Most Swimwatch posts are written by
David Wright. However, we occasionally get suggested articles from “outside”.
Published below is one such article written by Jane Copland. It is longer than
a normal Swimwatch post – more than made up for by the importance of its
subject and the quality of its writing.
I don’t know who I would have been otherwise. I was never a
happy-go-lucky person, but I wasn’t this.
Nurture versus nature isn’t a conflict. It’s a recipe.
Here’s mine:
I was eighteen years old, and I had accepted my life to date
as normal. I had never experienced a life that didn’t begin with a
self-administered pep-talk at six a.m. every day, reminding myself that no
matter what they did to me, I mustn’t respond. I mustn’t even make a sour face,
I mustn’t even acknowledge the barb, whether it be a water polo ball thrown at
my head, a punch in the stomach, a story of my terrible behaviour or kick to
the face. I didn’t have a happy childhood. I had a troubled youth. For most of
my adolescence and almost all of my teens, my daily life revolved around
keeping myself safe and navigating dreadful aggression, armoured from six in
the morning until roughly the same time at night with a numb defiance to keep
myself out of trouble, a constant watch kept over my shoulder. I come from a
loving home. My parents are still two of my best friends. But my family and I
were heavily bullied during my life as a competitive swimmer, and only twenty
years later have I really begun to understand what damage that did.
I have written about my experiences in swimming before, in
two national newspapers. In the Independent, I wrote about the bizarre and troubling experience of
having men become aggressive when faced with a faster woman swimmer (or
runner), and in New Zealand’s Newsroom, I wrote about growing up an outcast in that country’s
swimming community. These two unfortunate circumstances of my youth came to a
head in Napier, a town to which my family moved in 1998. I trained in public
pools and public lanes, and I was a fast female teenager. I was also an outcast
who trained alone, which resulted in years of abuse from parents and
administrators from the Aquahawks swim team. We shared the Onekawa (now Napier)
Aquatic Centre, but some of us shared less willingly than others. The pool’s
management, the local swimming administration and by proxy the Napier City
Council, were complicit and responsible for allowing this abuse to bloom.
I’m telling this story again because its consequences evolve
and grow with me, and I have only in the past year begun to really understand
how the unfortunate origin story of mine is a lot bigger than me and a few
horrible years in a horrible town in New Zealand.
Recounting the tales of what was done to me gets old, but in
short, I was physically and psychologically tormented for years, routinely lied
about, and taunted with physical jibes like being kicked underwater by other
swimmers’ parents, joining my lane to get a heel dug into my ribs. They
threatened our ability to drive to school and to swimming, made false reports
to the police about our property, tried to prevent me from competing, and
finally told a bald-faced lie to the useful idiots in charge of the pool in
order to have me kicked out of the facility entirely. By this point, I was a
national champion and record holder, and widely known as scum, a whore, a
mealy-mouthed lout. And the strangest part of all this is that I didn’t really
know it was abnormal. I knew it was wrong,
but it was also normal. Normal and wrong can coexist if you know no other way
of living.
After four years, they told the pool management that I had
sworn at a child. Apparently, prodding me like a stubborn cow and getting no
explosive retort had grown old, so they just made up a story. Told to leave and
not come back, I obliged mid-training session, without saying anything. I
remember being next to mute, unable to speak. We drove out of Napier to the
Clive War Memorial Pool, a terrible place whose water poisoned my respiratory
system until I left for the United States months later, and I continued the
session that had been interrupted, crying so hard underwater that I threw up. I
finished the training. I said nothing. I moved to America and tried to forget
about it, but it turns out that abused fifteen year olds don’t grow up. They
sit in the heads of their hosts, watching the joy and the wins and the better
days, watching the passing of better years, acknowledging that while their
hosts have moved on, they have been left behind. They are waiting for the
moment when it comes crashing back down, and then they will make themselves
known again.
When someone enters a lane I’m swimming in, I have to
patiently and deliberately remind myself that they are not there to hurt me.
