Water, to me, has never been just an element. It has been a home, a refuge, a constant challenge.

My first connection with water dates back to when I was just over a year old. My parents took me to the pool and from the very beginning, I felt at home. My instructors quickly noticed that I floated more naturally than others, and that innate ability became a part of who I am. Floating felt effortless, but it was also a kind of secret that made me feel safer, more alive.

I grew up in it. My memories are made of chlorine, lanes and silence – that unique silence that exists only underwater: where everything pauses and it is just you, your breath and your thoughts. It was there that I truly learned to know myself.

In the water, you cannot pretend. Every emotion, every fear, every doubt rises to the surface. Swimming has always been a way for me to create order, to turn effort into something positive, to feel free.

Water teaches you respect. You cannot dominate it, you can only learn to listen to it. Every movement must be precise, every gesture meaningful. It becomes a relationship, almost a continuous dialogue, and when you find the right rhythm, everything turns into harmony.

Perhaps that is also why today I feel even more strongly how precious water is, and how much it must be protected. For someone like me, who has built such an essential part of life within it, it is impossible not to recognise the importance of caring for it, respecting it and never taking it for granted.

There have been moments when I loved it deeply and others when it felt like a battle. Yet even in those difficult times I knew it was where I was meant to be, because it is where I built my story, my victories, and above all, my very identity.

Today, after retiring from competitive sport, I am living what feels like a ‘second chapter’ of life. I no longer feel the urgency to return to the pool every day, but water is still within me. It is a bond that will never end – and perhaps that is why, even now, every time I enter the water, I feel exactly where I am meant to be.

This is how this short essay appears in the special Oceanographic publication, The Innerview