I was the only person in my group of friends who couldn't swim. For years, I managed to hide it. At pool parties, I would sit on the edge with my feet in the water and say I just didn't feel like swimming. At the beach, I'd offer to look after everyone's bags. Nobody ever questioned it, or if they did, they were kind enough not to say anything.
The truth was that I was deeply afraid of water. When I was about five, I fell into a pond near my house and had to be pulled out by a neighbour. I don't remember much about it, but my mother says I screamed for hours afterwards. From that day on, I refused to go near any body of water that was deeper than a bathtub.
The turning point came last year when my daughter, who was six at the time, asked me to take her to the swimming pool. She had just started lessons at school and wanted to show me what she could do. I realised that I couldn't keep making excuses, and more importantly, I didn't want my fear to become hers. So I did something I never thought I would do — I signed up for adult swimming lessons.
The first class was terrifying. I stood in the shallow end, gripping the side of the pool, while the instructor tried to get me to put my face in the water. There were only four other adults in the group, and knowing that they were probably just as nervous as me helped a little. Week after week, I went back. Progress was slow, but it was real.
After three months, I was able to swim a full length of the pool without stopping. It wasn't pretty, and I was certainly the slowest person there, but I did it. The look on my daughter's face when I told her was worth every moment of fear I had experienced. She said, 'Now we can swim together, Dad.' And that's exactly what we do.