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Faced to the Sun - I Found Myself Again

A woman in a purple bikini floating on her back in a vivid blue swimming pool, arms outstretched, eyes closed and face tilted up towards the sun. She has short white hair and colourful beaded bracelets on her wrists. Her body is fully relaxed, suspended in the clear water.
Floating in a pool in Tenerife © theaardvark

I nearly didn't get in.

Paul was there. The steps were manageable, with his help. The water was that shade of blue that you only seem to get in holiday sunshine. And I sat at the edge and felt every reason not to. My anxiety and Ellyllons were already muttering. FND doesn't take a holiday just because you do.

But I got in.

And then I floated.

Five minutes? Ten? More? I genuinely don't know. I lost count in the best possible way. Face up to the sun, just... still. Completely still. The kind of stillness I used to find in meditation, my happy place, where my mind would finally go quiet. I haven't felt that in so long I'd half-forgotten it existed. But there it was, waiting for me in the water.

The spasms came, of course they did, FND loves to make an entrance. But they couldn't touch what was happening underneath them. They couldn't take away the feeling, the epiphany, really, that somewhere inside me, I am still there. Buried under the Ellyllons, waiting to surface occasionally, when the conditions are just right. Still here. Still me.

I haven't been in a swimming pool in over four years.

I didn't realise until today how much I'd been grieving that. Not just the swimming. All of it. My life before. My practice. The yoga, the meditation, the feeling of being grounded in my own body. That quiet mind. That sense of being me rather than just managing me.

I cried a bit afterwards. Happy tears, mind. The sort that sneak up on you and make you look daft.

There's nothing quite like water taking your weight, is there? The ache backs off. That tension you forget you're carrying, because it's just there, always, melts away. For a few minutes I felt almost normal. Like my body was actually mine again, not just this thing I have to manage and apologise for all the time.

A few months ago, just going away on holiday felt like a gamble. Terrifying, if I'm being honest. Travelling as a full-time wheelchair user can be a faff. The what-ifs pile up quick: what if the transfer's a nightmare, what if I can't get onto the plane, what if the room's not actually accessible, what if I flare up, what if I ruin the trip, what if holidays are just something Past Me did, and I have to accept that now?

And the hows. How do I find an accessible resort? How do I arrange assistance at the airports? How do a foggy-brained, anxiety-ridden neurological disaster zone and a perpetually distracted ADHD-headed eejit with an autistic fear of getting the logistics wrong navigate the alien process of booking a holiday without the kind of marital bickering that can come with it? That's me and #TechGuyPaul, in case you were struggling to work that out.

What actually happened is that we were introduced to Caitlin at Travel with Cait ✈️. And she handled all of that. She talked through what we wanted, dealt with our changing requirements as we worked out what we actually needed, and found us a package that worked within our budget and our very specific accessibility requirements. She did the thinking so we didn't have to. (Travel with Cait✈️ is also on Facebook.)

The journey out with  Jet2 was brilliant too. Their assisted travel service was excellent, and a significant part of why the holiday didn't break me before it had even started. The airport experience was less stressful than I remember any of our previous holidays being, even before the FND. Which was superb, because FND-me doesn't handle stress well. Of course, part of that could be not travelling with kids in tow anymore. (We fly home in a few days. I'll report back. But so far: full marks.)

Tenerife itself, or at least this part of it, is shaping up to be a genuinely good destination for wheelchair users. More on that as the week unfolds.

But today. Today was about the pool.

A woman in a purple bikini top and white bikini bottoms reclines on a white in-water sun lounger at the pool's edge, eyes closed, face turned up to the sun. She has a shaved head and is wearing red bone conduction headphones. In one hand she holds a cold drink, sunglasses resting beside her. The pool's pale turquoise tiles are visible beneath the water around her.\

I've been writing this blog for a while now, and honestly, a lot of it's been hard to write. I'm aware it's probably hard to read too. Life with FND, ME/CFS and fibro is hard. No point pretending otherwise, and I never have. But sometimes, when you're busy documenting the difficult, you forget that things do move, even if it's just for the briefest, most joyful, precious moments.

Today I found a piece of myself I thought was gone forever. She was floating in a swimming pool in Tenerife in a purple bikini, eyes closed, face turned to the sun, absolutely refusing to sink.

I think she's been waiting for me.

With love, Sha 💜 aka The Wheely Happy Aardvark

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