“What if I fail?” The anxiety-inducing words are engraved in my mind, so heavily intertwined with my daily life that I fail to imagine times without it. Every action I take could lead to failure and unpredictable consequences; it terrifies me. Though there are ways to help with anxiety, they vary wildly from person to person but I find introspection to be helpful. Introspection is the act of looking within oneself and understanding one’s thoughts and actions. It is a powerful tool that everybody should use; not only can it reveal the ways in which a person thinks, it can help people grow and overcome situations that are mentally taxing.

“Breathe,” my diving instructor stated in conjunction with a wave of an open hand to and from his stomach. The students on the damp grass mimicked his motions, myself included. Today’s scuba diving class was not about hand signals, it was the final test: an open water dive where we would perform skills we had learned on the ocean floor. The quick review of some basics comforted me slightly. By this point, anxiety and adrenaline both coursed through my body, and the air tank in addition to dive weights were already strapped to my back and hips respectively.

After safety checks, the instructor marched us down to the overcast beach of La Jolla and we wade into the water. We put fins and goggles on as soon as we could float on the surface then swam out to the dive point. We paired up with another diver, each affixed a regulator in our mouth, gave a thumbs down, then slowly let air out of the Buoyancy Control Device (BCD). The water rose to meet my eyes, it felt like ice against my exposed face. I watched my dive computer as we descended, “ten feet… twenty feet… thirty feet…” it read. The water pressure rose to twice of that on the surface which made my neoprene wetsuit compress until it felt like another layer of skin. My fins absorb the impact as I land on the sandy sea floor, I sit on my knees like the other divers have.

The instructor swam down to us and started with the final tests; one by one, he met with every diver and gave us a task. There were a lot of skills that we needed to know like: removing a BCD completely then putting it back on, achieving neutral buoyancy, breathing off an emergency regulator, clearing a partially flooded mask, and a full mask removal. 

I sat still and felt the icy water push me back and forth gently, my mind replayed the instructions given by the divemaster before we got in the water, “To demonstrate one's proficiency with this task is simple: take the dive mask completely off, breathe through the regulator for a whole minute, then put the mask back on.” He made it sound easy enough, and I swam in pools without goggles regularly which I thought would help me. I took a deep breath and gradually let water fill my mask, my heart rate increasing as the ocean pressed against my face. I slid the goggles off my head, opened my eyes, and moved my arm through the strap. Mere seconds passed before the adrenaline entirely flushed out of my body and anxiety assumed a stranglehold. The misguided, instinctual part of me wrestled for control as I knelt at the bottom of the ocean. I could not force my lungs to draw a breath almost as if the water overrode my common sense. Part of me thought I had failed, and that part gave up. “Oh my god, I am going to drown,” rationality told me I was overreacting but the physical signs of stress overpowered my logic. Despite fully being capable of breathing air through the regulator, I failed to do so.

My struggling caught the attention of my instructor five feet above me, who then waved an open hand to and from his stomach. Everything went still as my brain interpreted the hand sign, “Breathe,” the word echoed across my now clear mind. With newfound serenity, I was able to address my problem. I could not force my lungs to draw a breath so I would instead have to force a breath into my lungs. I remembered the purge button on my mouthpiece, a feature that would let air flow out unrestricted as long as I held the button down. He kneeled in front of me and watched as I mashed the purge button on the mouthpiece. The short burst of air pushed my lungs open and acted as a jump start; I began to breathe better but continued to purge to fill my lungs. The instructor gave me an ok sign and moved to the next person. I fumbled my goggles back onto my face and cleared the mask, taking another deep breath as I did.

Anxiety is a general concept, so it can be described by an individual as a lot of different things; for me it feels like I'm sinking deeper into water, one of my friends describes it as sitting in a chair and balancing on the back legs. Introspection is not some magical remedy for all anxiety, and I still find myself falling into old thought processes sometimes. However, I find that having a better understanding of how my brain processes information helps me live in peace with my issues. Being able to step back and look at what is going on in a more logical view is incredibly helpful for managing stress and eliminating sources of unrealistic pressure. 

Seeking help from both friends and professionals is also helpful when dealing with anxiety. My dive instructor, for example, instantly calmed me down by being calm and supportive, even though he did not say anything. “Facing your fears” played a substantial part in my therapy, having a moment of experiencing my worst fear forced me to reevaluate what I think of as failure and whether I was even threatened by it anymore. Recently, I noticed myself adding “so” before the usual “what if I fail?” taking a major part of my anxiety and changing the sentiment to be more optimistic. Multiple times have my feelings towards failure been challenged, each time so far I found a work around; after looking at my own experiences, I realized that my fear is far more irrational than it presented itself originally. The ocean of my mental health is not the abyssal, inescapable pit that I thought it once was. There are places where that is the case, but knowing how to avoid them helps me from sinking.