Breaking Waves E-Book

Emma Simpson

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 335

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A warm, reflective and uplifting memoir about healing wounds, reclaiming a voice and discovering freedom through the open water. The open water. To the uninitiated, it represents the unknown, an expanse of mystery and uncertainty. But to those who brave the wild waters, it is so much more. A space to heal. A place of communion. A balm to quieten the mind, soothe the soul, and allow you to reconnect with the world and yourself. Emma Simpson discovered wild swimming after a period of immense pain. Lost in grief, disillusioned with life, and feeling increasingly untethered from the world, she instinctively felt the pull of the water. There she found an unexpected source of hope and strength, a profound sense of connection, and a glorious sisterhood of women - each with their own remarkable stories to tell. Interweaving the tales of these inspirational women with reflections on her own experiences, Emma explores themes ranging from devastating loss to birth and rebirth, and from chronic illness to body confidence. Whether describing the taste of an iceberg or a kiss from a baby whale, Breaking Waves is a love letter to womanhood and the open water. It's also a celebration of community, renewal and the power of writing your own life story. Above all else, it is a joyous celebration of going with the flow.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2025 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [e-mail]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773179-4

eBook: 978-183773181-7

Text copyright © 2025 Emma Simpson

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS

1.The Shape of Water

2.The Taste of an Iceberg

3.Drowning

4.The First Breath

5.The Body Keeps the Score

6.Tits, Bums, Lumps and Bumps

7.Come Dive with Me

8.What Lies Beneath

9.Reflections

10.Endings Are Always the Hardest

Acknowledgements

Notes

For Brian, For Dad

1. THE SHAPE OF WATER

It was 2am.

I was working as an air traffic controller at London Gatwick Airport which was, at that time, the busiest runway in the world. I loved those early hours, with the airfield lit up like a Christmas tree. Aircraft were scarce, but the airfield was alive with activity, preparing for the day ahead. The odd late charter flight came and went, and then … that beautiful stillness that only seems to occur when the rest of the world is asleep. I surveyed my domain. At that moment, this was my airfield. While night shifts certainly had a well-documented downside, there was also something special about them; a feeling of camaraderie upon entering an exclusive club, a mutual acknowledgement that we were here, keeping the national infrastructure going while most people were in bed. It was a world of sugary doughnuts and strong tea at 3am to fend off the body’s yearning for hibernation. There was time to just be. To notice what it is to be part of something bigger. A rare luxury.

That night I contemplated the noise that had been circling around my mind for some time. Regardless of my shift pattern, I was no longer sleeping. A relentless rumination pervaded my head and the only time I felt relief from it all was when I was here, wearing my air traffic headset. While I was speaking to aircraft, in that state of hyper vigilance, with a plane taking off and landing every minute, I was 100 per cent focused. In this space, I had a defined voice, one with specific purpose and intent. I couldn’t mourn, catastrophise or howl in anger while separating several aircraft from each other, planning a departure order, checking the weather or judging if the aircraft on the runway would get its wheels up before the next one thundered down to land. The irony was that what is purported to be ‘the most stressful job in the world’ was the one place that brought me relief from pain, grief and the gnawing depression I didn’t yet know I had. In this space I found solace at the epicentre of my very own three-dimensional puzzle. A reassuring sense of comfort in keeping hundreds of other people safe and secure, while firmly closing the door on my own feelings.

That night I started to question myself. What if the noise managed to find a way in? What if I couldn’t block it out anymore? As I stood there looking at the lights, feeling serene, something crystallised, and I decided that the risk to public safety was too big. Asking for help risked my job, my livelihood and my home; not asking for help risked something far worse. At that moment I knew I would never control another aircraft again. The following morning, I held my hands up and shouted (not for the first time in my life), ‘help me I’m drowning’; and, just like that, my operational air traffic career was over.

As I allowed myself to step back and accept help, the tears finally began to flow. I realised I had forgotten how to cry. Although tears would undoubtedly fall when I experienced overwhelm, fatigue and frustration, I had long since stopped crying through emotion, loss or connection. If a real tear threatened to form, I would feel it retract like the ruby slippers under Dorothy’s house. But now the tap opened. Not sobs or choking gasps, but floods of tears. Saltwater bleeding from within me, dripping down my face.

