#HighFivesAthlete Alina Garbuzov shares her most recent path to recovery goal..Diving in!

“This weekend I swallowed some pool water. Both through my nose and my mouth. It was for a good cause, though. I spent something like six hours in the pool over Saturday and Sunday, learning how to dive. I was never a water baby. I am one of the people who gets a strong and irrational need to head to the surface when water goes up my nose. So, diving scared me. But not recently. It’s official: in January I’m going to Hawaii to finish the dive certification I started this weekend. I’ll be diving for a week.”

“But first I have to learn how to take my mask off underwater. And how to take the oxygen-drip of the regulator out of my mouth. And how to breathe slowly and deeply through all this while wearing a weight belt and no flippers. I don’t know why I feel claustrophobic under water. But I had to have some conversations with myself about this today. The day ended with practicing my favorite skill: finding the point of buoyancy. Once there is the right amount of air in your bladder-equipped diving backpack (called the BCD), you float in the water column. An inhale slowly lifts you a little higher. Emptying your lungs brings you back down. That was really fun.”

“I used to be incredibly hesitant to learn things that did not come easily to me. Why should I, since I had so many other things to chose from? My strength, now, is the new-found ability to struggle. I was not a natural and easy student. My instructor and I tried again and again. But this did not fill me with a burning sense of shame. This did not turn me away from diving. I have learned how to take all the difficulty in and to keep moving forward. And I’m proud of myself for this. This is a new kind of ability… it makes my horizons seem a bit more limitless. I am certainly less constrained than the old self, which knew only how to move through the smoothest channels.”