“Do you miss it?”
After 5 months of retirement, I’m still in the phase where people continue to ask me if I “miss” diving. Unfortunately, this is often a complicated question posing unassumingly as a simple “yes/no” question. The way I see it, there are a few different possible ways to interpret a question like this:
Do I miss the act of diving itself, as in performing dives and learning technique?
Do I miss the lifestyle I was living as an athlete?
or
Do I miss my identity as a diver?
I usually choose the interpretation I want to answer based on my mood; this means that my answer often changes.
Do I miss learning the sport? I can answer (with some amount of relief) that, yes, I miss the act of diving. It’s a relatively simple “yes.” I miss the adrenaline rush of trying a new dive, the feeling of finally making progress on a correction, the satisfying sound of palms hitting the water after a good dive, the bouncing drills on the end of the board, the pleasure of knowing exactly where my body is at any given point in the air. I miss the smell of chlorine and the rough texture of the board and filling out my weight sheet in the morning after a session. I miss doing dryland flips and surveying the pool from the 10 meter platform and speaking in the mix of numbers and letters that is “diving language.”
Do I miss the lifestyle, outside of the practices themselves? I’ve thought about this a lot, and honestly, I don’t miss it. I was ready for the next phase of my life. I was tired of planning my entire schedule around my practice schedule and always feeling exhausted and sore. I was tired of chlorine-damaged hair and mandatory team meetings and early wakeups and pushing through overuse injuries. I was literally tired of just hearing the word “diving” and tired of looking at the diving accounts I follow on Instagram. The simplest word for all of this, of course, is “burnout.”
However, the knowledge that this lifestyle burned me out doesn’t completely make up for the fact that it’s also the only life I’ve ever known. Over the past 5 months without diving, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve felt guilty for moving on. I’ve gotten mad at myself for things like sleeping in, not working out at the same intensity that I did as an elite athlete, losing muscle tone, or even drinking a protein shake without having worked out before. I’m still wrestling with self-judgment and my own biased expectations of what it means to work hard; but that’s a conversation for a different time.
Do I miss my identity as a diver? I guess that depends on my definition of “identity.” This interpretation, of course, is the hardest one to answer. I think it deserves a post of its own.