When people learn that I can’t swim, the first thing they ask is how my parents could have condemned me to endure such an shameful existence. But my deficiency is not their fault. Every summer until sixth grade, over my strident objections, they would enroll me in the age-appropriate weeklong lesson at the community center pool.

I hated them. (The swim lessons, not my parents.) I hated them because I was awful: all flailing limbs and frequent stops to “clean out my goggles,” during which I would take as many furtive steps forward as I could without the teacher noticing. I loathed putting my face in the water. I dreaded holding my breath. I became so fearful of the familiar chemical burn of chlorine invading my nose that I started wearing a garage-sale scuba mask in lieu of standard goggles. By the time I started middle school and aged out of lessons, I had decided that I would be fine never entering water in which my feet couldn’t touch the bottom again.

From there, whatever meager skills I had absorbed atrophied fast. Besides, I didn’t have much need for swimming, in the strictest sense of the word. A laborious dog-paddle between dock and wherever my cannonball landed was enough for summer camp. At the beach, I would take idyllic walks in the surf, allowing the water to lap at my ankles before retreating to higher, drier sand. At pools, I would hang out in the shallow end, or sit on the edge and dangle my feet, explaining that I just didn’t feel like getting wet that day. When I went tubing with friends last year, I just asked the driver to take care not to flip me. Life jacket and everything, I was terrified of being alone in the water, even for a moment.

Occasional attempts to test the limits of my abilities did not go well. On a Caribbean spring break trip in law school, I signed up for a daylong snorkeling trip, because I was on vacation, and coral is pretty, and YOLO, back when it was sort of acceptable to say YOLO. Besides, I reasoned, anyone can stay afloat with those giant fins! (Two important facts to remember about me are that I am an optimist, and also a moron.) But when one slipped off my foot and plummeted to the depths of the sea, I quickly learned that I could not move in any direction but down.

Floundering but determined to keep my voice calm, I shouted for help in Spanish, as if speaking English would have been the embarrassing part about being a 26-year-old man who required an open-ocean rescue after entering the water of his own free will and accord. Two guides were on either side of me in seconds, flipping me on my back and towing me to safety like a crippled ocean liner. “How drunk are you?” they asked, mid-swim, in English. I assured them I was not, and then realized that future retellings of this story might be kinder to me if I lied.

Back on the boat, I nodded and smiled when others asked if I was alright. I apologized to the guides for losing the flipper. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting quietly, wrapped in a life jacket, watching everyone else’s little neon-colored snorkels flit across the turquoise surface.

About one in five Americans can’t swim, according to the Red Cross, for reasons that range from inadequate facility access to a lack of affordable instruction to bad childhood experience to an instinctive, not-totally-irrational fear of being immersed in a substance that makes it impossible for mammals to breathe. Urban residents are less likely to have learned as children then their pool-having, lake-enjoying suburban and rural counterparts, and the same is true of those who come from less-wealthy families. “Half the kids in New York City don’t even get to see a pool,” one swim instructor told me.

What the Red Cross refers to as “cultural” factors matter, too. One-third of African-Americans say they cannot swim, compared to only 16 percent of whites, a disparity attributable to some combination of this country’s tradition of racial discrimination in public accommodations; the pernicious stereotypes that arose out of it; and the resulting dearth of pools in historically black neighborhoods and educational institutions that persists today. About ten Americans drown every day, and across all age groups, African-Americans are much likelier than whites to be among them.

Whatever its roots, unfamiliarity breeds contempt, or at least disinterest: Of adults who can’t swim, 28 percent of city-dwellers report that they don’t enjoy the water, and the same overall percentage of respondents said they just aren’t interested in learning. Others don’t want to admit that they cannot do something as adults that they “should” have learned as children. “People are nervous about being in a public space, in front of lifeguards, and maybe with little kids watching,” says Carol Imber, a coach at SwimGuru in Seattle. “I get one-on-one requests all the time from adults who say they want to do this—they just don’t want anyone else in the room.”

When insecurities linger for long enough, they can calcify into a sort of latent dread that feels insurmountable. One summer, my old roommate and his wife vowed to rectify this wrong, taking me to their apartment complex’s pool and showing me how to float. They taught me to open up my chest and stick out my stomach, and they gently held me up until I felt comfortable trying it on my own. I listened to what they said, and I really tried. My head still disappeared beneath the water as soon as their hands did from beneath my back.

Their enthusiasm, bless them, was unabated by my disappointing performance. But what they couldn’t know, and what I couldn’t really explain in the moment, is that failure had become the grim expectation for me, because as is true about any skill, every separate episode of ineptitude witnessed by other people reinforces the notion that for whatever reason, this is something everyone but you can do. My willingness to try surrendered to the all-powerful human urge to avoid humiliation. I laughed, and they laughed, too, probably because they could tell that I felt like an idiot, and then they kept swimming while I sat on a deck chair and read.

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I have never been proud of not being able to swim. It’s just a dumb piece of trivia about me, which I would disclose only when necessary to become a participant in the inevitable jokes, instead of the butt of them. But a few months ago, I decided that at this point in my life, the real thing couldn’t be any more onerous than the various coping mechanisms I had developed to avoid it. I bought a pair of goggles, signed up for adult lessons, and prepared to confront my oldest, wettest nemesis.

There are five other students in my class, which takes place at a city pool just up the street. Our instructor is a cheerful, earnest woman named Elena who asks each of us about our goals for the five-week session. She only laughs a little when I respond, “Learn...to?”

