It Takes a Team

I put off watching NYAD for longer than I’m proud of for a few reasons. The first being I knew nothing about it, other than the fact that the title looked like an acronym for some bizarre phrase I’d never heard of and that it involved swimming, a sport I’ve never participated in. I learned the doggy paddle as a kid, and that’s about the extent of my swimming education. When my aunt told me to watch it, I still hesitated. I’m blessed with more than one God-send in my amazing aunts, and I’ve always taken their recommendations to heart, even if I don’t act on them right away. This particular aunt spoke of the incredible inspiration she found in the film, the relatable struggle of the protagonist, and the beautiful story it presented. And if I’d been a bit wiser at the time, I would have watched it immediately. For this aunt, one of the bravest, most inspirational persons I have in my life, to tell me that she found a story that moved her and incited a desire to push herself in areas of her life that contained some fear and doubt, I might have taken that suggestion to watch it for myself a bit more seriously had I considered it in that light. But I wrote it off because the visual that Netflix provides is of an older woman (Jodie Foster) wearing huge spectacles, and the preview it offers when you hover over that visual is of two women, both older and apparently past their glory days, debating a line of poetry in a kitchen followed by one of those women reading from the book as she brushes her teeth. I was not inspired. Not enough to click play or even watch the rest of the trailer. Part of me is glad I put it off until when I did, because when I watched it, I really needed the message it gave me. I not only connected whole-heartedly with the story of both women, despite differences in many areas; I found the motivation and insight I felt lacking in my life at this particular time in their adventure. 

NYAD tells the true story of marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, who revisits her attempt to swim from Cuba to Key West 30 years after her initial failed attempt at age 28. This swim of 110 miles across open water was a feat then considered impossible by any human due to the incredible distance and the hundreds of other unpredictable and uncontrollable factors and risks. Young Nyad viewed it as the crowning achievement of her swimming career, but she only made it 76 miles before her team decided to abort the mission. She seemed resigned to the fact that this particular achievement was outside her reach. NYAD includes footage of her past swims and interviews in which she insists that she can do the impossible, but the final footage of her failed attempt cuts to a shot of Diana - nearly 60 now - played by Annette Bening, holding her breath and submerged in bathwater before she surfaces, angrily gasping at the air. 

Diana is not only haunted by her perceived failure; she is drowning in it. The woman we meet in the opening scenes of NYAD is a devoted friend and a driven athlete, but she is also egocentric, stuck in the past, discontent in the present, and motivated to defeat her feelings of failure and resentment through sheer self-will and effort. She returns to swimming not out of love for the sport, but out of a desire to escape her mental unease. Her perceived failure to achieve greatness translates into a failure to earn the acceptance of the world whose respect and love will immortalize her; her true failure here is the inability to recognize the love that surrounds her already. When she determines to try for the impossible swim again, she does so with the same mentality that has prevented her from greatness all along. 

Diana interprets her discontentedness as “everything” being wrong with her life. In response to the prompting of her friend Bonnie (Foster’s character), she asks, “Where is the excellence?” Her query reflects her belief that the glory she once experienced as an elite swimmer will solve her current problems. She has a good life, but she cannot view it as enough because she lacks the ability to connect, to be vulnerable and to find peace in simplicity. She seeks greatness when she asks Where is the excellence?, and that one question really spoke to me. I don’t really consider myself excellent most of the time. I have a crippling fear of failure that creeps up especially when I’m nearing certain goals I set for myself, and I always feel that excellence is a state of being above the plane on which I live my small life. But maybe I - and many of us - confuse excellence with perfection. To be excellent means to rise above, to rise high - from the Latin e/ex: out off/from and cellere: to rise. The -nt suffix of the word makes it a present participle, meaning that the word refers to the process of rising high rather than the accomplished feat. So to experience excellence means we merely set ourselves on the path to rising, to improving ourselves, and to achieving a higher state of being. Diana views excellence as achieving this seemingly insurmountable, untouched physical goal that she once set out for; it’s the process of achieving it rather than the goal itself. Excellence is a modus vivendi, a way of being. For Diana, an incredibly gifted athlete, rising higher in body, mind and spirit definitely involves tapping into her superior skill as a swimmer. At this point in her journey, however, she fails to see that there is room for excellence in other areas of her life as well. For all of us, excellence involves working with all our individual strengths and capacities for something higher. It means rising through pain, fear and pride to be someone closer to the person we were born to be. 

