The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [99]
There are reasons to come out. My son, my family. Love. Animals, the ocean.
Too, it strikes me that in America we don’t much have a “sacred” place or role for the isolate artist any longer. Everything has been sucked up into marketing and celebrity and the almighty commodity - so if you are a writer, you are meant to sell something. If it sells, it has worth. But in my heart of hearts I just want to sneak individual books into the pockets of sad people. Or stuff pews with them! Because writing gave me a place to go and be and grow when I wanted to give up. And I’d like to jam my foot in the doorway so that others might find this place too. And yes, that is still true. Maybe more than ever.
Swimming offered you water, respite from home, your life there. During your senior year of high school at the State Championships your relay team scored the best time in the nation. “Then Jimmy Carter took all little girl dreams of swimmer glory away from our bodies with a boycott-Randy’s famous pool full of winners included- anyway. There was no world left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.” Later you accepted a scholarship in Texas and once there left both the college and competitive swimming. Did the U.S. boycott of the Olympics have anything to do with this or affect your future relationship with the sport?
My sister and I have always had a little bit of a hard time distinguishing reality from fiction. We both escaped our childhood terrors in books and music and art, and those creative worlds were more real to us than the one that trapped inside my father’s house.
Something could be “true” one minute, say, Christmas morning with presents and a tree, and rendered “untrue” within the first twenty minutes of opening presents if my father’s rage got loose. Or you could get an “A” at school, and bring it home only to be shamed: “What, does that make you special?”
Once my sister crawled underneath her high school art lab table and refused to come home. Ever. I’d go to school or to swim team-my two great escapes - and be unable to tell reality from nonreality. At the pool, in the safety of water, alongside the beautiful bodies of almost women, was that reality? At school where teachers gave me books to read that forever took me to other worlds, wasn’t that real? Or was reality back at home, where even breathing meant shame?
Reality lost its hold on me by the time I was 10.
Very good swimmers spend their youth trying to swim to an endpoint like the Olympics. A tangible goal you are living for. Training for. Year after year. Something to give you self worth. Something to make you feel special. And if you were fast enough, maybe you could even swim all the way to a new life.
So when the Olympic Boycott happened, it proved what I already suspected was true. Reality could disappear in an instant - a man could take it from you forever.
I think the beginning of my deepest acts of self destruction often have something in common - a question that comes up in different forms over the course of a life-when the thing you are living for dies right in front of you, why go on? It’s a sadness that enters us all, just differently I suppose. But that Olympic boycott was one of my earliest moments of consciousness with regard to the mutability of reality in the world. Something called “politics” could steal your personal life. Just like something called “father” could. And I’d already grown up through the Nixon years and survived early Catholic upbringing … so even children understood to be cynical.
On the hopeful side though, swimming, books, art, and love -those worlds are still most real to me. In the best sense of that puny word.
You purposely divulge few details relating to your drug use and you don’t declare whether or not you have a “problem” with either drugs or alcohol, although you mention going to rehab and jail both more than once. What was your thinking about this part of your narrative?
Over the years I have become very disappointed in the idea that there