t he a u’au
I couldn’t figure out what had possessed me to swim across the ocean. My hip flexors burned. My stomach churned. Fatigue gripped my muscles.
I battled against the waves, my depleted limbs spinning as they attempted to propel me against the ocean’s merciless current.
The seafloor was long gone, only infinite cobalt glimmering beneath me. I was so far from land that there was no way to check my progress.
Am I even moving?
Each stroke clawed me an inch closer to land—and another mile away from any rational explanation for my presence here.
A wave crashed over my salt-swollen face as I breathed water into my lungs. I sputtered, coughing as I struggled to find air.
Am I going to die?
This was my own fault. I’d decided I was going to be one of the best swimmers in the world at the ripe old age of ten, and I let anyone who would listen—and everyone who wouldn’t—know it.
I hadn’t conceptualized that three hours into swimming the fifteen kilometers between the Hawaiian Islands of Lanai and Maui, I’d wish I was on solid ground.
I’d thought this swim across the Au’au Channel was going to be easy. That was just how my ten-year-old brain worked.
The longer I was in the water—the wilder the water was—the happier I was. It didn’t matter if I was practicing in the pool or bodysurfing giant waves in the ocean with my sisters. And the perfect combination of those was a fifteen-kilometer channel crossing. So may as well do that, right?
I joined the local Chicago suburb team at five, when my aquatic skills could more accurately be described as survival rather than swimming.
My older sister Rachel was doing it, and as someone who worshiped the ground she walked on, I had to do everything she did.
I was told that Rachel was one year and nine months older than me, but I was convinced we were twins—we have the same oceanblue eyes that disappear when we smile, the same upturned Cindy Lou Who nose. And, of course, I “manifested” growing to exactly the same height as her.
I was also told that I needed to learn how to do freestyle before I could join the team. I disagreed. So, when we went to drop Rachel off at the pool, I packed my swimsuit, snuck in behind her, and faked it until I made it.
My relationship with swimming wasn’t love at first stroke. It was born out of stubbornness and spite.
On our second day on the swim team, the coaches pulled Rachel out of the pool to move her into a faster group. I gasped, horrified. Did they intend to separate us?
I jumped out of the water in world-record time and hurried forward to stop this crime.
“Rachel and I have to stay together,” I declared. I was only on this team because I wanted to spend every possible minute with Rachel. She was my best friend. My rock. My role model. My twin.
“This group is holding Rachel back,” one coach explained.
“Then I’ll go with her.”
“You’ll be able to join her when you get the basics down.”
“It’s okay, Becca,” Rachel said as another coach led her away. “You’ll be fine.”
Instead of “being fine,” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The coaches formed a barricade between Rachel and me. From then on, I had one mission: I’m going to get past all of you. I’m going to get good enough at this dumb sport to be in Rachel’s lane. I wanted the actual swim practice to be like what happened after practice, when Rachel, our friends, and I would put our swim caps over the drains in the showers and flood them so we could slip ’n’ slide. I wanted practice to be like every swim meet when we’d write EAT MY BUBBLES on each other’s backs, build towel forts, and eat Fun Dip until our stomachs hurt.
When I finally got into Rachel’s lane, I’d be included in the fun that I was sure was happening on the other side of the deck. In the meantime, I’d have to stare at the black line on the bottom of the pool, alone.
But as I focused on improving, something magical happened.
I started looking forward to every practice. I tuned out everything except the sound of water rushing past my ears.
Somehow—at age five—I had found purpose in the pool. It wasn’t just about getting to be with Rachel anymore. It was about the quest. I was Lucy from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—but instead of journeying to Tumnus, I was journeying to Rachel’s lane.
My imagination ran wild. I’d been imprisoned in the “slow” lane, and I had to be ready to escape when my captors opened the cell door. I had to pass my fellow prisoners until I was leading the lane. That was where I’d have the best chance of a successful prison-break.
As I broke my team’s six-and-under record, I felt like the most powerful swimmer on the planet. It was intoxicating, efficiently slicing through the water like a knife.
I fell in love with jumping into the pool. With pushing my body toward Rachel’s group. With playing my prison-break game.
I passed all the other five-year-olds on the team. Then the six-yearolds. At swim meets, I was the only eight-and-under entered in the mile, 200 fly, and 400 individual medley.
