helmet

I spent four years trying to do a single reverse dive, and it never happened. not once.

a reverse is one of five categories of dives, the others being forward, backward, inward, and twists. in it, you stand on the board facing the water, take your two to four steps forward, and then throw yourself off and rotate backward, hoping your momentum and the board’s propelling motion will keep your skull from cracking against the springboard.

many former gymnasts, who tend to take to diving to save their knees, have a hard time psychologically doing any dives that involve them landing in the water on their heads, because they’ve been trained to always land on their feet.

that was not my problem.

my problem was that I have never been strong, or large, and so my body is quite fragile. I don’t trust it to support me. it doesn’t take up any space, so it on its own has always seemed much less significant to me than what it is a vessel for.

I don’t like putting my mind in danger. and if a reverse dive goes horribly wrong, it’ll fuck your brain up a lot more than most things will.

fast forward six years.

in yoga class, I can do crow pose, and tripod head stand—where I’m literally resting most of my body weight on my head!—but I chicken out anytime I try to kick to a handstand, where my arms, historically my weakest point, are the only things between my skull and, mat notwithstanding, the very hard ground.

I don’t trust the rest of my body with my brain. it’s the thing that I rely on for everything: work, study, art, writing, language, ideas. all of these things are my shields and weapons against the world.

my fists? not so much.

there’s no conclusion to this, no happy ending. it’s not something I’ve overcome. it’s all mental—I’ve proven, by jumping off the side of the pool, and doing other poses, that I’m perfectly capable of exactly what I intend to do, physically. my dive coach told me for four years, as I stood on the board frozen for minutes at a time, that all I had to do was stop thinking.

all I have is thinking, it feels like. what’s left of me if I stop?