I cannot stress enough how much Create, Consume, Cavort, Commune has been improving my life as a form of mental health food pyramid.

That’s, on a regular basis, to: **Create — ** Build something, make an art, craft an experience, experiment **Consume — ** Enjoy what someone else has made; music, games, shows, but all the better if it’s someone you know. **Cavort — ** Move your body, work up a sweat. **Commune — ** Connect with other people. Share experiences. See and be seen, have a few dozen micromoments of liking your community.

Create and Consume I tend to have covered in the average week, if not the average day. But Commune and Cavort I have to actually pay attention to; they’re the first things to go when I start to feel overwhelmed.

Exercise has always felt like a chore. I hated sport as a kid (at least in part due to a culture of hostility in and around it), and the feeling of burning lungs and dripping sweat after a run were straight up unpleasant.

For twenty years I thought I hated swimming.

I was good at swimming, once I was in the pool. I learned it earlier than most, even for Australia where swimming lessons are a compulsory part of primary education. While other kids were at the pool for an hour a week ten times a year, I was there twice a week, missing out on Power Rangers and afternoon cartoons until I could pass the Grade 6 tests. As soon as I passed them, I was done.

I realise now why I hated swimming. It wasn’t that time I was nearly swept out to sea. It wasn’t the burning feeling of holding my breath. It wasn’t the lessons or the feeling of being un-coordinated or the FOMO of afternoon TV.

It was the change rooms.

At school, surrounded by other kids, I couldn’t concentrate long enough to put on a sock until the teachers were in there screaming at me that the bus was about to leave. After school, it was my grandfather, who would turn every car trip, every meal, and every interaction in between into a shouting match. Not with my older brother, just me.

After twenty years of not swimming, a friend dragged me to the local reservoir. Even doing a few strokes into the deep water kicked the shit out of me, but I immediately realised this was a form of exercise I could do. Running still feels like a chore. Dancing is expensive. Weights are great when you know exactly which muscles to hit and how to hit them, which takes an entire education in anatomy that I don’t have. Swimming feels natural to me and hits all the right places.

Even after getting back into it (and progressing pretty rapidly), I’ve been pretty flat out for the last month. I didn’t swim for two weeks, and started getting anxiety attacks again. Half an hour back in the pool and now I feel ready to take on the world. It’s absolutely wild how much of an impact it has.