I have always found swimming easy and it springs from the fact I was in the water paddling around before my legs had worked out how to bear my weight let alone take meaningful steps.
I preferred the water, I felt at home there so when I started secondary school and found I was in the school team and winning everything it didn't seem such a big thing.
Streaks ahead of anyone in my cohort I was invited to join the local swimming club and try out; excited I wanted to join and be around people like me, water babies (well more like young people bordering on merman and women).
It was a tough routine but I thrived; an hour or two swim training before school then two hours after school, with an extra session on Monday from 7pm until 9pm. Saturdays were either training days or swimming meets where the team went off competing.
I was 11 years old by this time, held many records via inter-schools championships and dearly wanted to be part of the squad.
To me it was the pinnacle of success to travel around GB and compete for the county and perhaps the region.
One day it came, the lilac costume. I learned many years afterwards that the ongoing spat between my mother and the trainer had not ingraciated me with him and he treated me as no more than a "make weight ", that extra female needed to make numbers, to fill in for those precious swimmers who were under the weather or being raced too hard.
Although talented I wasn't a golden girl in his eyes, not even bronze but useful because I loved swimming the longer distances no one else in the squad wanted to do.
My wins were never acknowledged. In many ways I was the outsider who never shined but, it appears, shined as a potential light for the GB squad.....I never realised.
However, I got a piece of swimwear from our sponsor, Adidas.
Everyone had blue, I had lilac but I didnt care, I still had one. My mother sewed it to fit and I wore it every day, twice a day from that moment.
But I was 11 years old and puberty hadn't been reached yet, that didnt happen for another year and that's when my problems began because the beloved lilac costume started to feel tight and I was told by a very disgruntled trainer that I was getting fat.
The other girls had new costumes and I was given one but he overestimated my 'fatness' and it was really loose; falling to pieces and getting a little tight, I stuck to the lilac one.
As hard as I tried, the body of a pubescent girl failed to remain the same shape she'd been at 11 years of age and the further from that time I went, the more I wanted to crawl into a tent and hide. In my eyes, trying so hard to get the trainer to say, 'well done', was creating a monster which would haunt me all my adult life.
Pleasure was leaving my world of water to be replaced with one of fear. I swam out of terror not desire and when the scout came to look at the "top" swimmers he chose me not them.
I was terrified.
I wanted to hide in a corner.
If the scout hadn't approached my mother directly she would never had known. I really didnt understand as it wasn't really explained why.
No one said, " you swim so well we think you have a shot at the Olympics and can do it even though you'll be the youngest in your class".
My mother only said, "do you want to go?" presuming, I suppose, someone else had explained it all to me. They hadn't and terrified of more people ridiculing me for my size somewhere else and not being able to run to hide in my bedroom, I said no ( a decision I still regret and would have taken of it had been explained properly).
From that day on my swimming became unpleasant. The trainer went out of his way to criticise and even when I set records he failed to acknowledge them but kept the silverware.
In the end I took a decision, my lilac costume and I needed to part, I had to stop swimming and feeling like a failure.
I hated my body as I blamed it for robbing me of the success I should have had and from then on any failures in my life I took out on my "fatness".
All because of a proud moment when at 11 years of age I was given a lilac swimsuit and how that pride of belonging was slowly stripped away by non-acknowledgement of my successes (and losses) and the bullying to be thin once puberty began.
Shame that, but a fact of life and now I see it for what it is, I maybe able to enjoy the autumn of my life back in the water where I belong.