One happened when I was a teenager. It’s no secret that I can’t swim. I’ve talked about that a few times here, but when I was 14, I went to a water park on a school field trip.
My classmates and I had been at the park for hours and I had stayed in my safe zone at the shallow end of a wave pool pretty much all day. At some point, I let my two of my friends talk me into getting onto a two person tube so the three of us could go hang out at the deep end. *Face palm.*
The plan was that one friend would pull us out to the deep end as myself and the third person sat on the tube. I expressed my trepidation because of the fact that I couldn’t swim, and they assured me that we’d be safe on this tube, and if I fell in, they’d save me.
Everything in my soul told me don’t do it, but my friends convinced me to ignore my gut and go anyway. After all, everybody was at the deep end. So I jumped on the tube and off we went. Two of us in the tube, one person swimming in the water pulling the tube.
All of a sudden the siren that tells you the waves are coming sounded. The friend who was pulling the tube, was now swimming against the force of these huge waves and the two of us on the tube were swaying back and forth from the motion of the water.
All of a sudden the friend pulling the tube, couldn’t pull any more. He had gotten a cramp in his legs. In his panic, he tried to jump onto the tube, but he flipped it over and into the water we both went.
At that point in my life, I had never even been in a pool. Of course, I knew not to breathe, but I couldn’t hold my breath. My eyes were open, I was inhaling water and panicking. One of my friends was literally underneath me trying to push me back up to get air, but we were both drowning at that point.
After what seemed like being under water forever, a stranger grabbed me and swam me out of the water, He had saved my life. As I looked around at the lifeguards, who hadn’t even budged, I realized that the deep end of the pool was so crowded that they hadn’t even noticed me nearly drowning.
I was extremely grateful to that guy and I never even spoke a word of what happened to my mom until I was an adult. I survived nearly drowning, but she would have definitely killed me for sure!
I learned a few lessons that day.
The first one is obvious. When you can’t swim, don’t get in a damn body of water without the proper safety mechanisms — like a life vest.
Another lesson I learned though is that what you don’t know can kill you. Faking it til you make it can be a really bad idea in certain situations. I talk about taking action to accomplish your goals, even in imperfect circumstances, quite a bit here but I think you should generally know something about what you are doing. Unlike I did that day.
If there’s something you’re not that well versed in, you can learn it as you go, but being honest and avoiding taking on things that you flat out can’t do will always save you heartache and pain in the long run.
That was also one of the first real lessons I got in learning to trust my gut and listen to my intuition. The fact that I had debated about going for so long before finally giving in really bothered me for a while. I knew the feeling that I had just before I climbed into that tube, and it was one of uneasiness, like I knew something bad was going to happen.
I still had some major fuck ups in regards to listening to my gut after that, but because that experience is one I’ll never forget, it still comes up in my mind today when I’m about to do something that counters what my gut is telling me to do.
Finally, one of the biggest lessons I learned that day was that sometimes you can’t do what everybody else is doing and that’s okay. My mom used to always ask us, “If so and so told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?” Hell, everybody’s mom used to say that, and some of you reading this say it to your kids now.
Sometimes being in the crowded end of the pool is the worst place to be. It’s where you can easily go unnoticed by the people you need to see you the most. It’s totally fine to dominate shallow end where it’s the less crowded and less risky.
Now, I know I mentioned another near death experience at the top of this article, but I’ll save that story for another day.
Have you ever learned a really valuable lesson from a really negative experience? Find me on Instagram or Facebook and tell me about it.