This is where, almost imperceptibly, my healing began: expelling this corked water that had sluiced around in me for so long, trapped, stagnant, stifling. Little did I know then how water would later heal me in a very different way. How cold seas and winter lakes would become a source of sanity, calm, wildness, freedom, connection and fury. How water would save me and transform me from the outside back in; and how I would become part of a gloriously inclusive searority of women who just … knew. How I would scream, laugh and howl into the water, as my voice put itself back together, and learned how to articulate my being. Having nearly drowned in the sea in my twenties, it had been many years since I had allowed myself to venture out of my depth. Slowly, this began to change. In the wake of what I would define as my breakdown, I lost a layer of fear. Water became the perfect landscape for me to push the boundaries; I was innately drawn to it to help repair my broken soul. I found something uniquely wonderful about crying into salt water – it is impossible to know where you begin and where you end.

The events that had unexpectedly catapulted me into that dark ether a few years prior centred on the sudden death of my brother, Brian, in traumatic circumstances, just ten weeks after my firstborn daughter contracted life-threatening meningitis at birth, leaving me without a solid foothold on my world. In the months that followed, a combination of shock and the need to nurture a newborn kept me functioning. Beyond that, there was a subliminal pull that perhaps I could outrun my grief if I kept forging ahead, keeping busy, returning to work early, moving house, having another child. However, as those months turned into years, illness after illness began to plague me; isolation, anxiety and depression gripped me, rendering me immobile for weeks at a time, and my connection with others and with the natural world diminished until I could sustain the relationships no more. My voice, once so full of vitality, had become muted, internalised. Thoughts and feelings skittered around my head, unable to escape or find air. I remember sitting on the edge of my sofa thinking it was only my daughters that were keeping me alive, and it was because of them that I shouted for help.

It had taken me five years to make that first call for support, and after ultimately having to leave my job, I began to heal in the traditional sense through therapy, medication, the love of my family and support of my friends, but I wondered if there was something at my core that would never recover. As my daughter’s health improved and she grew stronger, I was able to tick along okay for a couple of years, no longer in danger, but still somehow not quite alive. The light in my eyes, which had always glowed so brightly, was still slightly faint, my internal voice was still a whisper. I was stuck in my own necessary ‘wintering’, having ‘temporarily fallen between two worlds’.1 But then, on a quiet, family holiday in the gorgeous British seaside town of Swanage in Dorset, something began to change. And it began in the sea.

To look at us as a unit on that trip was to witness an illusory idyll. Mum, Dad, Aunty, Nana, Grandad (always in his socks on the beach) and two gorgeous little girls lighting the world up with their smiles and sandy feet, belying the reality of shattered parents who had lost a son, and the siblings who had had a limb torn from them and whose grieving came second. We were there during the Swanage festival week in August, which meant sandcastle competitions, chalk painting, Punch and Judy and, it transpired, a sea swim. Something inside me lit up when I saw the notice for this event. I knew in my soul that I needed to do it, although I couldn’t articulate why. No one out of my ‘non-swimmer’ Mum, Dad and sister was willing to accompany me, and my quietly supportive husband was in charge of marshalling two toddlers, so it was clear this was going to be a lone venture, but my long-buried tendency towards the ‘fuck-its’ broke through the weeds that had been subduing it, and I signed up to do a 500-metre swim. Not the kilometre, mind, that would have been silly. This was terrifying enough.

On the day of the event I was nervous yet excited. I knew this would challenge me both mentally and physically, and it brought back inklings of my previous sense of fun and adventure. They were feelings that had deserted me while I was unwell, although I hadn’t realised their absence until just at that moment. Having donned my tummy-control Marks & Spencer swimming costume and sparkly flip-flops, I affected my best Dickensian jaunt and made my way to the departure point on the rocks, before realising that, clearly, I must have turned up to the wrong event, because everyone else was dressed head to toe in rubber and they were all wearing swim hats. What. The. Actual. Fuck. Swim hats?? I hadn’t possessed one of those instruments of torture since the excruciating hair towelling days of school PE. I can’t say it really occurred to me that I might be the one inappropriately dressed until I began to absorb the looks from the other participants, ranging from pity, ‘oh bless her, she’ll get so cold’, to indignation, ‘oh my God, the integrity of this event has just gone through the floor’, to almost famous, ‘they’ll interview me and I’ll say I saw her just before she drowned, I’ll pretend I spoke to her!’ Awkward doesn’t even come close. One thing that grief does do, however, is stop you giving a damn what other people think, because it really doesn’t matter, so I pretended that I had turned up like that intentionally because I was so hardcore. In reality, without a wetsuit I only had my blubber to protect me, but I figured that would suffice, so I shed my flip-flops and joined the shuffling penguins towards the entry point.

