together to start building my picture of recovery. It was during this time that I came across Isabel Hardman’s book, The Natural Health Service. In it, she talks about her experience of recovery from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and about all the evidence that there is for connecting with nature as part of our healing. One of the chapters was about open water swimming, and hearing about all the evidence there was for its positive effect on mental health, and about Isabel’s personal great experiences with it made me feel really inspired to give it a go.
Becoming a Pole Dancer
I did a Google search for open water swimming groups in my area, but found nothing. So I did some more research about how to stay safe while swimming alone, and started giving it a go on my own. And I swam alone for two years before I happened upon the Pole Dancers; the open water swim club that gets its name from the poles we swim out to and then frolic between each morning.
There’s about 65 of us locals who brave the sea each day. Well.. some folks go every morning; I’m a twice-a-week-ish kind of person if I’m honest. If you rock up sometime before 8am you’ll find some other brave friends ready to strip down to their bathers with you and surrender to the sea. Everyone’s there for different reasons - fitness, mental health, connection to nature… but what unites everyone is a desire to connect and support each other to achieve our goals.
Finding peace in the uncertainty of the ocean
I want to say that my ocean swimming journey was love at first dip and that it’s all been easy and wonderful, but that’s not quite true. Even though I’ve been swimming for years now, I ask myself what the hell I’m doing every time I go down there. When I first hit the water I am just freezing and full of regret and usually screaming like a baby. And all the retirees who have been doing it for 30 years tell me to toughen up and grow a backbone. Two minutes later however, I’m elated; feeling connected to myself and the water and the whole universe and couldn’t imagine ever being happier. So it’s that feeling that makes me go back over and over and over again.
While ocean swimming is one of the best things I’ve ever done, I don’t to give the impression that it’s some kind of magical cure for mental ill-health. I’d be lying if I said my mental health was happily back to where it was five years ago and that everything is always fine now. What has changed though, is that even when it’s not fine, I can be fine with it. My self-judgement in tough times is a fraction of what it was, and I can feel at home in my own skin on my best days and my worst. And I know it’s ocean swimming that I have to thank for that.
Hang on… is this blog about swimming or politics?
I talked in a previous post about how I’ve come to realise that politics is just the decisions we make about who we are as a collective - how we all figure out how to function well together as the diverse hodge-podge of ordinary folks that we are. So yes, (spoiler!), of course this is political.
No matter the state of our mental health, life can feel so full of pressure and responsibility. There are always expectations we feel we have to meet - from work, from family and friends, from ourselves. Not to mention an advertising industry worth billions of dollars designed to create discomfort in us and then capitalise on it. Stepping off this treadmill for a moment is a radical thing.
In contrast, the ocean expects nothing from us. It embraces us no matter what we bring to it.
The ocean teaches me to make space for the dark and the light within myself. I can stop moving, stop growing, stop producing, and still be ok.
The ocean has invited me to find beauty where there was pain, to stop dividing the world into black and white. It has invited me to hold pain without judgement, and uncertainty without fear.
And the same invitation is there for you.
I don’t think we have to all go for a freezing cold dip to find radical acceptance of ourselves. But I do think we could all benefit from finding the spaces in our lives where we can learn that there is nowhere else we need to go and no-one else we need to be. So I want to ask you:
Is there somewhere you go or something you do that helps you experience this kind of self-acceptance?
What are the parts of your life where you could benefit from accepting more contradiction and uncertainty?
Maybe there’s a part of yourself that you see as ‘bad’. Is it really bad? What would it mean to make space for it to just be what it is?
Would changing how you respond to parts of yourself you find difficult to accept change the way you relate to others too?
Sharing some of my answers to these questions has been my small scale political action for today. And if you want to share your responses too, I’d love to hear from you in the comments! Or you can email me at practicalpolitics@substack.com if you want to share but public commenting isn't your thing.
One final political ask
The Pole Dancers are currently petitioning our local council to get some showers and change rooms at the beach where we swim!
If you want to support us with it, you can fill out this google form and I’ll add your details to the petition. You just need to provide your name and email address, and there’s some more info in the form description.
Thanks for reading Practical Politics. My blog about small scale political action for ordinary people.
As always, this is not a blog about how you should live your life, but how you could live your life.
So please, take what’s helpful and leave what isn’t.
Tas x