15. One Thing You Never Learned 

I’ve never learned how to swim properly.

I can ‘move’ from one end of the pool to another (or more like half the pool), but I never learned how to float. So if I was in a place where my feet don’t touch the ground, I’d probably drown. When I was a little girl, my dad attempted to teach me how to swim, but he was terrible at instructions and our visits to the pool were so sporadic his ‘lessons’ never bore fruit.

Sometimes I wonder if they had just thrown me into a pool, would I have been able to learn how to swim? Perhaps it was because I knew my dad was there to hold me that I didn’t try as hard. My dad did not have formal lessons on swimming. He basically learned how to swim at the river (public swimming pools were not a big thing back in the day – or only the rich could afford entry to the ones at posh clubs) – it was literally a case of sink or swim.

Kind of like life, innit? While I still don’t know how to swim (and have made peace that I probably never will), the takeaway from this is that we can rage against the world and its injustices and how it doesn’t fit around us, but ultimately, only the strong and the adaptable survive.