For Diana, her birthright appears fated to lie in her swimming career. Throughout the film, Bonnie catches her telling the story of her surname in social gatherings, recalling again and again the time when her father directed her five-year old mind to the encyclopedia to read the definition of nyad - the Greek for water nymph. These scenes are comical because they present as a trope in their friendship history: Bonnie continuously catching Diana in moments of self-worship bordering on obsessive. Diana tells the story of her name because she feels the need to assure herself that she is the swimmer, the water nymph capable of achieving immortality and acceptance via her physical achievements. Bonnie, on the other hand, tries to nudge her focus to the people around her, to the real connections she has available to her in the present. 

Diana’s discontent with her present intensifies in the scene when she reads Bonnie a line from a dog-eared page of a poetry collection by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Diana takes this as a challenge, plunging body and mind back into the pool to gauge whether she still has it in her to revisit the feat that continues to haunt her all these decades after her failed attempt. Her return to swimming stems from this call to adventure as well as from her own sense of pride. Pride was the factor that initially held her torn between the decision to leave swimming and to endure all the discomfort of trying again; pride leads her to relive her glory days again and again through the repeated story of her name; and pride finally pushes her back into the training and preparation for her continued efforts to complete the swim. 

Sometimes we need a little pride in our lives to push us in the right direction, to convince us that we have what it takes to go after the greatness of which we are capable. Pride can also keep us from this same greatness though if not balanced with humility. Diana absolutely deserves to feel pride in her ability as a swimmer, but it keeps her from truly valuing the other factors that are crucial to her success. She has enough self worth to believe in herself, but her pride doesn’t let her admit that she needs a team to reach her full potential. She needs the support and assurance that this kind of connection offers. This realization becomes part of her growing process as she begins the daunting challenge of completing this harrowing swim. 

In recovery, we need a good amount of pride in ourselves because self esteem is necessary for believing that we are worthy of recovery. We need to believe that we are not only resilient and courageous, but that we are enough, worthy of love, and deserving of a happy life. A gaping lack of self esteem fed the thinking we had in addiction that we could settle for a life imprisoned to a substance and disconnected from the people we loved most. We need pride in ourselves to understand our worth and our ability, but we need enough humility to recognize that we can’t progress in recovery without the help of a power greater than ourselves. Pride without humility will isolate us in an egocentric mentality. We need God, and we need our communities. When we try to do it all on our own, we fail. 

Though Diana presents as overly confident and completely independent, she knows that her feat requires a crew. She recruits her best friend, Bonnie, as her coach, and together they gather the people whose unique skills make them essential to the swim. Diana initially seems to doubt the expertise of these strangers, but she weighs her need for them as greater than her misgivings. Her relationship with John Bartlett, the man whom Bonnie finds to be their navigator, is central to the film. From their first encounter, Diana behaves as though she has nothing to learn from Bartlett and would be fine without him. Despite the wealth of knowledge that he demonstrates about the water she has chosen as her course, Diana seems unimpressed and aloof. In this initial interaction, we can see that Bartlett is a man whose lived experience has made him an expert in understanding the mutability of this particular stretch of ocean. Diana seems to operate with the mindset that no one on her team can possibly know more about her swim than she does, and she treats him as if he needs to prove himself worthy of her trust. Though she says, “he’ll do,” to Bonnie, she doesn’t stay to have the lunch Bonnie prepared for the occasion. Diana’s actions reflect her lack of interest in cultivating real connections with her team members; she knows she needs them to do a job for her, but she doesn’t have much concern for them as people who mean something to her life and are connected to her in a way more meaningful than their basic functions for her mission. 

Asking for help and trusting in our communities for the guidance and love we need can be terrifying because it requires the honesty and vulnerability to admit helplessness and need. It’s definitely simpler to view the people in our lives - our family, friends, teammates, coworkers, fellow commuters, servers, etc. - as significant only by the merit of their contributions to our story. It’s simpler because it’s self-centered. We only need to consider how we feel and what we want. But we miss so much without the complexity and expansivity that empathy opens for us. Living a self-centered life is only simple because of how closed in our perception is; when we let our walls down and choose connection, we become part of something greater than ourselves: something infinitely more complicated and at times confusing, but we are part of and no longer apart.

