poolside dissonance

people see the job from the outside and they see a pool. they see swimming, water, and kids playing. they do not see the environment that sits behind that.

working poolside—as both a swim teacher and a lifeguard—is a strange kind of marathon. it is loud, it is humid, and it is relentlessly stimulating. you are constantly “on.” whether you are guiding a child through their first few strokes or scanning the water to ensure everyone’s safety, your attention is never truly allowed to drift.

there is an incredible, almost addictive reward to it. seeing a child you have worked with finally grasp a skill, watching that moment of realization when they trust themselves to move through the water—that feeling is genuinely unmatched. it is why i keep showing up. it is why, even on the days where the exhaustion feels like a physical weight in my chest, i haven’t walked away.

but god, it drains you.

there are moments, usually when the air is thick and the noise has peaked, where i have stood on the poolside and felt right on the edge of breaking. the sheer amount of output required—the constant walking, the endless talking, the hyper-vigilance—it catches up to you in ways that are hard to describe until you have lived through a full shift.

i have thought about quitting more times than i can count. yet, i never do.

the first reason is the kids. there are students who rely on me, who have built a foundation of trust that i am not willing to break. to walk away feels like leaving a promise unkept. the second reason is that i actually love the work itself, and the people. the staff i work with are incredible. there is a specific kind of camaraderie you find in these environments; we are all sharing the same heat, the same noise, and the same long hours. some of them have become the people i seek out the moment i’m off the clock.

it is a bizarre, rewarding, exhausting cycle. i spend my day teaching, helping them progress, and then i rotate over to lifeguarding, standing on the same hot poolside, watching the same water, just with a different lens.

i don’t know how long i can keep balancing the weight of this reward against the toll it takes on my body and my mind, but for now, i’m still here. i’m still on the side of the pool, balancing the exhaustion with the magic of watching them grow.

it is easy to minimize this. sometimes, i look at the exhaustion and think it sounds like i am crying over spilt milk. i tell myself to just do the job, and i watch others who seem able to just switch off, do their shifts, and move on. but i am not that person. i won’t pretend to be. i know the specific, heavy toll this environment takes on me, and there have been mornings where i have come dangerously close to not going in at all.

i show up anyway. i show up because i know that if i give myself permission to skip even once, i might realize that i don’t truly have to go back. if the structure breaks, the motivation evaporates.

the hardest part is often just the anticipation of the day. procrastination is a difficult habit to break, especially when you are sitting at home, staring down a forty-five-minute drive to work. every minute spent sitting there is a minute spent dreading the noise before it even begins. it is a strange, circular kind of suffering—dreading the commute, knowing the work will drain me, yet knowing that showing up is the only thing keeping the structure of my life from unraveling entirely. it is not just a job. it is a daily negotiation between my need for stability and the reality of my own limitations.