Within seconds, I experienced an exquisite pain in my feet – why were we entering the sea here? Walking through the jagged, craggy rocks, slime-covered stones and deceptively evil shingle? Why weren’t we going in at a sandy point? Why was no one else swearing?! Aah – because they all had bootees on. Of course they did. With their smugsuits and swim hats there was a whole wardrobe no one had told me about (and dryrobesweren’t even a lucrative twinkle in their inventor’s eye at this point). There was nothing to do but get on with it, so enter the sea I did, carried by my excitement and terror, the Jaws soundtrack looping in my ears as I hit the water. Once in I allowed myself to surrender – to the feeling, to the sensation, to the experience. In the deep water, unprepared, untrained, with seaweed bouncing in and around my legs and breaststroke my only way to stay afloat, I felt exhilarated. I took in my surroundings and marvelled at my own courage. I felt alive and connected to something for the first time in such a long time. The grey blanket of numbness that had encased me since Brian’s death threatened to shift, ever so slightly. I looked around and just grinned – until that let a bit too much water into my mouth – at which point I got a bit more serious and swam to the exit point.

At the exit steps I was aided by some volunteers, handed my beach towel by my sister who shared the emotion of that moment, and my two daughters ran up to me just so proud and excited by my adventure. My endeavour had lit something up in them too. Their faces filled with awe and admiration are something I will never forget. I looked back at the water and felt so happy that I had conquered my fear, and while feeling slightly faint and a bit punch-drunk, I also started to feel the first steps of a spiritual healing. Something awoke for me that day. It wasn’t a big distance that I had crossed – just 500 metres – but it began to span an emotional gulf. My need to connect with the water had come from a place of instinct, something from the ancient brain associating water with healing and protection, both physically and mentally. Through some subconscious combination of the literal and the spiritual, I had reached for the water in an attempt to surrender, to relinquish control and to enter an unexpected landscape. I needed to push the fog aside and start to find out who I was in this ongoing parallel existence where everything had changed yet everything was the same.

In the mirror of my soul, the reflection was still hazy, leaving questions hanging in my throat: had my edges dulled or sharpened? Was my heart broken or open? Was there a light behind my eyes? Was I still me or fundamentally changed forever? While I didn’t yet have the answers, I became able to hear my own questions. In the water, on that unassuming day in August, I started to free my voice.

Water steadily took on a more and more meaningful part of my everyday life, and over the following decade grew to become an essential part of my being. I have now become one of ‘those nutters’ who jumps into cold lakes in a bikini in February, and swims naked under the moonlight. When I’m in the water, I don’t feel like a ‘swimmer’, it’s more that I inhabit the space, experiencing its environment and submerging in its sensory nature. I am drawn to the presence of the moment as I watch bubble trails fill my vision and weave through my fingers. I feel connected with the surroundings and those that share the space, but also with myself and my womanhood, the water a wall of protection surrounding the nakedness of my skin. What I feel is encapsulated by a beautiful and ancient Icelandic word innsæi,2 meaning ‘the sea within’, bringing to life ‘the borderless nature of our inner world’. It also means ‘to see within’, to know ourselves. Submerging in water allows me to explore the duality of the fluidity of my own limits as a human, while getting to know a deeper part of myself, as my senses become simultaneously heightened and dulled. Sight becomes illusory – distances and frames of reference distort while colours pop through the blue that isn’t really blue. The sounds of my daily life become distant and muted with the flow of my breath filling the aural void, gifting me my own perfect, not quite silent silence. Smells and tastes of salt, seaweed, ice, petrol, mud and sand are absorbed, and my whole body becomes alive with touch. The water is all-consuming, yet non-invasive, rendering me both vulnerable and safe.

When the water is warm, my mind floats back to swims in the lakes and seas of Africa, Thailand and California. I lie on my back and watch the clouds float and billow among the criss-cross of contrails. At the lake where I regularly swim, in the warmer months Canada geese fly overhead, and sand martins swoop over the water like bats that woke up too early before heading back to their nests in the sandstone. Waterfowl huddle protectively around their babies, before loosening the leash on their growing offspring as the youngsters start to find their own way in the world, reminding me of both the formative stages of my own sibling relationships, and those I see mirrored in my own children. I pretend I know what all these creatures are, except the only word that really forms in my mind every time I see one is ‘duck’, unless they’re white, in which case it’s ‘swan’. It turns out I am just as gifted at bird identification as I was at aircraft recognition (three or four engines? Easy. Two engines? Er … they all look the same). Nonetheless, I am joyful at sharing their water, but then remember that adult swans and ‘ducks’ are casually terrifying, so I give them a very wide berth.

