Dressed for a Formal Event that Nobody Else was Attending

For over two years, a few mornings a week, I would get up in the dark, put on my swimsuit, a big lined swim coat, and a thick beanie. I made a cup of coffee, got into my car, and drove to a quiet bay.

I made a date with a good friend and joined a small community of mostly women who dip together in the San Francisco Bay.

I was hooked after my first dip. Every time I dipped with others. We talked in the water. We watched the sun come up together. We held hands when the cold, the weather, or what was going on in our lives had been a lot. We celebrated birthdays, divorces, new jobs, book launches, and adventures. We shared resources.

Nowhere else have I felt such a sense of accomplishment by 7:15 in the morning. Every morning was different. The sense of awe of watching the sun rise in an orange sky or the Golden Gate Bridge popping through the fog. Some mornings we would see a heron, a seal (or several), a family of geese, or the Coast Guard going out on a rescue. It was a hard and beautiful way to begin the day. And I got to do it in a shared community.

There’s something about being immersed in the water up to our necks in awe-inspiring beauty with others. We were all equally cold, and equally alive. I haven’t found anywhere else that filled me up in a way like this did.

I took some time off last fall to have knee replacement surgery, and then my father passed away. I stopped dipping when the water was relatively warm and started back again in winter, when the water was much colder. I was excited to come back. I had missed it.

One morning, shortly after I started dipping again, I experienced a sharp pain in my wrist. I could not move my arm. It was scary, and I worried that I would get stuck. I got myself out of the water and checked for a bite or a sting. I didn’t see anything. My friend poured warm water over it, and the pain faded. I decided it was another weird one-off experience “in the water”.

I kept dipping it a couple of times a week. Every once in a while, the pain would return in my left wrist. I couldn’t figure out a pattern, but I noticed it was happening more often.

Then, driving home one day, my fingers started tingling. I looked down, and they had gone white. I recognized the signs of Raynaud’s disease, where your fingers and/or toes turn white and then sometimes blue. It is a circulatory condition where the small blood vessels narrow too much. Raynaud’s can have an autoimmune cause or be due to cold or stress. I called my doctor and asked for antibody testing. The results came back negative. With that ruled out, I felt relieved and kept dipping.

I did what a lot of us do when we love something and don’t want to lose it. I tried harder. I adapted around the symptoms instead of listening to them. First I dug out my old scuba gloves. When that was not enough, I bought heated ski glove liners to warm up my hands on the way home. When that was not enough, I went to the local surf store and got help buying a used children’s wetsuit. I cut the arms off and wore the sleeves under my gloves. I started showing up to the water looking like I was dressed for a formal event that nobody else was attending. It worked, sort of, for a while. I was proud of my ability to hack the system.

Then I started noticing that I was unusually tired on days I dipped. I was having more and more trouble warming up. That led to more coffee. Then on a quiet Friday morning, I actually fell asleep before lunch.

I kept going into the water. One morning, I could only get to my waist and no farther. My body said no more.

While I feel a sense of loss, my body had been sending me signals that I had been ignoring. Those signals didn’t go away; they started getting louder. This is not my first health issue, and I know the cost of this rodeo if I keep asking a body to shout out what it needs. This summer, I decided to listen to my body. I put my early morning dipping on pause.

I keep thinking about how I should have acted sooner. I spent months trying to find ways to keep going instead of asking what my body needed and listening to the answer. I am trying to strengthen my muscles around listening in and trusting what my body is telling me.

What about you? Is there a place where you are currently wearing the wetsuit sleeves and packing your heated glove liners? What’s the thing you’ve engineered a workaround for, instead of stopping to ask what it’s actually telling you?