I was the heroine of my own swimming novel. The chosen one who loved swimming the hardest events, fueled only by her quest and dozens of Hershey bars.
I was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I was Joan of Arc saving France. I was Becca Mann, and I was going to be in Rachel Mann’s lane soon. Maybe this mindset was born of the hundreds of fantasy novels I’d read. Or maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, where my role models were martyred saints. Regardless, it had been determined: I was the Chosen One.
The day a coach pulled me out of my lane and walked me toward Rachel’s, I felt unstoppable. This was my moment.
I hopped into the pool, grinning at Rachel as I took my place behind her. Rachel smiled right back, then pushed off the wall. I waited the assigned five seconds, then followed.
I spun my arms like a windmill, determined to prove I could keep up with the big kids. To show I belonged. To have more fun.
I made the interval, getting several seconds of rest before I had to do it all over again.
And I did. I made the entire practice.
On the way home, I watched the suburban Midwestern houses pass by through the car window, on cloud nine with an excellent view of a seemingly limitless horizon. The world was my sandbox, and I had only played in a corner.
What else can I do? The idea was addictive.
What else do I want to do?
I was proud of myself—I wanted to hold on to who I was in that moment. I knew exactly who I was. Driven. Passionate. Good. A heroine.
I was going to be that person—my eight-year-old self—forever. It didn’t—I didn’t—get any better than that.
A few years later, the 2008 Olympics played out on my family’s TV. I didn’t care to watch—I was too busy pretending to be a demigod in the forest in our backyard, writing stories in my mind. The Greek Olympians had real powers, unlike the athletes on the screen. But I hated being left out, so my imaginary adventures brought me back to the TV.
I rushed back into the living room just as Michael Phelps won his eighth medal. My family was loving it. Me?—I wasn’t sure. A myriad of emotions burst within my chest, the most prominent of which resembled jealousy.
If someone had told me that Michael Phelps and I would be training together five years later, I would have thought, Makes sense.
“You missed it, Becca!” my mom exclaimed.
“So?”
“So you should watch,” my dad said.
“Why?” Why watch swimming when I could just swim? “I’m going to have more than that one day. I’ll get nine.”
Maybe this was my next big quest.
“Okay. But just so you know, it’ll be a lot of work,” my mom said.
“I know,” I replied with a shrug. “I gotta go—Poseidon needs me.”
I loved swimming more than anyone, so I would be the best at it. It was simple kid math. The person who likes something the most is the person who gets the glory. I’d gotten into Rachel’s lane. If I could complete that challenge, I could get more Olympic medals than Michael Phelps.
But there would be other challenges first—the next of which presented itself on a family vacation in Hawaii while crossing from Maui to Lanai on a ferry. My mom wondered if a swim was done between the islands. “It’s so beautiful. I think I’ll have to get in shape and swim across it.”
“You can’t,” I interrupted. “I’m the swimmer of the family. I have to do it. You can’t do it before me. I like swimming more than you do.”
I wasn’t supposed to have been a swimmer. I was born and bred into a family of triathletes—that was the only reason Rachel had joined the swim team in the first place. I couldn’t let it be taken from me. I knew I could cross the Au’au Channel. I thrived in the Hawaiian waters. The bigger the waves, the more fun I had.
I was the Chosen One, and I’d found my next quest.
“Promise me,” I said to my mom. “Promise me you’ll let me do it before you do.”
“You really want to swim it?”
“Yes. I have to.”
My mom took in the determined glint in my eyes. I wondered if she could see what I felt—that I absolutely had to swim across the channel.
“Okay,” she agreed.
She knew—it was the same look I’d given her over a year before when I told her I wanted to swim my first 10k in Miami. It didn’t matter that I would be the youngest competitor by years—a lot of years if I didn’t include Rachel. If there was something harder to do, I was going to do it.
My parents weren’t going to stop me. They told me I could do whatever I set my mind to, and they made sure those weren’t just words. If I wanted to swim across the ocean, they’d help me make it happen.
I craved the adventure. I wanted to look down and not be able to see the bottom of the ocean. Crossing the Au’au Channel was so alluring
that I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it before the horrifying idea of my mom being a better swimmer than me was presented.
