How I Learned to Swim

Have you heard of the swimmer’s body illusion; it’s a cognitive bias in which we attribute characteristics to an activity, instead of the other way around. So, we assume a professional swimmer like Michael Phelps looks the way he does because he swims, when the reality is that most pro swimmers are born to swim, their naturally broad shoulders and long limbs nearly ensuring their success in the sport. 

Writing is my swimming; I was born to do it, my brain hardwired to string words together. All my early memories of learning involve language. I could read picture books and write my name before preschool, thanks to a wonderful caretaker who turned my refusal to nap into an opportunity for educational enrichment. And I kept getting lucky, kept falling into the right places and meeting people who fed me stories and encouraged me to share my own.

I’m enrolled in an elementary school that puts on a poetry contest every year starting in first grade and though I don’t have to write original poems to participate, I always do. And I win, almost every year. And I begin to think maybe I’m good at this thing, maybe people actually like the way I write about the world. 

I’m a freshman in high school enrolled in honors English with a tough critic as a teacher but he sees something in me. For the first time I learn how to actually dissect poetry. I’m introduced to words like assonance and syntax and spend classes analyzing stanzas to discern what the speaker is saying. We read Romeo & Juliet and West Side Story side by side, discuss how Shakespeare continues to influence modern life and I begin to think maybe I’d like to do that, write something that transcends time. 

But “writer” is not yet a job in my head, so as a freshman in college I instead attempt to be a business major, marketing specifically because there’s at least a sliver of creativity in that career. But I’m failing, killing myself for Cs and Ds and I know this path is not sustainable for me so I talk to a counselor. And as fortune would have it, Georgetown has one of the top English programs in the country. So I switch paths, and it’s like coming home. Words greet me at the door with open arms, and I’m eager to embrace them, to comb through their layers, finding and making meaning as I go. 

I’m so eager I choose to write a senior thesis, apply to be an honors English student and then, a Master’s student, weirdly excited at the prospect of writing two theses in two years — not knowing yet of course, that I’d be finishing both from my childhood bedroom thanks to a global pandemic. But even if I had known, I wouldn’t have said no, couldn’t have turned down the chance to keep studying and writing words with a brilliant cohort of students who share my passion for literature and language and professors who, despite their expertise, treat us as professional colleagues rather than plebes.   

And when it comes to writing, the pandemic is good for me. I need a place to put all my sadness, my fear, my anxiety and I return to poetry, the art form I had loved in elementary school but had lost. The first poems aren’t good; they aren’t for a while, actually. But they are mine, and remind me that I once loved to write creatively as much as I love to pen a deep critical essay. And they open the floodgate. The more I write, the more words come. Now it’s as natural as breathing, I’m always typing, always scribbling, always taking note of the poetic around me. 

And I don’t worry when the words don’t flow. Like a swimmer who trusts his limbs to carry him the length of the pool, I trust my brain will eventually make meaning of the messy thoughts and fragmented sentences living in my notes app, because it was hardwired to, and writing is what I was born to do.