Recently, while circumventing a particularly large swan, I came across a little bee on her back on the surface of the water, trapped in the meniscus, fighting for her life. Suspended in that liminal moment between life and death, she almost appeared to be peacefully sunning herself without a care in the world, the deceptive reverie interspersed with intense yet futile spasmodic efforts to right herself and fly away. The lifeguard approached, noting that I had stopped swimming, him caring for me as I cared for the bee. Together we flipped the little bee onto the rescue board, where she crawled into a patch of sunlight to recover. In that moment I felt a unique sensation of joy and connectedness to something bigger in the world, a feeling of playing a part in the greater symphony of life on earth. My kind and gentle dad used to rescue poorly bees, scooping them up and feeding them sugar and water in the palm of his hand – I could feel his smile behind the sunlight.

I have often considered the significance of the bee, and how I absolutely had to come back and write about it that very day. How it made me reflect on the care my dad took when he looked after them, showing me the gentleness of humanity, the importance of noticing things outside our own direct context, and the acknowledgement of what nature does for us. How happy it made me to see the bee and immediately think that I could be like Dad, just for a moment. How it made me consider that we carry our history in our DNA.

I’m not sure when I first began to notice such things. When did I change from a hair-on-fire-person-of-extreme-busyness who would flurry past people in the street barely noticing their own mother, to someone that spotted a flailing bee? Is this what it means to ‘be present’? As someone who struggles with meditation or mindfulness and has the stillness capacity of a toddler, I consider that perhaps temporary bouts of ‘presence’ are exactly what I have found through this time spent in nature. These years of gentle slowing allowing me to ‘notice’, both above and below the surface. On turning my face into the water, I leave the bird and bee life behind, becoming mesmerised by the shards of light that are scattered Pollock-style beneath the surface. I catch slices of my ‘land-based’ world as I turn upwards to inhale before plunging back into the shared silence. In temperate water, ideas flow through me as I swim, stories are born and chapters are written. My words are lazily piped out into the morning mist, as if by Alice’s Wonderland caterpillar, suspended above the water before they evaporate with the sun, yet somehow baked into my mind to perhaps be retrieved later. Time takes on a different meaning. I may find myself swimming fast yet staying still, suspended in currents beyond my power, or surrendering to calm waters as I float and drift.

When I plunge into the cold, my mind contracts to a razor-sharp pinpoint. Demons are vanquished as I become witness to my body’s autonomic function – the gasps, the contractions and releases, every receptor stimulated, flashes of cold crackling through my limbs. I am reminded of the intense focus and narrowing world of air traffic control – a time when I could escape the world and exist in a single moment. My voice enters uncharted territory, from the initial high-pitched ‘fuckety fuck fuck! It’s freezing!’ song that I sing as I start to make my way in, to the alarming guttural noise and breathy groans I expel upon submerging my chest. My body responds involuntarily with my lizard brain telling me to scream and run away. In those moments I am exposed and raw, often fleetingly wondering if I make the same primal sounds during sex and therefore how many people have heard that side of me. Sharing the experience of ice swimming with another human is a curiously intimate and connecting moment; from the trepidatious adrenaline-spiked entry, to the overwhelming bodily sensation of a thousand tiny pinpricks as pain subsides into pleasure, to the subsequent dopamine-fuelled euphoria. The post-coital cigarette reincarnated in the ritual zipping of each other’s dryrobeswhile sharing hot tea and pressing jelly cubes through chattering teeth. There’s always a healthy amount of flesh on show as getting stripped of wet gear and wrapped in a warm dry fleece takes precedence over preserving dignity. It is wonderful to step into this parallel world with any human being, but the vast majority of those I find myself with at the water’s edge are women.