My mom found a boat captain who was an official Hawaiian Channel Crossing Certifier, and I got ready to embark on the longest swim I—or anyone my age—had ever done.
The preparation wasn’t theatrical. There was no training montage. I didn’t change my routine. I just figured I would be fine, as I had a strong enough base.
A twinge of nervousness coursed through my gut as I watched the support boat, which looked like a floating bathtub, drift toward where I stood with my parents on the dock. The perfect boat for tiny me.
My dad gets seasick, so he stayed on Lanai to have a nerve-racking beach day with my sisters. He wasn’t the biggest fan of this adventure, but he knew better than to try to stop it. My mom would be my feeder, responsible for keeping my energy up throughout the swim—and watching me to make sure nothing bad happened.
We didn’t have much of a feeding plan. I was too naive for that.
The crossing began at Club Lanai, a beach only accessible via a dirt road. The boat dropped me off about a kilometer away since it couldn’t get over the reef to take me closer. I’d have to swim to shore before I could turn right around and start my adventure.
I jumped into the water, letting the cool waves dissipate my underlying anxiety the moment I was submerged, the colorful fish calming my mind.
Ten minutes later, I climbed onto the deserted beach. I stood alone, a ten-year-old girl with nothing but her cap, goggles, suit, and smile. It felt right. I didn’t need cheerleaders—I only needed myself and the ocean to cooperate with me.
I took in the landmass on the horizon. It didn’t look very far. Five hours tops.
I grinned, no longer nervous. I shook out my muscles. Did the sign of the cross.
Then I waded back into the Au’au and swam toward my potential. This was it. The clear water sparkled, sunlight reflecting off the reef below.
I was the coolest ten-year-old on the planet, the cobalt blue as endless as my joy. As I swam over the fish, I wondered if they, too, had made the commute to Maui at one point or another.
I plowed through the waves like a warrior. I was free, powerful, grown up. The sun shone and the water rushed through my ears.
And as I passed the idling boat, the bottom of the ocean disappeared.
The first few hours passed like a daydream. Hundreds of jellyfish glowed beneath me, and I laid eyes on the first sea turtle I’d ever seen. I sang to myself. I watched the details of Lanai fade into the distance.
I don’t know why more kids haven’t done this, I thought, It’s so fun!
Despite the endless depths, I felt safe in the ocean—more comfortable, more aware, more in tune with my body and my surroundings. The water was an extension of me.
I belonged there.
I hadn’t even conceptualized that this swim was going to be hard. I’d thought I was just going for a very long, fun swim across the ocean.
The first half is always fun. The second half is when my inner demon emerges.
Around hour three, with four miles to go, that’s exactly what happened.
The current picked up. Maui, which had been getting consistently larger, stayed just out of reach. As I struggled toward Maui, I began chanting, You are Becca Mann. You can cross this ocean. You will cross this ocean. You are the toughest ten-year-old on this planet. You love swimming. You are awesome.
You love a challenge. I spat the salty water of the Au’au Channel out of my mouth.
You love swimming. I got stung by the dozenth jellyfish.
This was a different beast from the calm ten-kilometer race in Miami a year and a half before. Rachel had been forced to swim with me through every loop of that course. Now, I was alone in the wild, untamed ocean.
A shout from the boat made me lift my head. “You need to feed!”
I reluctantly treaded water and glanced up at my mom, giving up hard-fought meters to the current. “I don’t want to.”
“Too bad.”
Touching the boat meant disqualification, so our feeding system was simple. She threw me a Gatorade. I glared, chugged it, and threw the empty bottle back.
I kept stroking. Was Maui getting closer . . . ?
You love swimming. You love a challenge.
“Why am I going so slow?” I demanded when my mom threw another Gatorade into the water beside me.
“You’re almost there.”
I didn’t believe her. I only believed the pain. But the only way to get the glory was forward. No matter how frustrated, tired, and over this crossing I was, I had to keep going.
Ow, ow, ow. I winced with every stroke.
I was swimming in place. Everything hurt. I was angry with my mom for no reason. I was angry with the captain. I cried into my goggles because I knew that the rest of the channel was going to be miserable. Why couldn’t my body do this as efficiently as I thought?
Everything comes to an end. I’ll get to Maui at some point.
It didn’t calm me.