Fear keeps us apart, and it plays a huge role in Diana’s story. As Diana prepares for the swim, she admits her greatest fear: sea creatures. Despite this fear, she determines to make the swim without a cage, insisting that she will not have an asterisk next to her greatest achievement. On board the boat that accompanies her, she has team members whose sole job is to maintain the activity of an electronic  shield designed to deter sharks. The shield, however, does not work for jellyfish, and Diana suffers from horrific encounters with box jellyfish on her third and fourth attempts. These stings - the fastest acting and most venomous of all jellyfish stings - cause immediate tissue damage comparable to a burn. Diana’s screams in the film give us a sense of the severe agony she suffers on top of the exhaustion already accrued from the hours spent swimming for her goal. Such pain might deter anyone from getting back in the water, especially with the knowledge that another sting would be fatal since the body doesn’t build immunity from the poison. But Diana chooses to adapt; she finds a way to continue in spite of the physical pain, the setbacks, and the fear involved in returning to the same waters with even higher stakes. She believes with every fiber of her being that this swim is her calling, so even as she lies in a hospital bed recuperating from a severe jellyfish attack, she has already begun looking for the tools she needs to continue on this path, even if it involves more discomfort and acceptance of more help than she anticipated needing. By the time Diana sets out on her fifth and final swim, she has learned to put on and take off a full body suit for the periods in which she would be swimming in the dark, and she also wears a silicone mask over her head that causes painful abrasions on her neck. Diana accepts these conditions as the necessary pains she has to endure to progress on her mission. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pain involved in working for something greater. For me, it’s running and recovery. There are days I seriously question my ability to continue because the discomfort - physical, mental or both - feels like too much. My thinking starts counting how far I’ve come and comparing it to how far I need to go, and I feel like I’m just one person and I might break. I had one of these crises on a recent training run - the longest I’ve done so far in a while -, after which I watched NYAD for the first time. Diana’s resilience through and acceptance of her pain suggest the necessity of discomfort in progressing upward in our lives. In real life, Diana said of this reality, “I am interested in the unknown, and the only path to the unknown is through breaking barriers, an often painful process.” When we break past the limits of our mental or physical comfort zone, we have this kind of experience, and the pain involved can discourage us because the place we’re heading - the unknown - cannot guarantee an end to that pain. Diana pushes forward through the discomfort because she trusts in the inevitable end of pain with the triumph she envisions waiting for her on the beach of Key West. Before every swim attempt as she stands ready to dive into the ocean in Cuba, Diana shouts, “courage” in Spanish. Courage involves finding a way in spite of the fear and pain, not without them. Diana has her fears - big ones - but doesn’t let them deter her efforts to achieve the feat she believes she is uniquely capable of achieving. 

The sharks are perhaps her greatest fear. I personally consider Diana a little crazy for making this swim in shark infested waters, but I suppose you have to be a little crazy for the pursuit of excellence. Diana has to put her full trust in the shark shield and the people responsible for maintaining it in order to remain focused on swimming rather than the collection of “some of the deadliest marine animals on Earth,” as she tells a spellbound audience of children. She is willing to dive into an ocean filled with her greatest fears because that same ocean functions as the pathway to her greatness. That’s how it has to be for all of us. We have to be able to step into our shadows -  the fears that cripple us and keep us in harmful cycles because they are safe - in order to access the greatness that comes when we move through our fears, trusting in a power greater than ourselves to carry us through the worst of it.

We need to be able to acknowledge and examine our greatest fears. Fear of failure, of rejection, of being hurt, of not being enough. All those fears that keep us from actualizing the greatness we hold like unused potential energy within us. These fears can keep us from going after the desires most precious to us, because the very pursuit of them involves swimming through our fear. We have to face the fear of failure if we want to run a marathon, apply for a job, or start a business. We risk fear of rejection when we open our hearts to a relationship. The very definition of being vulnerable involves the risk of being hurt, and vulnerability is necessary for connection. I have a whole storm of fears in my shadow involving my running and recovery, and they seem to intensify all at once when I’m not expecting it. I’m afraid of not being strong enough, of letting others and myself down, and of being a fraud, among other things. I have this irrational idea that expressing those feelings to anyone will expose me as unqualified for and unworthy of the things I want most in life. That’s my monster mind, my shadow, talking when those thoughts arrive, and I don’t like sharing that part of me. The self that believes in me has an ongoing war with my fear-filled shadow over which of them is right, and they each have their winning days. I’m still trying to find a way - Diana’s mantra throughout this time - as I see her doing in this film. She just keeps going onward, even surrounded and sometimes attacked by the things she fears, and she learns to accept the help of others when they become too much to handle on her own. 

In her fifth swim, the film depicts a scene in which the crew spots a shark fin approaching and realizes the shield has gone down. Two men immediately grab their poles and dive into the water to protect Diana and revive the shield. When Bonnie calls her closer to the boat, Diana quickly realizes the horror of her situation, but there is absolutely nothing she can do. This scene is so powerful in showing Diana’s vulnerability and sense of gratitude: two expressions she has learned to embrace as part of her journey over the course of the film. As Diana treads water, she knows that her life depends on either the ability of these men to defend her or on the whim of the fast-approaching shark. They succeed in time to divert the shark by restoring the shield, but it’s a close call. Before continuing on in her swim, Diana treads water and takes a minute to thank everyone for her safety. She thanks everyone, because she realizes that everyone is crucial to her success in this mission. 

