I have been spending some time re-invigorating a couple of long term pursuits: swimming and music. As I began to think about these two very large and nebulous areas, I also began to hear in my head a certain amount of negative self-talk. Let’s use an example.

I have always admired swimmers as athletes. I love Olympic swimming and I have swum, briefly, Masters swimming. That means I swam in organized practices with a group of people who were coached. And we went to meets on occasion but mostly as individuals. So you swam races, from the blocks just like on the Olympics.

My favorite of all these experiences was swimming in the big pool in Federal Way that was used during the Goodwill games. It’s the swimming equivalent of playing basketball on the same court as your local pro team. It was really cool.

I also swam a lot as kid. I took swimming lessons many summers and eventually became a life guard at our local “puddle”. All the swimming I did then was in open water, not in a pool. I loved this too. You were in shape and tan – back in the day these were both good things.

Whenever I swam with other people my age, I was never one of the fast swimmers. This bugged me because in other sports I was one of the faster people. So I worked on my swimming a lot and had a fair amount of endurance. Life guard training is good at that.

In Masters, same thing. I was never making it to the fast lane. Lanes are broken up by speed in workouts. In the breast stroke, I was one of the better breast strokers during practices. In relays, I would often get slotted by the coach to swim the breast stroke with other faster guys.

So I took this as a challenge and have studied a lot about swimming in order to improve my other strokes. I took master classes, read books, bought videos and did the drills. Now I am a pretty good swimmer technically. I also found that this aspect of swimming fits me. I like instruction. I like the technical part swimming, music, and other things. 

But a lot of this was driven by negative self talk and even now that voice is present in my head. On my “bucket list” is the goal to swim an Individual Medley in a meet. It contains, cue scary music, the butterfly.

I have never swum the butterfly except very poorly. It’s a very technical stroke. If you ever see someone who is good at it, you will be amazed at how effortless they swim it. At slow speeds, it looks as relaxing as breast stroke.

I took a butterfly lesson a month ago. I have been doing butterfly drills for years, but I never put it all together. I figured I would schedule 3 lessons spread over a few months, just so the coach could help me put it all together. I paid for the lesson and took it an it was terrible.

Now I could just be happy with this. Why not? Who am I trying to impress? Who cares? What does “not doing it” keep me from?

I came from the lesson with a great coach who spent 1 hour and extra 15 minutes in the pool with me and I made essentially no progress. I think she might have felt bad for me. I literally could not effectively move across the pool. She recorded the effort. I watched it. It was awful. I came out of the pool thinking, “that was pitiful.”

Eventually, I thought this is fascinating. Why do I do berate myself on certain things and not others? Why is this more meaningful to me and actually makes me feel bad?

I don’t have an answer. But I’m exploring this feeling a bit. I’m letting my mind work around the edges of this odd behavior. I’m not a berator, yeller or shamer. I would never be a parent, coach or a teacher that shames and belittles students. I do not have some stereotypical voice in my head. It isn’t like a cartoon drill sergeant. But it also is not always a nurturing, helpful voice, full of good suggestions and encouragement. That inner voice is just more of a dick who knows how to push my buttons.

The good news is that I don’t think that a depressed person can explore this kind of introspection with any success at all. I don’t want to say I’m cured. But I am in a good enough place right now to avoid rumination and instead let my inner world be a source of interest and fascination. Thanks meditation and therapy!