anniversaries and exorcisms

on two years out of bed

Two years ago, I dove into the water after six years bedbound. One month later, I posted two videos of that moment on tiktok, which together accumulated 30 million views.

I’ve thought a lot about the framing of this essay. What to emphasise, what to leave behind. There are two distinct versions of the story I could tell: the one where it felt like the molecules of my selfhood broke down and re-formed in one single moment, and the one where a month later I had a thorough interrogation of my sense of self after having that moment go wildly viral.

At first, I wrote a version weaving the two stories together. After all, they occurred in parallel, and I thought there was something interesting to be said about fusing the pure with the immense, the personal with the public, and ultimately how warped my sense of self became for a while in that experience.

In the end, I felt pretty unhappy with my attempt at that piece, it felt clunky, uneven and forced. So instead, I thought I would tell a different story: the one I wish I could have heard two years ago.

Hey Lil,

I know you may not be ready to hear this, but you are, actually, getting better. That change that’s been pulsing through your life for the last year or so isn’t a figment of your imagination and fuck, it’s going to get a lot better, I promise. I know it’s been really, really awful. I know you’ve been so scared. I know it’s been a long time since life felt good, and I know most of the time you don’t want to be here. But thank you, you keep staying and I’m here because of it. I love you for that, and I would have loved you if it had needed to be different too.

I think about you every day. If I had one simple wish in this world it’s that I could be transported back to share these words with you. They are more imperfect than I’d like, but I know you needed to hear them so desperately, and I think it is quite frankly fucked that you never got to.

You won’t believe what you are going to do until you are doing it. I know you’ve thought about it for years, in that desperate way someone thinks about air when they are underwater. You have been frightened. You’ve been angry. You have grieved.
When the possibility of going back to the ocean first becomes real, you’ll be too scared to feel it directly. Hope is a dangerous substance. Everything has a cost, and joy now feels like a dark entity.

But slowly, you’ll allow yourself to imagine, you’ll let yourself plan every step. Mum and Dad will film the journey down and the video will be two minutes long. A two-minute trip to the moon. It will take months of private hope, but you will get there.

At this time last year, I found myself subconsciously counting down to the anniversary of my first swim, feeling the echo long before it arrived and the reverberation long after it was over. This year, I’ve been startled by the quiet. I went searching through my photos to find the date and add it to my calendar to make sure it didn’t actually pass me by.

This year, after work, Dad and I changed into our swimmers and drove down to Little Manly with Mum. It was a beautiful day, just like it was two years ago. The water was refreshing (cold), just like it was two years ago, and our smiles were nearly as big as they were then too. There was a warmth in that moment that can't be created artificially.

I have watched the videos of my first swim enough times that my actual memory and the evidence of it have met somewhere in the middle, the way they do with old childhood photographs. I remember the cold water and how it didn’t feel too cold. I remember the absurdity of my body entering the water after so many years of being stuck. The ocean didn’t receive me with ceremony, but the sun did warm my skin on that autumn day like it had come out just for me.

I remember laughing. Trying to stay upright and not get too carried away in the exertion of euphoria.

This year, I reflect that most anniversaries are happy or sad, but this one is both. Yes, it marks two years of life, of rebuilding and emerging. But it also marks the moment of escape, escape from torture. It feels odd to require myself to celebrate the moment I was released from such grotesque suffering. Most anniversaries are shared. Mine is purely solitary. No one traversed what I did with me. I feel so angry that I endured it. That I need to be the sole keeper of those memories when all I wish to do is forget.

I wish I could tell you that after this moment, everything will arrange itself in perfect harmony, the barriers to life will fall like dominos, and the pain will retreat entirely. It won’t be like that. You’ll still feel so angry sometimes, bowled over by the scale of what happened to you, and irate that there is no one to hold accountable. There will be days when the grief refuses to leave you alone. And moments when the past crushes in on itself and suddenly, you’re back in that room and in that body.

You won’t become untouched by what happened. I’m sorry. But you will become more. You will carry yourself forward, holding every version of you who thinks she is too ruined to be carried anywhere.

There have been many times over the past two years when I’ve wondered if I need an exorcism. At times, the pain of the past I’ve lived feels so irrefutably corrosive that I consider whether expelling its possession over me is the only way. It’s a gruesome thought, freedom as abandonment. Submitting myself to further brutality was never going to be the solution I wanted it to be.

The more time passes, the more I know I would never want to rid myself of her, the sickest version of me. She is the fire in my belly and the angel at my back.

At Little Manly this year, after we swam, I looked around at the beach. There were a few other people there, who I assume thought we were a bit wacky, filming an afternoon swim, whooping and group-hugging.

They are in their own worlds. And the larger world around us all is doing what it does best: continuing.

For so long, that was the most unbearable thought to me. The world continued while I was trapped frozen. Now it is sometimes what comforts me most. The world does continue, as do I. Seasons change, my body changes, I change. The beach is always there and each time I return I’m not quite the same person who left.

Lil, I write this to assure you: you get there. You will stand at the edge of the water, and you won’t have to keep imagining your life from a bed you cannot leave. You’ll be cold and happy and alive. You’ll come home.

This anniversary, like the last, has not offered perfect resolution or closure. Instead, I like to think of it as offering contact. A point where time folds and allows two versions of me to stand side by side.

forever and ever