Perhaps Diana’s greatest fear, the one that she never mentions but that continuously appears in flashbacks to her girlhood - is the fear of letting herself be vulnerable in her relationships. From these flashbacks, we learn that her swim coach, Jack Nelson, began sexually abusing her while she was a teenager on his team. Someone she loved and trusted completely took advantage of that love and hurt her in a way that disrupted her entire view of herself and the world. Diana holds her cards close to her heart; she doesn’t date or attend therapy, both of which require intimacy deeper than exchanging pleasantries and light conversation; she doesn’t even reveal her dream of revisiting the Cuba swim to her closest friend until she has already spent hours in the pool and signed up for a trial swim. There’s one scene when Bonnie asks her friend, “How’s your mind?” Bonnie asks this as she rubs ointment on Diana’s neck, an intimate scene between the two women, and she tries to open up a conversation on the dark places that her friend’s mind might go in the long and lonely hours of swimming, but Diana shuts it down. She insists that she’s fine and takes over the task of tending to her neck herself. Diana struggles to present her shadow - that space filled with fear and insecurity  - to even her closest friend because it is the most vulnerable part of her. She insists that she’s fine as a way of closing the door that her friend has tried to open so that she can see the complexity of the struggles with which Diana wars on a daily basis. 

That’s something I struggle with too. I see so many men and women in recovery who are able to admit openly and honestly that they’re in the midst of a hard time. There’s such bravery and humility in being able to present the things we don’t love about ourselves to others without knowing how they will be received. We all struggle, and we don’t always have to be fine. I’m learning that saying I’m fine to hide the truth isn’t an honest way of living and impedes my relationships with others. Admitting to our struggle doesn’t equate to failure; it accentuates our humanity and provides grounds for the honesty and vulnerability necessary for connection. The Third Step prayer includes the line, “Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love and Thy Way of life.” This prayer doesn’t ask for the disappearance of all suffering, but rather for the things we perceive as difficulties to become situations in which we triumph, even if that victory doesn’t look the way we would like it to. We don’t like pain or difficulty, but they’re part of life. We have to believe they’re part of a plan greater than we can orchestrate if we’re going to find the way forward, and we can’t do that alone.

After the fourth swim, both Bonnie and Bartlett have expressed their exhaustion at Diana’s selfishness on her swims. Bent on completing her mission, she pushed them to set out despite Bartlett’s misgivings about the weather, overriding his role as navigator to get her way. She overlooks the strain that her repeated attempts put on Bonnie and the rest of the team, taking their sacrifice to put their lives on hold for this adventure - that doesn’t pay and isn’t easy - again and again for her cause. Bonnie says she’s done, and Bartlett names personal matters that he needs to attend to instead of setting out to Cuba again. In the time before her fifth swim and in the absence of the team she has come to need and even love, Diana sees her wrong. She expresses a humble, heartfelt apology to Bartlett for all her actions and doesn’t push him to rethink his choice to remain home. She reaches out to Bonnie for her friendship rather than her coaching when the news that her former abuser, Coach Nelson, has passed away at an old age. The vulnerability and humility she expresses in these occasions reveal the change in her since the onset of these attempts. By the time she sets out from Cuba a fifth time, she does so with a team - including both Bonnie and Bartlett - who feels appreciated and seen as part of her effort rather than backstage crew to a one-woman show. In an endeavor that is just as much a mental effort as it is a physical feat, Diana needs the connection and direction that her team provides. On the final day of the swim, with Key West in sight ahead of them, Diana begins swimming in the wrong direction, wasting strokes and losing her form and momentum. Bonnie, seeing the disconnect that her exhaustion has created, jumps into the water with her to wake her up and guide her back on track. I don’t know if this actually happened in real life, but it’s a beautiful representation of how connection works in our recovery. Even though Diana has a team of about 40 people assisting in her swim, she is still the only one submerged in the ocean, laboring away at her strokes. No one on the team is allowed to touch her, and she cannot come onto the boat for a break; both these would result in disqualification. That’s a lonely experience, and she needs the constant assurance of her coach - Bonnie - and the others who cheer her on to know that she isn’t actually alone in her efforts. When she doesn’t respond to Bonnie calling her back to the right direction, Bonnie sees that she has disconnected from that support. Diana is in her own world, and exhaustion is taking over. When Bonnie enters the water, she does what no one else has yet done on these swims. She puts herself in the same physical circumstances as her friend and eliminates the disconnection the ocean normally puts between them. Bonnie can’t remove Diana’s pain or complete the swim for her, but she does the best thing she knows how to: she sits (or treads water) with her. She gives her the physical proximity to another human that Diana lacks on her swims, and in doing so she shows her friend that she is not alone in her efforts. This gesture and her insistent request for just one more stroke from Diana pull her friend out of her haze and back into the determined mindset she needs to complete her swim. Diana says, “I love you” to her friend and coach before continuing onto the final part of her swim.

