I recently started taking swimming lessons.
(I love them. Jennifer, my swim instructor is dope.) And if you come to the pool in my apartment building on any random afternoon, chances are, you’ll hear me yelling (out loud) to myself “Butt up! Keep your butt up!”
Keeping your butt up is one of the hardest parts about swimming!
This might be a silly thing to explain, because probably a bunch of you reading this do swim and know what’s up. But the thing is, if you keep your head up, it kind of lifts your torso up, and then your body is at an angle, which makes it harder for your legs to paddle efficiently, and then you’re just a mess.
But if you keep your chin down with your face in the water (popping your mouth out to the side when you need to, to breathe, of course), then your butt stays up and you’re a better swimmer.
And I don’t know if this makes any sense, but one of the things it made me think about is how when I was going through some pretty serious depression/PTSD in the last couple of years, I feel like sometimes people would have this attitude of “just keep your chin up.” And I don’t totally even understand my own metaphor here, but there is something about it that I feel like is a nice idea of like, “Well, if you can’t keep your chin up, don’t, put your butt up instead and you’ll swim better.”