March 14th – Doubts

I had a complete break-down today. I feel really bad for Javier who had to deal with my sobbing hysteria right after we returned home from our dive trip. "Oh no! I'm just not made up for this! Why do I keep pushing myself if every single thing about diving takes me forever to master??? Yes, I'm good now, but what effort has this cost me, how much time!" – I kept waling on an on. Javier's mere presence is always soothing though, underwater and at the surface, and fortunately for everybody after a little while I finally calmed down. So now I can actually describe what pushed me off the rocker.

This morning I connected a new long hose to my regulator, for the octopus used for the purposes of comfortable air-sharing in order to extend a dive's bottom time. I wasn't really sure how to efficiently "store" it on my BCD though, so I just went the cave-style way and wrapped it around my neck. Apparently, I hadn't done it skillfully enough, because when the necessity of sharing air presented itself, I realized that the octopus is absolutely impossible to get to without me taking my primary out of my mouth and making a thousand other ridiculous moves. Which I started doing – no big deal. Well, in diving there's no such thing as "no big deal". Every tiny problem has a winning chance of becoming a huge issue. And so it snowballed on me. The client was kind of impatient or maybe he was just trying to be helpful, and he grabbed the octopus from my hand before I was able to completely detangle the whole thing. That put me on the wrong side of him. The crazy current made it difficult to quickly switch sides. In the process the guy must have pressed the inflator button on his BCD by accident and since I was in the process of moving sides, I wasn't close enough to react immediately by hitting the deflator button. The guy was much bigger than I am. He was pulling me up. I tried to stay down, grab his leg and at the same time communicate to him the proper actions. He was completely unresponsive. We kept going up. My computer was beeping annoyingly, announcing that I'm going up too fast. Needless to say, I hate this sound: I'm very paranoid about the decompression sickness, air embolism and other lung overexpansion injuries, and usually follow my very conservative computer without any further questioning (for example, I have never even gone into the decompression mode once in my life). I thought to myself, "Screw him, why should I go up to the surface with him? He is a certified diver, let him do whatever the hell he wants, but I'm not bubbling up here!" and I started to swim down, trying to pull him with me. Well, he was too heavy for me, and all I managed to do was yank the octopus out of his mouth and stay down, while the guy shot up to the surface. Luckily for my consciousness, he had anticipated the separation and immediately stuck his own regulator into his mouth. So nothing bad really happened. But this incident completely shook me.

Of course, in the end of the day, I did everything right – my safety is the priority. But… If I hadn't entangled the octopus to begin with, or if I hadn't let him grab it before I was ready to share air, or if I had paid enough attention to his inflator, or if I had been quick enough to reach for his deflator button, or – well, I don't even know, probably a thousand more "or" solutions can be added here, the bottom line is "if I hadn't" something, the whole situation could have been easily avoided. I have the only frustrating thing in my life right now, and it's the fact that I find myself absolutely incapable of reconciling with the idea that "I'm good, but I'm not that good". I have never been "not that good" in anything I do. I immediately become "the best" (well, relatively speaking, let's be at least somewhat modest). It's such an alien sensation for me to not be able to quickly "get" everything, to succeed at the very first attempt. Theoretically, I know everything I could have and probably should have done in this situation, but I was just physically unable to apply this knowledge to practice. Why? Why, why, why my body refuses to be quick, damn it!? Argh!!! I'm so mad at my parents today for not pushing me to do sports when I was a child. How could they do this to me? Now every time I need to learn a new physical skill, it looks like I have to first suffer through the humiliation of sucking at it tremendously before the mastery finally comes. This is just not cool. But I cannot live without diving anymore, so I know that I'll just keep sucking until I don't suck. I guess, it's necessary to expand your comfort zone from time to time…