The Fable of Putting Your Mask On
As long as you're breathing, everything is probably going to be fine
We’ve all heard the saying, by now. It’s been said on flights for decades and solidified itself as a popular self-care aphorism.
“Put on your oxygen mask before helping others”.
It is a good call. Turns out, to keep living, you need to keep breathing. If your plane depressurizes or experiences some other emergency that causes a loss of oxygen in the cabin, the first thing you need to make sure you’re doing is breathing. If you aren’t breathing, you can’t help anyone else, let alone continue to make good, conscious choices about your safety.
If you’ve managed to never hear this phrase before, you’re now up to speed and I can carry on with the article.
But for most of you, you’re probably surprised that I trod this relatively tired ground. I’m not staying here.
Nope, I’m taking you 18m underwater.
Last week, I wrote about my excitement (and some nerves) surrounding my impending trip to the Canary Islands to study for my PADI Open Water Diver Certification. I’m proud to share that I was successful! Many hours spent under the sea and chafing burns later… I am certified! I’m now allowed to dive (with a buddy, always with a buddy) down to 18m with scuba gear. So is my husband! We did it, kids!
The whole experience was, bluntly, fucking awesome. I’d love to be more eloquent about this but these lessons were so delightful that my American self needs to gush a bit. I loved it. What a cool thing we did.
We saw a butterfly ray, swam past sunken anchors, joked (underwater) that a coconut found under the water was a bra, and even had some close encounters with cuttlefish and the largest starfish I’ve ever seen (I think. Water can distort things, but I’ll go with it).
That said, I did not love every single minute of it.
You see when you’re getting your scuba certification, you don’t simply scoot around underwater for a few hours. Oh no. Don’t get me wrong— there is plenty of swimming and exploring. But you gotta practice skills.
And by skills, I mean that you must practice (and perform, to the instructor’s satisfaction) every single thing that could go extraordinarily wrong so that if one of those things does ever happen, you don’t lose your shit.
Remember what I said earlier about breathing? That’s one of the two critical rules of diving. They are to:
Always dive with a buddy (for what I feel are obvious safety reasons)
Never stop breathing (because your lungs will collapse and you will die)
Aside from the threat of lung collapse, which is real and bad and should be avoided, and generally keeping you alive (like in the airplane mask example)… consistent breathing will also keep you from panicking.
I feel that should be the third official rule of diving.
Don’t panic.
How do you keep from panicking? You… practice your skills. You simulate (or cause) everything that could go wrong in the safest, most secure environment possible so that if anything happens at another time, you realise you aren’t going to die and you know what to do.
I will admit, freely, that I am a person who is more prone to panic than I would like when faced with an attack or perceived harmful event. My preferred reactions are not fight or flight, but rather the much less useful, more subtle, fawn and freeze. I’ve become a less triggered person in general over the years thanks to thousands of hours spent meditating, journalling, doing yoga, going on walks, and all of those other things everyone recommends for your mental health that, much to my chagrin, has helped my mental health. I’m less reactive than I ever have been, which makes me feel very proud.
Alas, I am a human, and sometimes, I freeze or fawn.
Despite immense personal growth, my first instinct is still to either freeze and go dark, ignoring a problem with hopes that it will magically go away or resolve itself, or worse, to fawn, twisting myself into knots (and sometimes abandoning myself or even my own supposed values) to make sure that others are happy (or at least not mad at me). This is a form of people-pleasing, which I know isn’t good. At best, it’s disingenuous because I’m acting in ways that aren’t true to who I am, but rather who I’m using my limited powers of deduction to assume others would want me to be. At worst, it’s straight-up unintentionally manipulative.
It also doesn’t work. It might, briefly, but fawning straight-up has an expiration date. It isn’t sustainable for the fawner or the fawnee. No matter how well-intentioned, fawning to people will eventually wreck your relationship with them. If you are a person who does this, like I am, I cannot recommend working on developing alternative coping strategies enough.
At my core, I simply don’t like it when people are mad at me. Most people don’t like that, to be fair.
I don’t like most kinds of discomfort. Again, most people don’t. We spend much of our lives trying to avoid discomfort, sometimes at all costs.
Discomfort is not, however, going to kill us. We might feel less-than-great, but we aren’t under real threat.
