Abstract
ABSTRACT This auto-ethnographic essay explores the author’s ambivalent identifications as an academic researcher trying to write about swimming. Beginning with her tide-bound rituals of sea swimming near her home in Merseyside, the author reflects upon her shifting perceptions of her own physical and psychic interiority in the wake of her cancer diagnosis in June 2019. By drawing together forms of mobility associated with swimming, collecting and hoarding, the author seeks out some unlikely connections: through the trope of ‘treading water’, she represents states of immersion and suspended temporality, and she describes how – both as a swimmer and a hoarder – she experiences a heightened sense of permeable interiority, an ebb and flow of feeling between self and environment.
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