Young girl swimming in a pool

LIFEGUARD: Anxiety created by accepting responsibilities that aren’t mine

I was eight years old when I saved a life.

It was a hot summer day in Houston. My mother took me and my three brothers—the youngest, just a baby in her arms—to the neighbourhood pool. It was packed, but I saw you come in with your mother. I remember because I loved your swimsuit—hot pink and bespeckled with little yellow duckies. I was embarrassed to be jealous of a younger kid. You couldn’t have been any older than six.

Your mother set her things on a table and poured herself into a lounge chair. She told you to have at the water, so you hopped right into the deep end. No floaties. I guess she didn’t think you would need them. Maybe she couldn’t afford them because she had spent all her money on the swimsuit. (These are the thoughts that occupied the mind of a lonely 8-year-old girl.) It was plausible and would have been worth it in my eyes. It was a very cool swimsuit.

No one was watching


LIFEGUARD – Anxiety from creating responsibilities that arent mine

Barely after you climbed in, you drifted away from the wall. You seemed to struggle to stay afloat. Maybe you weren’t the strongest swimmer (like me), but you were doing fine. I thought so.

I watched you until the water engulfed your face. You cried out just before it covered your mouth.

Alarms went off in my brain. I looked around at the multitude of older kids and adults in the pool—many of them close enough to save you with one swoop of their giant arms. But no one was watching. No one was listening. And there was no lifeguard on duty.

“Mom!” I called.

She was nearby, trying to soothe my crying brother.

“Mom!” I yelled louder.

She sighed and shot back, “What?”

I just pointed. She followed my finger to you—your wide eyes and lips puckered, trying to keep above the surface as long as you could until you sank again.

My mom was, in equal parts, panicked and exasperated. “Well, Jesus! Do something! Go get her!”

I didn’t need to be told twice. No wall to push off of, I just started swimming. I was a good swimmer, but there were so many people to weave through. As I approached you, I felt scared you would take us both down. I’d heard of that happening before. But our eyes met, and you seemed to understand I was there to help.

I extended one arm for you to grab, and towed us back with the other.

Serendipitously, your mother looked up from her magazine just as we arrived at the wall. She ran over and pulled you out of the water, thanking me 1,000 times.

Afterward, my mother praised me.

“Do you know you saved that girl’s life?” she asked.

Yes, I knew. 

“I’m very proud of you. You should be proud of yourself.”

I wanted to be proud of myself. I even convinced myself I was.

I wasn’t not proud of myself.

But the truth is, I was not proud of myself.

I was nervous.

Too much responsibility


LIFEGUARD – Anxiety from creating responsibilities that arent mine1

Anxiety was planted in me from infancy, unbeknownst to me. The adults in my life, most of them well-meaning, fostered it by burdening me with responsibilities that were unfit for a child.

The responsibility of taking care of my brothers as if they were my own kids. Effectively Mommy #2, I changed more diapers than my father ever did.

The responsibility of comforting my mother when she was overwhelmed with child-rearing or angry at my father’s neglect. I was her only therapist. She always seemed unhappy. So I considered myself a failure at it.

The responsibility of dressing modestly to avoid distracting boys, especially in church. It was my job to keep them focused on God, rather than their job to just be focused on God. And rather than my job to be focused on God myself.

The responsibility to tame the troublemakers at school—the ones the teachers would purposefully put next to me because I was the quiet girl. They actually used to tell me it was my special job to keep them in line.

All these responsibilities tended to my anxiety like water in a garden.

But before that day at the pool, the stakes were relatively low. At most, it was about good grades and the good graces of parents and teachers.

You made it about life and death.

If I hadn’t saved you, you would have died. Sure, there were plenty of people at the pool, they were all nearby—even closer to you than I was—and they were all capable of saving you, more capable than the 8-year-old girl. But they didn’t save you.

I did.

And if I had waited for them to save you instead, I would have waited forever.

To them, you didn’t exist.

That day, you made the garden of my mind bloom. My anxieties unfurled into obsessions that yielded a harvest of compulsions.

I looked for drowning kids at every pool—for every second that I spent at the pool. I worried—worried myself sick—that someone would drown as soon as I left—because if no one was looking, then they wouldn’t see it happen. And you had already proved to me that no one is ever looking.

I looked for danger everywhere


LIFEGUARD – Anxiety from creating responsibilities that arent mine2

So, I looked. I looked for danger everywhere I went. I searched grocery store corners for lost or forgotten kids—even kids that didn’t look lost or forgotten, I worried they would become so. I always said a prayer of protection for each one in every aisle of every store, and for the ones I may have missed.

I bit my lip when I saw people cross a busy street, and mentally readied myself to push them out of harm’s way, if (and when) it was needed. On the road, I peered into every car window I could for signs of kidnapped children in the back seat.

Every night, I searched the house twice for hidden robbers that might have snuck in at some point during the day. I triple-checked every door lock

Errand runs with my mother became a dreaded nightmare during which I couldn’t let my guard down for a second. But I had to go, nonetheless. If I stayed behind, there would be no one looking out for danger. With my luck, that would be the day a kid lost their mom in Walmart or tripped into traffic. Someone could die without me.

Time passed, and the anxiety crept into my own home. Every night, I searched the house twice for hidden robbers that might have snuck in at some point during the day. I triple-checked every door lock. I toggled at the stove switches to make sure they weren’t on and leaking gas into the air.

I poked at the chimney for embers that might ignite and turn into a roaring fire that would kill all of us during the night. It didn’t matter that we had never lit the fireplace before—that there has never been nor ever would be an ember there. I still had to check. Just in case. Better to be safe than sorry. The whole process took half an hour. Sometimes more, if my imagination went wild, which it was increasingly prone to do in middle school (I wouldn’t be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder until later in my life).

This kind of vigilance was never my job. Or anyone’s job, really. I know that now (thank you, therapy). I think I might have known it back then, too. I was just nervous to let go, because of that one time when a life was on the line. Sometimes it’s still hard to ignore my anxieties when I think about you and your hot pink little duckie swimsuit.

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image 1: Kris; image 2: Hanne Hasu; image 3: Pexels; image 4: Pexels

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