{"id":2151,"date":"2025-10-13T12:51:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T12:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/?p=2151"},"modified":"2026-01-20T13:01:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T13:01:20","slug":"the-significance-of-water-in-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/the-significance-of-water-in-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WATER IN MY LIFE"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading about Alexandra Shorey\u2019s experiences with fire in her childhood and during her life later. It made me think about my relationship with water. My mum never learnt to swim because her dad was forcing her so aggresively and criticising her that she remained terrified of the water for the rest of her life. So her life goal was for me to be a good swimmer. When I was 7 I started a primary sports school in post communist Poland in 1989. It was mandatory to swim 3x a week in an olympic size pool and there were no \u201egentle slow, get used to the water\u201d methods back then. You were thrown in the 2m deep water where you couldn\u2019t touch the bottom and were expected to just know how to swim. You were not taught to take in air so when I first tried I drank loads of water and started choking and drowning. My mum was watching and she alarmed the coach. He just stuck that long lifeguard pole in the water and I climbed up that thing very quickly \u201elike a monkey, it was hillarious\u201d my mum keeps repeating her version of the story. I eventually learned how to swim and actually really love water, I love snorkling and tried diving, I became a synchronized swimmer and swimming is still one of my favorite sports. Yet somehow every once in a while I have these repetitive dreams of a giant tsunami wave, coming to the place I’m at, usually with my close family, on a beach on holiday but sometimes in a city, in a place where I live. And there is that great fear as I watch the waves approaching and they keep getting bigger and taking up more and more land and even though I keep climbing higher and higher or running further away from them I keep having that feeling that there is nothing that can be done, that we just need to give up and it will cover us completely, yet somehow in most of these dreams, when I end up being covered by the water, I realise I can breathe underwater and I tell myself that all I need to do is just sit and breathe calmly and once the water is gone I will be fine. So I guess I am trying to understand what does that water represent, it’s both traumatic and scary, it reminds me of being put in situations where I was too young emotionally to “deal with” these difficult situations, like the fear of drowning, like my parents divorce, like nobody talking to me, like watching my dad crying after my mum left him for my stepdad. I also remember one more situation, when I was 15, on holidays in Spain with my mum and stepdad. I was a raging vegetarian at that stage and got mad at my stepbrother for making fun of me in a restaurant, eating a seafood paella and waving the little dead prawn heads at me. I stormed out of the restaurant and started walking along the rocks, which were being hit by the waves. My stepdad was walking behind me taking photos of me walking. Suddenly a giant wave came and it threw me on the rocks and then pulled me into the water. As it went away I managed to sit down but then another wave came and pulled me deeper into the sea and then threw my body against very sharp rocks. The third wave came and I was barely holding onto the rocks with my fingers hanging off. It was then my stepdad noticed I was actually in trouble, dropped the camera, pulled me up and helped me to come out of the water. My dress was ripped and I had a lot of minor cuts so was bleeding quite a lot. But I actually remember laughing that I looked like Tarzan, while my mum was panicking and booking return flights to Poland. I don’t remember much more other than my family not really huggin me or consoling but mostly laughing or panicking. So maybe that has something to do with the recurring water dreams and maybe that’s something I should think about when working on my next pieces? I’m also an Aquarius and like to think there is some sort of connection as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have included various images of water: photo of Thames, photoof my local ponds, photo from my son’s swimming lesson and Wayne McGregor’s Somerset House exhibition still shot of a film in which dancers perform with water constantly raining on them but also surrounding them on the floor<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I was reading about Alexandra Shorey\u2019s experiences with fire in her childhood and during her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174,33,7,98,6,114,93,94,175,173],"tags":[178,31,89,52,67,162,177,65,176,181,180],"class_list":["post-2151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-childhood","category-experiences","category-ideas","category-inspiration","category-my-practice","category-poland","category-psychology","category-therapy","category-trauma","category-water","tag-aquarius","tag-drowning","tag-fear","tag-mental-health","tag-overwhelmed","tag-surreal","tag-survivor","tag-terrified","tag-traumatised","tag-tsunami","tag-underwater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2156,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions\/2156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}