She begins instruction with the basics of kicking: We are to kick from the hips, not from the knees (I always thought you were supposed to kick from the knees); we are to blow a slow, steady stream of bubbles out of our noses to prevent geysers of water from gushing up into them (GAHHHH); and we are to compress our abdominal walls to maintain our buoyancy (three feet from the edge, I sink like a fucking anvil).

As I cough up both lungs and wish I had opted for the scuba mask again, Elena glides to my side with an infuriating effortlessness and informs me that this is nothing to worry about, and that she sees it from time to time in students who are “especially dense,” a phrase I had previously encountered only in the parent-teacher conference context. She encourages me to take deeper breaths, and to exhale more slowly. She also tells me to stop leaping off the wall to begin each kick sequence, which I am doing, of course, because reliance on a boost is the only way I’ll be able to get anywhere.

While I am preoccupied with trying not to die, in the section next to me, a dozen bored fourth-graders are taking turns zipping up and down their lanes, obediently switching to different strokes as their coach calls out instructions.

The hardest part, just as I remembered from all those years ago, is trusting myself to breathe. We learn the proper form by holding dumbbell-shaped “kick sticks” out in front of us like horizontal Statues of Liberty, with hips stacked parallel to the floor, one eye underneath the water, and one peeking out of it. I cannot understand how I am supposed to inhale when half my face—and, thus, half my mouth—is submerged, and the rate at which the tiny square tiles on the wall scroll by does not seem remotely commensurate with my kicking efforts. Elena keeps reminding me to tuck my ear to my shoulder, a sequence that results in me swallowing gallons of pool water.

It is a lot to process. And after learning (?) both of these skills in the span of two 30-minute classes, Elena instructs us to try combining them with some arm action, inhaling every three strokes on alternating sides and using the kick stick as a set of waterborne training wheels.

Here is my first review of swimming, or this rudimentary form of it, at least: I have never been more aware of the independent existence of all four of my limbs, none of which seem interested in what the others are doing. My legs churn in frantic spurts, and my arms chop down on the water like I’m trying to push my torso up off of it. When I think about kicking, I forget to move my arms. When I think about my arms, I forget about kicking, and my legs start to sink and I start to panic, a chain reaction that ends with my feet settling on the ground beneath me and my arms, determined to keep the sinking ship afloat, still splashing valiantly at the surface.

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While I am preoccupied with trying not to die, in the section next to me, a dozen bored fourth-graders are taking turns zipping up and down their lanes, obediently switching to different strokes as their coach calls out instructions. They appear to be putting as much effort into this task as they would into, say, skipping. During one of my stand-and-splutter breaks, I listen to three of them, in the passionate semi-yell in which boys that age inexplicably insist on speaking, regale one another with tales of their most recent accomplishments in Fortnite.

Midway through the third lesson, after dozens of halting trips across the pool’s shallow end—and, before that, three decades of unbridled terror whenever my feet would cast about for solid ground and find only a darker, colder layer of water underneath—I make a go of it without the kick stick.

The good news is that, to my genuine astonishment, I can swim. The bad news is that I am panic-sprinting, convinced that if I move at anything less than top speed, I will lose all momentum and slip into the deep end’s rich, soothing shade of blue. What I’m doing is more akin to “forward-motion-adjacent survival thrash” than “a competent crawl stroke.” Every time I take a breath, my head comes flying out of the water like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and I manage a sweet, fleeting gasp before plunging my face back in the water and staring at the bottom for three more ungainly strokes.

With great effort, I manage to complete five laps by the end of the day. I have to pause after traversing each length of the pool, so true swimheads might quibble with my use of the term. My pace remains laughably unsustainable, and I leave a gratuitous volume of white water in my wake, like a panicked trout getting dragged towards its future as an entrée drenched in garlic butter. It won’t be until later that I learn to try and glide, reaching towards the middle point between my shoulders instead of whirling each arm against its respective side. I feel like I spent an hour on the treadmill after what was, in fact, a grand total of six minutes of physical activity.

I do it, though. I am a little better during the next class, and then the one after that. And while an Escape from Alcatraz entry is not in my immediate future, I do plan on getting into the various bodies of water that I will encounter this summer. For the first time in my adult life, I might even derive some semblance of pleasure from the experience.

Everything seems to come so naturally when we are limber-brained kids, existing in a constant state of absorbing complex, foreign concepts without even thinking about the process. Bona fide opportunities to try truly new things become rarer as an adult. Eventually, we all accept implicit limitations on the scope of what we will do with our time on this earth: Either passive exposure has made us familiar enough with the constituent elements to pick something up with relative ease (think: grilling a hamburger), or, because we lack the time or energy or interest or talent or any combination thereof, we rule it out altogether (think: becoming an astronaut).

Swimming is not like traveling to the moon. But even so, learning to perform a discrete, measurable task as an adult that you could not do a half-hour earlier elicits a sense of euphoria, the kind that reminds you that childhood is not the only stage of life in which [Kevin Garnett voice] anything is possible, even if that thing is just swimming 25 meters uninterrupted. Meanwhile, as I exited the pool, the waiting parents enveloped their dripping, wrinkled kids in gigantic beach towels, urging them to change so that they could hurry home and rededicate their wondrously elastic minds to the development of some other invaluable skill that will no doubt serve them well for the rest of their lives.

That, or play more Fortnite.

Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read more