It is women I have broken ice with, swum in the English Channel with at night, stood naked with, cried with and belly-laughed with. Women whom I see experience the fear, joy and elation that I do at the water’s edge. Women who have cocooned around me like dolphins in a pod when I have been vulnerable. Women who have described a visceral need to get into the water and sob, without speaking to anyone. Women who need to feel held and healed by the water. Women who respect the power of the water and challenge themselves every time they go in. Women who become adventurers through the water. Women who find joy and laughter in the swirls and waves. Women who birth and are reborn in water. It is for these reasons that I began to seek out other women to explore what water means to them in all its forms – being in and around it, sailing on it, immersing in it, floating on it, birthing in it, crying out our collective tears. I asked them whether they feel the same fundamental connection as me. What is it about womanhood and water that feels so empowering? Do other women feel the same strength, exposure and awe that I do when yielding to the water? What brings them to the water’s edge and what does it save them from? Do other women experience the joy that I do? Through swimming in local lakes and rivers as well as through connecting with soul sisters from further afield, I found women who feel all of these things, receiving their stories of how water adds to their lives in so many ways. We shared emotional dips as kindred spirits and experienced the joy of water through our tales of fear, love, adventure, discovery and hope. During these conversations, reminiscent of the sleepovers of our teenaged pasts, we giggled in our vulnerability and connected through the sharing of our souls. We mirrored that precious midnight storytelling as we entrusted each other with our words in this most wonderful exchange of gifts.

An astonishing amount of humour and warmth has emerged in this exploration. One of the first women I spoke to when I began to write on this subject was a mermaid who lived in a second-hand chest freezer in her shed. Okay, so that’s not strictly true, but it’s not entirely false either. Having accidentally found myself on an English Channel relay team through the course of writing this book (learn to say ‘NO’, Emma!), I was introduced to Merthyr Mermaid,3 Cath Pendleton, to learn more about the Channel and how to endure the cold. As well as having swum the Channel, Cath was the first woman ever to swim an ‘ice mile’ (a swim of one mile in water temperature of 5°C or less) inside the Antarctic Polar Circle, in just a swimming costume, swim hat and goggles – something she achieved by acclimatising in said freezer, in ice-filled water, for several hours a week. One of the most instantly warm and welcoming human beings I have ever met, Cath gave such brilliant advice and guidance from her own experience, and then suggested that I look up her swim hero – another ice swimmer and fellow English Channel alumna – New Yorker Jaimie Monahan. The more people I spoke to about both the book and the relay, the more it started to crystallise that a) I’d actually have to write a book, and b) I’d have to swim the English Channel – both of which seemed fucking ridiculous. So initially I thanked Cath for her time and buried my head firmly in the sand.

A short while later, however, the latest edition of Outdoor Swimmer magazine dropped through my letterbox with a striking photo of a woman on the cover, emblazoned with the words ‘Marathon Queen’. The article inside was titled ‘Queen of Manhattan’, featuring one Jaimie Monahan. It seemed everybody really was talking about Jaimie. The Universe was clearly not going to let me get away with this one, so it was time to find out more.

When I spoke with Jaimie, a truly remarkable and radiant individual, she shared her own mesmerising stories of icebergs and extraordinary adventure before proceeding to recommend a host of other woman I could speak to who had shared swims with her from Siberia to the South Pole, and the chain of generosity continued. Upon posting in online open water groups asking if anyone would speak with me, I was inundated with replies. Women I’d never met of all ages and backgrounds entrusted me with their stories of birth, loss and recovery, surviving chronic illness, finding body confidence, seeking adventure, and discovering friendship through the water, immersing me in their love and laughter in the process. Through research for this book, I have broken bread across time zones with a multiple sclerosis athlete as she swims with First Nations communities in Western Canada, virtually accompanied a young Finnish explorer on an ice plunge, learned from an ocean advocate who has sailed the Pacific Islands trading Western supplies for coconuts, laughed with a Peruvian underwater photographer, and bonded with an artist who has shared the water with sharks. I have swum naked with women coming to terms with their bodies after surgery or birth, and gently bobbed around my local lake with a woman with stage four cancer. I was particularly struck by her for many reasons, not least because she’d had to convince her husband that meeting a random stranger on a cold winter’s day, getting undressed with them and heading off into freezing water in an unknown lake was completely normal. The trust inherent in women meeting women, and the unspoken understanding of those that connect with the water, meant that somehow she just knew that with me, she was safe. As for me? Danger didn’t even cross my mind, just an expectation of kinship that was more than fulfilled.

