I have always feared swimming for the simple reason that when I was in primary school, the swimming teacher pushed me into the deep end thinking he’s doing me a frikking favour. Either she’ll swim or she’ll drown was his theory, leaning more towards ‘she’ll learn to swim’ but unfortunately he just ended up scarring me for life.

All these years I have been really scared of getting into water. I think I must have brought in the most sick notes for swimming lessons because even now as I’m writing this my mouth is going dry and my heart is beating faster than normal because of my fear of drowning.

This has also haunted me in my dreams. Every time I am in disagreement with someone that person always tries to drown me. Of late it has been haunting me a lot. For almost 2 months I’ve been having this recurring dream that someone is trying to drown me and I cannot breathe or swim to the surface and breathe. And then I finally decided to face my fear in reality. I felt that if I faced my fear head on it would not haunt me head on. So I started taking swimming lessons. I’m still on lesson 3 and I don’t expect to break records like that Dunford fellow but I will learn to swim to not allow myself or anyone else to drown me. Either in real life or my dreams.