In diving, I mentioned that some things are life and death. You need to have air. Some of the first skills we practised were centred around what to do if you no longer have access to your own air. We dropped our regulators (the things you breathe from) and had to find them and put them back in our mouths. We took off our full buoyancy control device vests, complete with our air tanks, both on the surface and underwater, and put them back on. Our instructor turned off our air tank and had us share air through our backup regulators.
These were solid things to practise because they can happen— your kit can become stuck. Your regulator can drop, break, or get lost. You can run out of air (this really should only happen if you’re not paying attention or your tank somehow gets punctured but it can happen).
I was, to my great delight, perfectly calm and fine whilst practising all of those skills. I kept breathing, I trusted my instructor and my buddy/husband. It was fine. I had no issues whatsoever. I was so proud of myself.
And then, we had to take off our masks.
Wearing a mask isn’t even a requirement for diving. It’s highly advised and recommended because it’s pretty damn hard to see, especially in salt water, without one. Plus the water hurts your eyes after a little while. So I thought, naively, that this would be the easy set of skills. Flood the mask with water and then clear it. Take the mask off, and after a minute, put it back on.
Reader, I had trouble with this.
You see, it turns out that I breathe primarily through my nose, and the only thing keeping me from breathing through my nose while I was underwater was my mask.
So I, confidently, cockily, took off my mask, inhaled… and freaking panicked, because I’d essentially snorted in seawater.
This was as uncomfortable as that sounds.
I started gagging. It was not fun. I asked to go to the surface. My instructor, bless him, took me right up. After a few moments of sputtering and coughing, I realised something… I had not stopped breathing. Yep, getting sea water in my lungs and throat sucked, but even as we ascended and I was freaking out… I had been able to breathe. There had not been a single moment of that experience where I had been unsafe or threatened. I’d only been uncomfortable.
We descended and tried again to remove my mask for a minute. I failed, again. I asked to go up to the surface again.
This time, my instructor looked at me and gently shook his head. He took both my hands and planted them on the sand of the ocean floor. We made eye contact. He encouraged me to breathe. I coughed. There was water in my nose, mouth, lungs, throat.
But again, I was breathing. I was not under any threat. It merely sucked a little. That was all.
I was calm enough, during this attempt, to start to figure out that the issue was my aforementioned nose breathing. Too many years of singing, acting, public speaking, and martial arts had made me instinctively aspirate through my schnoz. There was no way I was going to be able to do this without physically pinching my nose. I decided to abandon that skill for the day, and once we got out of the water, I asked our instructor if I was allowed to pinch my nose. He answered, “Yes, of course” with a smile, as if I’d just asked the silliest question. Why wouldn’t I be allowed to pinch my nose?
Two days later, I took my mask off, grabbed my nose, kept that mask off for a minute, and put it back on without a single problem.
Though again, I’d never actually had a problem. It was merely a discomfort. A tiny amount of salt water was not going to kill me. It didn’t feel very nice, but everything was, in fact, fine.
Turns out, most things are usually fine. As long as we’re breathing, we’re good. We can still make choices. We can help ourselves and help others.
The things we’re scared of… are they threats? Are they going to kill us? Or are they simply making us uncomfortable?
Writing and creating are inherently uncomfortable for me. I’ve talked about this before, but I second guess whether I should be allowed to enjoy making things and committing my thoughts to paper or pixel. Sharing my writing means opening myself up to people being angry with me. It’s happened more than once. When I look at pressing “publish” on one of these posts, it feels a bit like water flowing into my nose. For the first few minutes, I frantically refresh the page, searching for any last edits I need to do, any places I might have English-ed wrong that would make me seem an unprofessional impostor, unworthy of my achievements. Or worse, anywhere I didn’t provide enough context and might be taken the wrong way. That terrifies me.
But it won’t kill me. If you read this and think I’m a hack… you’re more than welcome to your opinion. Many days, I share it. If you read this and think I’m a horrible person… again, many days, I feel the same way. You’re in excellent company.
No matter what you think of my writing, it’s not going to kill me. I’m not under threat. The worst-case scenario would be waking up to thousands of angry messages, and much like practising without a mask or a regulator, I’ve already survived that one a bunch of times.
It was uncomfortable, but I kept breathing.
You deserve to share your work without fear. The worst-case scenario will never be as bad as anything you concoct in your brain. And hey, if it is… then you’re ready for the next one.
Keep breathing, and everything will be fine. I promise x
