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I’ve always loved swimming.
I’m not the best swimmer, and I really didn’t even learn how to swim until I was 15, but I still love it. Still though, I have a love/hate relationship with the pool.
My parents have a pool, and when I lived at home I would swim constantly, except for when people were over, or when my parents had one of their huge summer parties. When I was a member of the Y, I never used the indoor pool, despite the fact that I would have loved to be able to swim in the autumn and winter. My old apartment had a pool, but if my landlady was home or if someone was working on the yard (it was a basement apartment), then I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. This apartment has a pool, but all last summer I never used it.
Why? Well, I think it’s the same reason alot of people don’t like the pool, or beach, or whatever: I didn’t want to be seen without my shirt in. My flabby stretchmarked gut, my moobs, my pale skin, I thought all of that was best left under the shirt. I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to be looked at, I didn’t want to be made fun of, etc…etc…
With that said, the apartment pool has opened for the summer, and yesterday, I went swimming! 
And yes, I took my shirt off.
That isn’t saying that the gut, moobs and paleness aren’t there anymore, and it’s not to say that I’m proud of my appearance right now, but I am learning that I need to worry less about what people might think and do what I want to do. I’m also realizing that more often than not, those people are probably more concerned about how THEY look then about how they look.
So yeah, I have alot of work to do, but I think I can now add swimming to my workout routine, and be okay with it. Plus, I like the smell of chlorine, is that weird? 