Quests aren’t supposed to be easy, I reminded myself. That would make a really boring book.
It didn’t soothe me.
Hour four passed with hardly any progress. I stopped feeding. If I treaded water to feed, I would lose ground, and I would be in the water longer.
For the first time in my life, that sounded like a bad thing.
I tried to think about how good it would feel when I was done. I was going to eat so much food. I was going to lounge around for a week. I was going to brag to Rachel and Julia—my blonde, curly-haired younger sister who used her cuteness to get whatever she wanted—and tell them that I couldn’t take the garbage out for the next year because I was “still recovering.”
I sang Wicked the Musical, reminding myself that I was Elphaba. Loathing, unadulterated loathing
I want to get out. I don’t want to do this anymore.
Another hour.
I was going to look up. If I was still in the middle of the channel, I was going to have to come up with a new plan for getting there.
My thoughts must have gone right to God’s ears, because Maui was closer.
Significantly closer.
Adrenaline surged through me.
The closer I got to the island, the more the current died down. The more I sped up. The effects of pure adrenaline pumped through my blood—my soul—and rejuvenated my tired body. By hour six, I could make out individual palm trees.
The closest beach was more a collection of rocks than sand, just south of Lahaina. I sprinted for it, invigorated by the nearness of victory.
The bottom of the ocean reappeared. I was doing it. I was almost—
There. I made it. I was finished. I climbed onto the rocks, almost falling as I hauled myself out of the water.
I squatted on a rock and looked back at Lanai, catching my breath.
The crossing took me six hours, twenty-six minutes, and forty-six seconds.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. My face was swollen. My muscles ached. I never wanted to move again.
And yet, finished with that seemingly Sisyphean task, I was proud. No—I was impressed. I’d powered through almost four hours of challenge to get to the other side, pushing myself past my limits and proving that I was just like the characters in the books.
No one is proud of doing something easy. Nothing was off the table.
So you swam across that channel? What else can you do? What other dreams do you have? a voice in my head taunted.
No. It tempted. I became the youngest person ever to swim across the Au’au. My name ended up in the Oahu airport, joining a list of other Hawaiian Channel swimmers. I’d gotten so sunburned that my arms were covered in quarter-sized blisters that I was so excited to show off to my sisters.
I wanted the next quest. I needed it to satiate the competitive voice within myself. How good could I be at doing the thing that I loved? What could I accomplish? How far could I go if I really tried?
Anything. I can do anything.
That was what being a swimmer meant to me. I wore the identity like a badge of honor, ready to take on the world. Ready to chase things I wasn’t even sure were possible to catch.
The moment I saw my mom, I smiled smugly. “I did it before you did.” “Res ipsa loquitur,” she replied. It was a Latin phrase we used in our family. The thing speaks for itself. Let your actions be your words. And they were.
What if, What if, What if?
I was wearing a tank top with a whale on it the first day I walked onto Herbert’s pool deck in Austin, Texas. A thousand miles from the kids I’d swum with in the Chicago suburbs. Everything was bigger in Texas, including the teens who were about to become my training partners. I trailed behind my mom, trying not to glance up into the faces of the older, more muscular swimmers.
Herbert was in his late sixties, his hair and mustache snow white. He wore a rusty Texas Longhorns T-shirt, his brow furrowing as I stood in front of him and met his glinting eyes.
Clearly, he’d been expecting someone older. Or bigger. Probably both. Not a newly homeschooled ten-year-old.
“Glad to see you dressed for the occasion,” he said, nodding at the whale. Heat rose into my face, but I would soon discover that he wore the same shirt every day.
I decided I liked him. He rarely smiled, so I knew that when he did, I’d earned it.
My sisters’ triathlon coach had swum for Herbert in college and had recommended I try him out after I’d climbed through the clubs of Illinois and found none of them challenging enough. I needed better athletes to train with. Better coaching.
Herbert gave it to me.
Three years after my first training trip with Herbert, he moved to Clearwater, Florida. I convinced my parents to let me move there too. Permanently.
It was December 2010. I had just turned thirteen and cemented myself as the all-time fastest eleven-to-twelve-year-old distance swimmer in the nation with two National Age Group Records.