They are not offended by my presence; they have nothing against me. They do not
viscerally hate me. They will not assault me, nor will they invent a story
about something I have done in order to have me kicked out. They are normal
people, eleven thousand miles away from where I was abused, arriving at the
pool for a swim. Most of them are. I tell myself, seeing legs standing in the
water as I swim up to the wall. Most people are good people. Most people won’t
hurt you. I repeat this. I am usually right.
I saw a therapist in the summer of 2014 whose only message
to me was that nobody would ever hurt me in a pool again, and although I still
find it a useful refrain most of the time, her simplistic analysis has, on
occasion, been wrong. Unfortunately, she was proven wrong the very next
morning, when I took myself to the only local lap pool at my disposal: an
awkward, badly-lit 17m bathtub at my neighbourhood’s only gym, attached to a
golf club. I never liked it, but I found that lugging my heavily-pregnant body
to the club at about ten in the morning made for a quiet workout. The morning
after my second therapy appointment, this did not transpire. Within a few
minutes of starting my swim, a man joined my lane. He was older: sixty or more.
I don’t know if he noticed that I was pregnant (it was hard to miss) but he
proceeded to swim down the centre of our lane in a wild, violent backstroke,
crashing into me. I stood up, scared and angry. He stood up too.
‘What do
you think you’re doing, sprinting up and down!’ he shouted at me, advancing.
Adamantly, he loudly laboured the point that I was in the wrong, swimming “too
fast” and ruining his right to thrash wildly and prevent anyone else from using
“his” lane. I left the pool, terrified for my pregnancy and staring down the
barrel of a resurgence of trauma, ironically exacerbated by having been told
that my fears were in the past and “all in my head” twenty-four hours earlier.
I reported the incident to the gym, who did nothing about
it. I did, however, learn that the man was a storied golfer, the likes of which
the club preferred not to piss off. This was horribly familiar to me, too. The
people who’d abused me in Hawke’s Bay were “important” as well. Teachers,
businessmen, respected members of the swimming community.
After that encounter, I swam less and less, until 2020
finally provided an excuse as to why I never swam. It wasn’t because I was
afraid. Not because the very idea of taking up space in a public pool set my
jaw into a clench and made my heart flutter high and hot in my chest, lungs
tight. All the pools are closed, I’d lament. Bloody COVID. And when they started to
reopen, I had the luxury of living in Reading, whose council had systematically
closed all their public pools on account of the disrepair that they, by way of
underfunding, had caused. Well, I
would say, there is nowhere to swim now,
and I’ve cancelled my membership at the golf club. Instead, I continued an
athletic pursuit cultivated after I retired from competitive swimming: I ran.
As the winter of 2020 approached, I even bought a treadmill of my own, my new
gym having not survived the pandemic. Running outside, I came across three
people in seven years who claimed I was out of place, running “too fast” or
otherwise in the way. But I do run quite fast, and I run every day, so I could
put three people in seven years down to a statistical certainty that at some
point, you will come across arseholes. Those were my running arseholes, but
they weren’t endemic. Right?
In the autumn of 2021, my family moved from Reading to
Oxford.
My son had approached multiple breakthroughs in his quest to
learn to swim, thwarted every time by COVID shutdowns. Stoically, we made our
way to the nearest swimming lesson providers: a former Virgin Active and
current Nuffield Health in North Oxford, boasting an indoor 25m and an outdoor
20m pool, as well as world-class tennis facilities and a gym. I enrolled my son
in lessons, and during his second session, I took my ageing swimming equipment
with me and swam in the public lane beside him. I did it the next week too, and
a woman joined me and the several other people who were sharing the space. My
refrain had been proving true: the pool was fairly busy, but we were sharing
the water amicably, up until that point.
She was nondescript, but they all are: the people who do
these things aren’t identifiable by the way they look. She was wearing a blue
swimsuit and no cap, long dark hair held in a ponytail. She was in her forties.
They all are, and they all aren’t. You can’t tell. Age, gender, apparel: it
could be anyone. Men are more easily offended that a woman is simply faster
than they are, but vicious troublemaking knows no mould. She was standing at
the end of the length as I approached. I went to tumble-turn, only to find her
body quite literally above me in the water, scratching and kicking. She had
waited until my feet hit the wall to push off on top of me. I was startled and
worried, but I put it down to an accident. We all screw up. A teammate of mine
in America once forgot which side of the lane she was meant to be on and we
collided head-on at best-effort pace. Shit happens. I believed this for two or
three minutes, until she did it again.
