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I almost died last weekend.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it is what I sent in a text to The Husband after I attempted an ocean swim and barely made it out alive. I’ve been doing “ocean” swims for awhile now, calling them that at least, even though they’ve occurred in the water on relatively calm harbour beaches where I can swim parallel to, and not far from, the shore.

But I’ve been wanting to try on more of a challenge, so when a friend offered her husband to accompany me on my maiden voyage from Manly to Shelly Beach–a trek through surf-level waves and (harmless) shark-populated waters–I assented, and we gathered there Sunday morning for a new kind of church. The kind where you almost die but then survive, and get gratitude and a blog post out of it.

The water was choppy, and my guide told me that if I could make the swim on this day, I could make it any day. Well, I’ve lived in New York and therefore can make it anywhere but this apparently does not include the Manly to Shelly swim because I did not make it. Less than halfway through, battered by waves and panicking breathlessly, I told my now-rescuer that I wanted to turn around and also, could I hold his hand the whole way back LIKE A SMALL CHILD?

It was humiliating, naturally, but also, these are friends who have seen me in bad shape before (and I’ve returned the favour) so I knew it would live on as a comedic memory in our shared history. But more than humiliating, it was scary. And I think it’s helpful to, every now and then, be reminded of how easy it is to sink, to drown, to die, if only to be simultaneously reminded of our need, always, to be rescued.

This same friend enlisted her daughter, who has a sewing machine, to rescue me when my volunteering to stitch an accessory onto the kindergarteners’ dance costumes met with a dead end (I remembered that I can’t sew, and when I try, I want to kill everyone around me). TH has rescued me countless times, most recently by not losing it when I got a speeding ticket in a school zone like I definitely would have if the roles were reversed (or at the very least I would have harangued him mercilessly, per what a friend and I recently rued as both our husbands’ bad luck in marrying people not nearly as nice as they are). My children rescue me with their forgiveness on the daily (one morning last week in the getting-ready-for-school madness, aka My Worst Self Come to Life at Eight O’Clock Every Day, Little Brother told TH in the face of his harmless ribbing of me to “stop judging Mom–she’s doing her best”).

We have to sink to know we need help, and the best way to be rescued is to need help in the first place. And recognising we need help? Recognising we’re sinking? It happens when we give up. When we allow ourselves to look around and see that darkness is enveloping us, and letting ourselves feel that: feel the grief of not seeing family at the holidays rather than wiping it away with a plane ticket; feel the grief of the still-wounded Inner Child and taking her to therapy; feel the insufficiency of our own efforts to Just Be Better and recognise that in that insufficiency is where we meet rescue. Forgiveness. Grace.

Which, metaphorically or if you’re really lucky (dumb), looks like a hand pulling your ass to shore.