Sometimes that’s all we need. Not someone to save us from the pain or do our work for us, but someone to take the time and effort to be there with us in the pain and in those dark moments when the fears just seem too big and too loud to surpass. We can show up for the people in our lives, let them know that we’re thinking of them or there for them, or just make ourselves available. When we go to meetings in the program, we’re going for ourselves, but we’re also going to be part of the larger communal connection that helps everyone there. We live in an age when technology helps us reach out to even those whom we can’t see physically on a daily basis, and sending a text or making a call goes a long way to help too in its own way. There’s something so reassuring and meaningful about giving our physical time though, showing the ones we love that they are worth the effort and sometimes the fear it takes to step into the ocean of fear and pain that they’re living in. 

In real life, Diana Nyad paused in her swim to tread water when she was two miles from the Florida shore to thank her team for their role in her journey. This is a stark difference from a scene in the film, in which Diana makes a toast to everyone for believing in her, a worthy cause to sacrifice for. By the fifth swim, she understands that she is not the only person of significance in the swim. Rather than seeing her team as characters in her story, people lucky to have the chance to help her, she views them as the community she needs and is blessed to have with her on her journey from shore to shore. She stumbles into the arms of Bonnie when she has finally waded through the final steps of her completed endeavor, and she says to the cheering audience, “You may think that swimming is a solitary sport, but it takes a team.” 

We can earn whatever milestones we want in sobriety or running on our own, but it takes a community to reach those goals in a meaningful way. Cultivating connection with our communities is a huge part of the work in recovery and a vital part of being a fulfilled human. It doesn’t matter how many miles we cover or how many days we live through without using a substance. If we don’t do all the work - including practicing the vulnerability and gratitude essential to our connections - we carry that same emptiness and disconnect that used to plague us through it all. 

Voicing our fears, frustrations, struggles and pain does not make us any less. It does not make us weak. It allows us to share a truer, often invisible aspect of ourselves with the people in our lives and deepens the connections that help both us and them. In Diana’s case, it makes her achievement so much more than just a swim. It becomes a culmination of the many different stories of each person in the voyage, each of whom sacrificed and worked hard to achieve their own version of the mission. The success in her mission isn’t dependent on the fame or her name’s place in an encyclopedia; her success involves her ability to face fears, to respond to setbacks, to accept the factors beyond her control and adapt to best live with them, to move from her state of disconnection to a place of connection with Bonnie and her team. 

Most importantly, she finally reunites with the child version of herself that her trauma caused her to lose so many years ago. We see a lot of Diana’s recalled youth in flashbacks of her on the swim team, with her father and with her coach. We see her initial state of awe at the world and her love for swimming, but we also see her become a scared, hurt little girl whose mentor figure broke her trust and sense of self. In the final day of Diana’s fifth swim, she envisions her young self before her, beckoning her forward in the water. The young girl seems at home in the water and knows the direction that Diana needs to go. This scene reflects Diana’s recovery of the simple joy and connection she had as a child. She finds it in the same ocean that contains her fears and frustrations because she has finally been able to use the tools of connection, gratitude and honesty in her growth. She steps out of the water exhausted and barely able to walk, but she steps into the arms of her closest friend, surrounded by her team and a loving, supportive audience. She is physically weakened and in pain from her efforts, but she is mentally stronger than she was at the onset of this swim and the swims before it. 

The work of recovery, like hers, is filled with fear and hardship, but it also contains moments of beauty and brings us that same victory of connection and triumph because we have the courage to step into the water in the first place. I forget this truth when I fail to reach out to the people in my life and listen to the self doubt and anxiety that thrives in states of isolation. This voice reminds me of the specific goals I want and points out how distant and unachievable they are. It makes me feel lost and afraid of revealing that distress to anyone for fear of criticism or appearing weak. But this isn’t me, and this voice is not the one that beckons me on the right path. We may experience setbacks and stand face-to-face with our greatest fears, but God gives us the tools we need and places people in our lives who will share these with us if we let them in. We recover because we go onward through it all, and we find a way when we accept a plan greater than ours, setting aside our own expectations in the process and doing the best we can with the tools given to us.