I surfaced into her, her body kicking and breaststroking
quite literally above mine. Astonished and now angry that she was clearly doing
it on purpose, I stood up in the water. She began yelling immediately, accusing
me of being an aggressive bully. My mind was absolutely screaming, how is this fucking happening?! How is this
happening again! All I did was swim! I tried to tell her, what she did was
dangerous and a violation of pool etiquette: you simply do not deliberately
wait at the wall until a faster swimmer is turning and push off on top of them.
It is dangerous. And my brain,
hell-bent on sense and justice, also understands that reasonable people know
this. My brain knows that, yet again, I am not faced with reasonable people. My
brain teters on the edge of a long-held-off short circuit.
She bellowed, ‘Oh, I’m slow, am I?’ and told me I knew
nothing about etiquette at ‘that pool’, as if a gym in North Oxford exists in a
different realm than every other public pool on earth. She repeated that I was
aggressive and a bully. Wading to the side, she marched around to a lifeguard
to complain, arms waving and fingers pointing at me, a former national champion
and record holder, NCAA Division 1 championship representative, who apparently
knew nothing about lane swimming. The lifeguard approached, a scene that
plunges me back into the horror of being fifteen and knowing that Mrs. Whoever
has told another lie about me, and I am about to face another kicking. The
lifeguard began to admonish me. Trying to stay calm, I told him what had
actually gone on, and invited him to check the pool’s CCTV, a tool that 2001-me
never had. I am still a member of the gym and welcome in the pool, so I assume
that he took me up on my offer.
You get into your nice car. You drive home to your nice
house. You tell your husband, whom you love and who loves you, this happened to
me. Again. He is hurt on your behalf. He believes you. Somebody believes you,
even without CCTV evidence. You go upstairs. You wash your face. I am glaring
at myself in a bathroom mirror, transported back to a locker room in Napier in
2001. My ribs hurt, even though no one kicked me. My brain is on fire again, twenty
years later.
During my teenage years, an interaction like that would have
either been escalated to deal some punishment to me, or would have turned
physically abusive. It depended: men were more likely to resort to physical
intimidation like kicking and shoving underwater, while women sought official
sanction. I still have a couple of scars on my hands from being shoved into the
plastic Onekawa lane ropes by men while I was training. The fifteen year old in
my head sat behind my eyes as I drove home unscathed, but there is no telling
her that the punch isn’t still to come. She doesn’t listen.
I slept for no more than two hours that night. The next day,
I was all but manic. My energy knew no bounds. I was not hungry. I ran twelve
kilometres, fast. I lifted heavy weights. I stared at the wall. I was
completely calm and absolutely out of control. I walked to pick my son up from
school, light as a feather. I could have walked all the way from Oxford to
London. I wrote to Nuffield Health’s senior management. I wrote the email I
wished I could have written over and over again for a fifteen year old who
never got a chance to say, she’s lying.
I worried for a week that she would be back the next time I
swam, and that she would:
- Bring a husband to physically hurt me
- Bring a friend to provoke me
- Send her daughter as tribute to “get in the way”, and then
claim that I was bullying a child (this happened to me multiple times in
Hawke’s Bay, with the parent smugly watching on, waiting for the cattle-prod to
do its work)
- Shout at me
- Worst of all, because no one has ever done it and I wouldn’t
know how to handle it, apologise
I know the woman in the blue swimsuit doesn’t matter.
I know she’s nothing. I know people like that. They do it to
everyone. That’s their thing.
But that night, and the next day, she was everyone who had
come before her. The weight of my fears being realised on day two of being able
to swim again was the bricks tumbling out of the carefully constructed mental
net that I didn’t realise had been suspected above my head for years.
