I came up gasping. One moment, I was fifty feet above the water, both hands wrapped tightly around the handle. The next, I was falling.
I hadn't meant to let go.
My hands had slipped almost as soon as my feet left the platform, and before I could understand what was happening, the water swallowed me whole. Then, just as quickly, it gave me back. I broke through the surface, shocked by how fast it had all happened. For a moment, I doggie paddled in place. I was okay.
I had been swimming for as long as I could remember. Lessons from the time I was barely old enough to float. Years of competitive swimming. Water was familiar. I knew what to do.
I turned toward the edge of the pool and began to swim. Except something was wrong. My arms pulled through the water, but my body barely moved. I kicked harder. Still, something tugged at me. My oversized T-shirt had filled with water. It billowed around me, heavy and swollen, dragging against every stroke. I pulled harder.
From somewhere above me, the lifeguard yelled, "Get out of the pool!"
"I'm trying!"
I was embarrassed now. I could swim. I was a good swimmer. But the edge of the pool seemed impossibly far away. So I kept pulling. Dragging the shirt. Dragging myself. Until finally my hand found the wall.
I don't remember taking the shirt off. I imagine I wrung it out, pulled the wet fabric away from my skin, and went on with the day. After all, I knew why I was wearing it. We all did.
And once it dried, I wore it proudly. A badge of honor in a sea of skin.
It's almost too easy to see the metaphor now: A girl falls into the water. She knows how to swim. She knows how to save herself. And still, she struggles beneath the weight of something she was told to wear for someone else's sake. But I didn't see it then.
I loved that shirt. Or at least, I loved what wearing it said about me.
I was modest. I was honoring God. I cared about the hearts and minds of my brothers in Christ. Their purity mattered to me, and somewhere along the way, I had learned that meant taking responsibility for what happened inside of them.
Isn't that what we do with the messages we're given when we're young? We find ways to make sense of them. Some of us hear something that doesn't make sense and push against it. Some of us learn to conform because conformity keeps us safe. And some of us take the thing we've been handed and turn it into something we can be proud of. I think I did a little of all three. But with this, I chose pride.
If modesty was good, I would be modest. If my body could cause someone to stumble, I would make damn sure I wasn't the reason they fell.
So I learned to carry the responsibility myself. I pulled the shirt over my head. And when it became heavy, I kept swimming.
It has taken me years to understand that the weight was never mine to carry. I cannot control what another person thinks when they look at me. I cannot control what they feel. I cannot control where their eyes linger or where they allow their minds to go.
I can do those things for myself.
But I cannot do that work for someone else.
And perhaps that's what troubles me most when I look back now. Not simply that we girls were taught to cover ourselves, but what that teaching required us to believe about one another. I had to learn to see my body through someone else's imagined desire before I had even learned to see it as my own.
And the boys around me were reduced, too. They became eyes that might wander. Minds that might lust. Bodies perpetually on the verge of losing control.
We weren't allowed the complexity of being human beings encountering other human beings. We became temptation and tempted. Stumbling blocks and stumblers. Bodies to hide and bodies to protect from them.
I don't want that responsibility anymore. I don't think it was ever mine.
Sometimes I think about that girl in the pool, fighting her way toward the wall in a shirt full of water.
I don't want to teach her how to swim harder. I want to tell her she can take the damn shirt off.
It took me a long time to figure that out. And damn, it feels good to swim without it.