The generosity of this community is something quite breathtaking, with multiple world-record holders and busy stay-at-home mums taking time out to open a window to their soul. Through listening to their stories, something beautiful has emerged in my understanding of how we experience water as women. This is not to lean on lazy stereotypes of softness and nurture, imagining women as mothers cooing gently as they cradle offspring, or friends enveloping each other in hugs at the water’s edge, nor is it to say we don’t strive for achievement. We can be as forceful and ferocious as the waves in a storm, and our endurance belies any notions of ‘weakness’; but there is a difference in our approach. It comes from within and is born of the elements. It can rage and erupt, ebb and flow, soothe and pacify, but it emanates from a shared cognisance. Just as our oceans, lakes and mountains hold the memory of the origins of our planet and the history of what has passed, as women we hold something in our own collective memory of shared struggle, and how we rise. We become empowered around water and, through finding our voices and really hearing each other, discover a new freedom. We have an instinctive understanding of the strength and power of humility through water – when to let the waves crash over us, and when to stand tall. In all its varied forms, water, like women, contains something fundamentally unknowable – whether it’s what lies beneath the surface, the life that it sustains, the minerals and healing powers it harbours, or its uncharted nature, there is something magical, spiritual.

I have come to know the women who are featured in this book in a unique way, rediscovering a deep sense of trust in humanity, and learning that when we build these feelings through our shared stories there is a positive shift in the fabric of the world. This gathering of experience has helped me to make sense of some of my own confusion and complexities, which have hung from me like faded Christmas baubles since Brian’s death: can I survive my grief? Does anyone have the slightest understanding of what I have gone through? How dare I be affected by this when so many others suffer so much worse? What happens when I surrender my grip on that which I hold so tightly? What am I running from and when can I stop? If I really speak my truth, how will I be judged?

I see so clearly that I have long held all of these questions, and more, although I have never been able to articulate them. I smile to myself in recognition that these are questions that I still hold, along with others, and how the answers continually evolve. Today these questions serve me well as I explore the wonder of them as I swim, understanding the human condition ever more deeply. I have realised that for every question there is no right or wrong answer, there is only a changing perspective – head above or head below water – and beauty and hope can be found in each ripple. I see how so many answers lie in the connections we form with those that understand.

It is with others that we consider how to make sense of the incomprehensible, how to experience something visceral in a world that can leave us numb, and how to truly connect with what it means to live. The stories which are interwoven with mine in the following chapters give a beautiful perspective into how we discover our truths through our connection with water and show the power of both womanhood and water as primal forces. These women have shared droplets of their souls with me, creating a glorious and colourful montage of warmth, honesty and insight. This has inspired me to want to carve out ice in the Baltic and to sail across the ocean, to taste an iceberg and kiss a baby whale, but most of all, I want to hold each of their hands and run into the waves alongside them.

2. THE TASTE OF AN ICEBERG

When you hold someone’s hand and run into the waves, a connection is formed, sometimes in a way that you’d least expect. The women I’ve met since that first foray into the cold waters off the coast of Swanage have not just inspired me, it’s more that we have merged in some sense, our waves curling around each other. On hearing their stories, I have absorbed their words and felt their feelings. Sometimes it’s barely even a look as we inhale the same air, subconsciously wriggling our toes in synchronicity as we dip test the water. Many of the women I have spoken to grew up with water as a fundamental part of their upbringing, instilling in them a sense of adventure, and others came to it, as I did, through later happenstance. Jaimie Monahan, who has circumnavigated Manhattan Island four times consecutively and has swum ice miles on every continent in the world, grew up with swimming as part of her every day. Raised in New York, Jaimie spent her whole life surrounded by water, drawn to it, afraid of it and in love with it, with her own experiences in water creating the jigsaw which connects her to her home, her family and her own story.

Despite her astonishing feats and multiple world records within ultramarathon and ice swimming, which include Guinness World Records for swimming six marathons in six continents in sixteen days and for being the first person to complete what is known as the Ice Sevens Challenge,1 Jaimie’s is a story of gentle determination and mesmerising exploration of the self. It is a story of relinquishing control and being in tune with the natural world while immersing in a shared history through the water. Learning of her experiences inspires reflections upon life and death, permanence and impermanence, relating both to the people in our lives and the environments we inhabit.

