Breathing Underwater

What I learned about writing and life during a scuba trip

I spent Inauguration Day underwater. Both literally and figuratively. After a brutal autumn with my father-in-law bouncing back and forth between the ER and rehab and my husband being away most of Sept and October to care for him, (sadly, Dave passed on Jan 4th), the decline and loss of our beloved Benny, aka the Writing Assistant and then the election, H and I needed this break desperately. We’d insured it up the wazoo, unsure if we’d be able to make it, but I like to think my father-in-law’s final gift to us was allowing it to happen.

We were both beyond depleted. I’ve been battling depression again, and H was exhausted, emotionally and physically. We know we have a huge project ahead of us, cleaning out the home where Hank’s parents lived for fifty years, which contains hoarder-like volumes of STUFF.

But for one week, we tried to forget all that. I turned off all the news alerts on my phone and watch. And because we were diving, we locked our phones in the safe for at least half the day. Even when I took it out, I only did a quick scan to see if there were any time-sensitive emails to answer. Spent almost no time on social media (sorry if I missed something important in your life!) and lots of time reading and writing in my journal.

In my natural Piscean element

As someone who had bronchitis constantly as a kid (including a partially collapsed lung) and is asthmatic as an adult, my natural breathing tends to be shallow, a learned response to avoiding coughing fits that wracked my entire body. Because it’s so ingrained, I don’t often realize how shallowly I’m breathing unless I focus on my breath, something I don’t usually remember to do.

But you can’t dive without focusing on your breath, especially when you’re a small person who dives with a 63cf tank instead of an 80cf one. I don’t want to be the person who cuts the dive short because I’m sucking down air.

Scuba helps me with being aware of my breath, learning how to control it, and how I can calm myself by focusing on it. Now I have to figure out how to do more of that on land!

And here’s another thing: I had SO MANY CREATIVE IDEAS underwater. I had to balance that with checking on my dive buddy and my gauges, but every day I came to the surface with new things I wanted to write about. I had to make sure to remember them till I got off the boat and could write them down, not always easy at my age :)

In my journal I’ve started playing with poetry —and I’m someone who won the WCSU MFA Bad Poetry contest after reading one of my high school poems that I can’t even recite with a straight face. But I’m being brave about it. Thinking of it as play is giving a freedom I haven’t felt in decades. After 20+ years of writing “the same but different” to ensure a book deal that fits my “brand,” I felt tired and discouraged. I’d forgotten why I loved writing in the first place. (If you love the concept of playing with writing, sign up for my fellow Sarah’s substack, you won’t regret it!)

I was saying to H, a skeptic about everything even remotely “woo woo”, that it was interesting how I seem to get so many water-related insights - both while scuba diving and in the shower. And the guy who thinks horoscopes are total crap said, “Probably because you’re a Pisces,” which funnily enough I’d been thinking but didn’t want to say!

The problem with vacations is that you have to figure out how to retain the things you learned when you’re back to facing the bombardment of bad news, the pull of social media, the quotidian chores and lengthy to-do lists that never seem to get any shorter no matter how many items you cross off.

And that’s before I even get to the onslaught of news in the last week, the cruel, the idiotic, the ridiculous. (These links are just a mere fraction.)

I’m working on another post about social media quandaries, particularly as a writer when publishers increasingly consider your platform as well as your work. But for now, I’d love to hear how you are planning to balance staying informed, fighting the good fight and staying sane.

xo Sarah