Childhood trauma isn’t just wrong because it hurts a child;
it’s wrong because inevitably, it is carried as a static malignancy into
adulthood. It isn’t just the act of harming a young person that is
reprehensible. It’s the harm caused in decades to come. I once relayed this
story in a comment online, only to have someone who claimed to have known me in
the past reply, telling me she “would have sympathy for me” but it was “a
decade ago” and I should have gotten over it. The ignorance of such a statement
highlights why abusers and bullies are allowed to continue: their actions are
seen as a waning harm that dissolves over time. In actual fact, childhood abuse
is a scratched CD which, when played, will glitch and hop back to the memory of
violence.
I sought out therapy from someone who wouldn’t tell me it
was all in my head, someone who knew that people like that do indeed exist, and
who would provide me with skills to handle them. My therapist, Alex, is an accomplished swimmer herself, who specialises in
helping people navigate past trauma in their current lives. The validation of
having someone say, I have experienced
this too, it is not your fault nor in your imagination was empowering, let
alone the techniques she shared for dealing with it when, not if, it happens
again.
I kept swimming. I kept going to the pool during my son’s
lessons. I stayed away from the woman in the blue swimsuit. I noticed that she
couldn’t meet my gaze when I looked at her, wondering how a person operates
after pitching a tantrum of that variety. I found myself annoyed that she
wouldn’t even look at me after her initial blazing aggression. In my head,
indignancy was peaking through again: how
dare you, I thought. How dare you cause me to be blindsided by the
bare-knuckled punch of anguish I had buried under years of avoiding swimming
pools? How dare you do that, and then retreat like a badly-bred cockerpoo who
yapped at a German Shepherd, then fled? How dare you have cost me a night’s
sleep and triggered a day of wired mania, and then not even be able to look at
me? It’s nothing to you. I’m just another person you’ve shouted at. How dare
you.
In time, I met other good swimmers at the Nuffield pool, and
they told me the same story. An American man, swimming outside under the lights
in the midwinter, laughed when I mentioned how busy it got inside.
‘And if you dare go in there,’
he said, ‘You’ll get accused of swimming too fast and being a bully!’
I almost choked on my own validation. You won’t believe this, I said, but he believed me.
The others, met weeks and months later, said it too. That’s what it can be like.
‘I find this place to be like a
bad boyfriend, but I can’t quit him,’ another faster woman swimmer told me.
‘It’s the outdoor pool in the sun. I just keep coming back.’
I took solace from them, but perhaps not in the way you’d
expect. I took solace not in their experience, but in their reaction. They
didn’t care. They didn’t mind if someone stomped off to a lifeguard,
entitlement in hand, complaining. They knew themselves, and despite being much
faster than the average duck, it was water off their backs. I don’t find it
coincidental that two of the three people who told me these things were
American. America has more than its fair share of issues, but discomfort with
other people’s pursuit of excellence has never been a bugbear of their national
psyche.
From their nonchalance, I realised how outwardly absurd my
wired, manic reaction was. But I also understand my reaction much better than I
ever have before. The woman in the blue swimsuit isn’t the one who upsets me.
Instead, I am still haunted by a child who never left Hawke’s Bay. Someone
who’s still crying in a car park.
I assume that, as hard as I work, I might never be totally
cured. I left it too long. If I had known what was rotting in my mind, I may
have been able to work on myself in my early-twenties and make some progress.
As it stands, I am almost forty and this is who I am. What I can do is understand
myself, much better than a twenty-three year old ever could have, and along
with the tools taught to me in therapy, that can buy me some peace. Even if I
can’t roll back years of brutal high-wire acts in which I handled other
people’s grenades daily and only managed to singe my eyebrows, I can reason my
way out of these situations when they arise in my adult life. I can control my
breathing and lower my heart rate. I can speak in a calm alto, not shrieking my
vowels or harshing my Rs, keeping my lungs in my chest and out of my throat. I
can hold my ground and my nerve at the same time: something I have never before
been able to achieve. I can acknowledge that other people’s poison is not mine
to swallow.
And maybe, toxically, subversively, I can use the waste
product to my advantage. If you find me on the start line of a race, tell me
I’m a bully, that I don’t belong. Find the nerve reason and experience is yet
to cover. Scratch it.
See how high I can still jump.