Her own heroes include incredible adventurers like Julie Ridge, who quit her role on Broadway to become the first person to swim around Manhattan Island twice before becoming a social worker (and riding across America on a bicycle), and Rose Pitonof, the first person to swim from Manhattan to Coney Island at the age of seventeen. Born in 1895, Rose grew up in an era where learning to swim was discouraged, particularly among women,2 the legacy of which led her to witness the horror of over one thousand women and children drowning in just seven feet of water in New York’s East River when their passenger steamboat caught fire, twenty feet from shore. It was against this backdrop of dissuasion and devastation that young Rose became a Long Distance Swimming Champion of the World and the subject of a Chicago Tribune article titled ‘Is There Anything Women Can’t Do?’3 A high bar for heroes perhaps, but there is no comparison or hierarchy here, just respect, admiration and an innate understanding of their experiences.

It is fitting that Jaimie was the only participant allowed to partake in what is now known as the ‘Rose Pitonof’ swim – a seventeen-mile ‘current assisted’ swim between East 26th Street Manhattan and Steeplechase Pier, Coney Island – during the pandemic year of 2020. Having completed the swim more times than any other person, her attitude to water is ‘a powerful embodiment of the spirit of the event’.4 For Jaimie, it isn’t about staying longer in the water to break records, trying to prove anything or plunge into ever more deleterious temperatures; it’s about finding that which she seeks, however defined or undefined this is, and about experiencing a oneness with water. Her passion is for spending more time in the ocean and thereby ethereally eroding the barrier between being a person and being the water. She describes the feeling of how we become one with water, how we can experience it in, on and around us, not quite knowing where one sensation begins and another ends. This prompts the question: where do we become water, and water becomes us?

I’d like to say I grew up with saltwater in my blood, having spent a childhood surfing the waves and being at one with the tide, but I actually grew up in landlocked London, with my formative experiences of swimming conducted in cavernous, always slightly too cold, astringent-smelling public baths. I have memories of lining up against the wall convict-style for verruca checks, with a too-tight swim hat tugging on my short plaits, walls adorned with baffling ‘no heavy petting’ signs, as we swam in widths, watching the plasters float by. I learnt to ‘swim’ by being taken out of my depth with an actual stick being waved through the water, eternally out of my reach. The promise of safety and something to hold on to was always half an arm stroke away as I coughed and spluttered my way to the far side. The ‘good’ swimmers would be having lessons in the deep end of the pool, permitted to use the hallowed diving boards, and taking junior lifeguard sessions where they would jump in wearing their pyjamas and pick up bricks from the bottom of the pool. My brother, Brian, was part of this group, and I was in awe – he seemed limitless at that age, full of energy and skill. I, on the other hand, always swallowed copious amounts of chlorine, felt my eyes and throat burn, and endured the compulsory excruciating ‘hair towelling’ by one of the parent helpers. I don’t remember ever seeing my dad or sister in the pool, and although she religiously took me to lessons, my mum still can’t swim to this day.

In my early years, before the bond with my siblings found its strength, they often felt distant to me, connected as they were to each other through their closeness of age, so I gravitated towards my parents. As the baby of the family, I was always a daddy’s girl, but I was also totally in love with my teacher mum, writing her letters every day and leaving them on her pillow. I would sit on the lounge carpet in the evening hugging her jeaned legs, comforted by the smell of soft denim, while she marked books and fretted about everything a parent of three young children with money worries frets about. Despite being the odd sibling out, growing up as a girl with a big brother was a remarkable thing. There was an innate feeling of protection, and an indefinable permanence of security. Brian had existed every day of my life, there was no ‘before’. Mum used to make him walk me to school while I was still in primary, whereby he would knuckle punch me in the arm until I crossed over to the other side of the road, shoving my toast and jam into the post box in protest. He pushed me away to shed the embarrassment of having an eight-year-old girl tag along with him when his age had reached the dizzy heights of double digits, but still he never took his eyes off me, and I knew I was safe with him there, and that was priceless. When we went swimming, cycling or climbing trees at the weekends, sharing sweets and squabbling over the Beano, the age difference evaporated. Mum or Dad would deposit us at the pool like it was some giant crèche, acknowledging the inevitable post-swim hunger when they picked us up and, despite not being particularly affluent, that ravenous gap would always be satiated with a salty or sugary treat as we left the pool, clouded in eau-de-chlorine and the delicious muscle ache of just the right amount of exercise. Brian and I would come together in activities and adventures, experiencing the agelessness particular to environments where everyone finds a youthful exuberance and shares a latent fear underpinning the freedom.