Gemini vs Gemini

The argument for diving into a hobby even if, perhaps, you’re at a perceived disadvantage.

Essay A

My relationship with water has always been defined by a fundamental disagreement with the Archimedes principle. According to the math, the upward buoyant force that is exerted on a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces. In theory, I should displace enough water to bob peacefully like a cork. In practice, I have the physical density of a spent uranium rod.

While others are “svelte mermaids” gliding across the surface, I am more of a “turtle-shaped buoy”—if the buoy were made of solid lead and filled with existential dread. During my childhood attempts at swim lessons, my coach’s confusion eventually curdled into a dark fascination. I would perform the motions with textbook precision—arms slicing in a perfect crawl, legs kicking in rhythmic right-angled triangles—and yet, I would slowly, vertically, and inevitably settle at the bottom of the deep end. I am biologically destined to be a “sinker.” I don’t tread water; I fight it, and usually, the water wins.

Despite this anatomical betrayal, I developed an obsession with the worlds Sir David Attenborough promised me. I wanted the vibrant, neon-soaked reality of the deep, even if my body insisted I belonged on dry land. This led to the paradoxical ordeal of scuba certification. The written exams were my sanctuary—I could calculate partial pressures and decompression limits with “science-nerd” glee—but the mandatory laps were a trial of spirit. I completed them through sheer, splashing violence, essentially sprinting along the floor of the pool until the instructor, weary of the spectacle, handed me my C-card just to make it stop.

The true “I told you so” moment arrived during the gear-up for my first open-water dive. There is a specific brand of smug satisfaction in watching a professional dive instructor insist that, based on my BMI and height, I’ll surely need twelve pounds of lead weight to descend. I would simply smile, decline the extra bricks, and step into the ocean. Within seconds, I would plummeted past the struggling “floaters” like a stone dropped in a well, leaving the instructor staring at my bubbles in silent, humbled awe. My physical “flaw” had become a technical superpower.

This iron-like density has since granted me a front-row seat to the planet’s greatest theater. Across more than forty dives throughout Southeast Asia, I have traded my struggle with gravity for the company of the impossible. I have locked eyes with “puppy-eyed” Thresher sharks in the early morning gloom and watched Cuttlefish pulse through a psychedelic spectrum of colors like underwater neon signs. I’ve hovered beside the “ugly-cool” Mola Mola (Sunfish), which looks less like a fish and more like a biological accident, and spent entire tanks hunting for Nudibranchs—those tiny, flamboyant sea slugs that look like they were designed by a Victorian socialite on hallucinogens.

Yet, the true lure of the deep isn’t the wildlife; it’s the arrival of Neutral Buoyancy. For a person who spent thirty-five years losing a wrestling match with the earth’s core, the “perfect hover” is a spiritual revelation. It is the ultimate Zen. By adding just a tiny hiss of air to my vest, I achieve a state of physical grace that is otherwise denied to me.

In that moment, the “sinker” becomes weightless. I am no longer a clumsy terrestrial creature or a failing swimmer; I am an astronaut in a liquid galaxy. There is an untouchable peace in hanging suspended in the blue, where the lifelong struggle with gravity finally ends, and for sixty minutes at a time, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Essay B

Here’s a fun fact about myself that I love – I cannot swim, but I can scuba dive. 

It’s not as odd as you’d think. The reason I cannot swim is that I am apparently* denser than the average human (in physical terms, not mental), so in accordance with the Archimedes principle, I sink lower into water than the average person. Which is a particularly odd characteristic for a woman, since women are gifted with many pockets of lighter-than-water fat in our bodies. And since my equilibrium state is a few inches lower in water, I have to expend more energy swimming upwards instead of forwards to take a breath, which means I am exhausted by the time I get halfway across the pool.

*I say apparently because I have no scientific way to prove this, but it’s an observation my swimming coach made after watching me make all the right arm and leg motions in water for weeks, but still struggle to actually finish a lap. She eventually asked me to just push off the wall and not move a muscle, expecting me to go in a straight line across the surface of the pool, but instead watched me execute a perfect representation of the diagonal in a right angled triangle. Pythagoras would have been impressed. 

A retelling of this particular finding to my friends led to a snigger fest, set off by someone remarking, ‘So, you’re a sinker!’

So, yes, I am a sinker, but I can do all the swimming motions. With a life jacket, I would survive in the sea. Which is why you will never find me near the sea without a life jacket firmly strapped to my person. And, which is why bikinis on beach vacations are completely wasted on me. I will never be that svelte mermaid frolicking in the sea. I will be that turtle-with-legs shaped buoy bobbing in the sea.

Anyway, turns out this inconvenience to my survival poses great benefits for my hobby, because scuba diving involves sinking. And as you now know, I am great at sinking.

Why even try to scuba dive, you may ask? Well, I love travel and seeing new things, and one Attenborough-narrated underwater documentary later, I just knew I had to go see it for myself. 

So, I crammed for the written test, struggled through the 5 laps of requisite swimming they made me do to prove I wouldn’t die in the sea, and set off for my scuba diving certification. And then I got my advanced certification. And then went on to do 40 dives in some of the most gorgeous reefs that South East Asia had to offer. 

On each trip, the diving instructor would size me up, and give me 8 kgs of weight to help me sink. Each time, I would tell them it’s too much, because listen, I am denser than I look. Each time they would scoff and tell me they know what they’re doing. Each time, I would get into the water, and immediately start sinking like a stone faster than everyone in the group. The instructor would hurry over to me to take off 2kgs. And I would smugly grin around my regulator.

Did I get to see what I hoped to see? Absolutely. Reef sharks, Thresher sharks, Manta rays and  Sting rays. Extremely ugly but somehow fascinating Sunfish and Bumphead Parrotfish. Turtles swimming alongside me and one memorable time, having a threesome. Cuttlefish, shifting colors and shapes as they sped past me. Hard corals and soft corals and fern-shaped corals that stung. Schools of Barracuda that vortexed, and Silversides that twinkled. Night diving and discovering the insane species that are the Nudibranchs! (If you don’t know what those are, google image them NOW, trust me). 

But my favorite part of scuba diving? It’s when, on your 30th dive, you’ve unlocked the skill of neutral buoyancy. You achieve the perfect hover, where gravity loses its hold on you, and for a few minutes, you imagine you know what being in space might feel like. There’s nothing that has come closer to ‘zen’ in my life. 

Not too bad for a sinker, eh?