A place called home

A shot from my 10k postal swim last year

For a very long portion of my life, I spent time finding solace in the water, chasing a little black line…up the pool…and down the pool.  It was peaceful, and gave me a sense of calm that I haven’t experienced from any other activity.

The occasional case of runner’s high has cropped up.  I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything similar while on a bike ride.  But the focus, the calm, the passage of time, when the rhythm of my stroke or the beating of my legs was the only real noise I could hear was always that the thing that separated me from myself.

There have been times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because everything else has gone to crap, and times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because it was a fun activity and the camaraderie around the sport was a win all in itself.  I cherish those times.  Some of the best friends I’ve had and still have are swimmers, whether they’re still in the water or not.  They’re still swimmers.

My life has fallen apart, a handful of times, perhaps just two or three over the course of my 45 years, on a level that it is at now.  This is the worst of the 2 or 3, my mind having betrayed me to the point where I can’t work, where I know that even though I have these momentary points in the day that I can put a few thoughts together, the idea of going an entire workday is preposterous.

I withdrew from school one semester when this happened, what would have been the semester I originally would have graduated.  I overloaded myself with all of the hours I needed to finish my degree during a summer session.  I would go on to return to school in the fall to limp my way to the finish line, taking a nearly perfect GPA, and knocking that down almost a tenth of a point, but still enough to graduate with honors. Truth be told, I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony and was announced “with high honors,” but when my diploma arrived, it was the next echelon down.

I started working.  I broke up with the guy I moved to LA with, and I joined the West Hollywood masters team, to try to find a place in life.  I was lost. I was working what would be the job that I came back to, and am employed doing now, and I met some very nice people and I still see some of them these days—sometimes at a swim meet, sometimes at a training camp.  I was very guarded back then, and wouldn’t really let people become my close friends.

Me swimming with the Grunions one weekend earlier this year
(Thanks, Kenny Brisbin for taking this photo)

So I moved. I told myself I didn’t like the city of West Hollywood—it was too cruisy, not my scene and I couldn’t deal with having to look like I was “on” to go to the grocery store.  After I moved, I continued to try find solace in the masters team I swam with as I went from one apartment to the next on the west side of LA for the next couple of years. I didn’t. I didn’t let myself. I told myself I didn’t like SCAQ because it was so spread out, too much like Corporate America meets masters swimming. But the truth is that I didn’t get to know anyone. I don’t even think any of them knew I was gay. So I moved, and moved again, eventually landing in Long Beach, and eventually finding the Long Beach Grunions, who were just starting up at the time, and who I found friends with and where I found my happy place in the pool.

The Grunions have ebbed and flowed for me. Some wonder why a place like Long Beach needs a gay swim team because being gay in Long Beach is just accepted.  To be frank, a former collegiate swimmer who happens to be gay shows up in Long Beach, and there aren’t enough fast swimmers to keep him or her interested in it, and they wind up swimming somewhere else, maybe with the team I swim with during the week now, maybe not. They push me to levels that I don’t get with the Grunions, but the Grunions have given me so much over the years, and my weekday team is never going to travel to a meet like IGLA New York during the 50th anniversary of Gay Pride and the Stonewall Riots, so there’ s a feeling on the Grunions that I just don’t get from the other team.

But now, after I’ve fallen apart, I don’t know what to do, really, to put myself back together.  Sometimes I need to stare at that black line for meters upon meters upon meters, and sometimes I just need to hear the rhythm of my stroke. My brain needs to sort itself back out. It needs to find its way back home.