My plan was to make the 2012 Olympic Team a year and a half later, get gold, and then move back to Illinois and start my freshman year at regular high school to be reunited with my sisters and cats. Those eighteen months would be completely consumed by swimming. The days of jet skiing between morning and afternoon practice on my Texas training trips were long gone, replaced with compression wear and long naps.
I believed. As my mom once told me, Doubt is the first step to failure. So I was going all-in on myself. No doubts.
I brought my Elphaba hat. My crucifix. All my favorite books. The map I’d created of Quanx, the imaginary land modeled after the forest in my Illinois backyard. My mind spent half its time there, and I was beginning to write it into a fantasy novel.
My mom stayed with me the first week in my new Florida Airbnb.
After moving me in, she’d leave for a month to return to mothering my sisters and running her law office. She was replaced with a family friend, who would be followed by my dad, my grandma, and finally, another family friend. I’d never been away from my mom for so long, but I told myself it would be fine. I’d talk to her on the phone every day. There was nothing to worry about.
But a tightness grew in my chest with every passing day when I realized I was the one running my life. Rachel wasn’t around to make me food. My dad didn’t do my laundry. My mom didn’t unpack my swim bag if I was too exhausted to do it. Julia wasn’t bossing me around, making me co-star in her music videos.
The gates to hell broke loose three days after my mom left.
It was a Thursday. A teammate said something random after practice that convinced me something terrible was going to happen to my family.
I had no idea what was happening as the world faded away. All I could perceive was fear. Terror.
Everything else was hidden behind glass.
I just need to sleep, I decided. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up, and everything will be fine.
I didn’t sleep that night. And I couldn’t force down breakfast the next day. I didn’t even belt Wicked on the drive to practice.
When I finished morning practice in tears and Herbert approached, I rubbed at my eyes and said, “Sorry, there’s something in my eye.” But my voice sounded as if it came from someone else. Herbert attempted to lighten the mood. “Yeah, your finger.”
I offered a half-hearted grin. Everything felt far away, as if behind a glass door.
I found myself back in that cloud of intense fear several times a day. My thoughts were spiraling out of control, though I did my best to hide it. Frequent episodes of fear about irrational things plagued me, making me feel as though I were living behind a veil, occasionally taking away my appetite for days.
Sometimes, I would spiral during practice, obsessing that my entire family wasn’t just 2,000 miles away—they were dead. On those days, the black line became a prison, dark and foreboding. My mind ached for something else to latch onto, and the fantastical imaginations I had summoned when I was younger turned sour. Scary. Disturbing. What if I think about the devil so much that I start doing his bidding?
Even positive affirmations about swimming became tainted with poison. “Anything is possible if you believe,” person after person told me.
What if that means that thinking my family’s dead actually kills them?
Not possible. Not true.
What if reality is broken and that is true? asked my brain. My stomach always plummeted first. Calm down, calm down, calm down.
What if? What if? What if?
The pit of dread would fill until it overflowed, seeping into my ribs, my heart, and my mind, until it consumed me like a storm. Until I felt as if I were no longer in my body.
What if I’m stuck in this feeling, and then it makes me go crazy, and I do something terrible? What if it makes me kill my family or myself, and then I go to hell, and I actually am stuck in the fear forever?
What if I’m going crazy?
What if I am crazy?
My dad accidentally called me Rachel one day. he has Alzheimer’s, my brain convinced me. he’s forgetting things. he’s dying, he barely has any time left before his brain is gone, and you’re living in florida, trying to see how fast you can swim across the pool.
I traveled for a swim meet the next week and woke up with no clue where I was.
You have Alzheimer’s. You inherited it from Dad. You’re the youngest person to ever have it. You’ve always known you’re special—you’re so special that you can give yourself Alzheimer’s.
Logic and rationality didn’t exist in the darkest corners of my mind.
You believe your mind has the power to do anything? You have the power to do terrible things too. You could break reality, send everyone to hell, and make everyone feel the fear.
I needed to believe I could do anything to swim fast. But if I could do anything
I could do something terrible.
When my mind managed to distract itself from the anxiety, and I found myself reverting to my happy self—daydreaming about Quanx, playing in the ocean’s waves, fishing on the pier—my amygdala began to prod at the rest of my brain. You’re forgetting something. You need to be prepared. Prepared to loop through my thoughts again, to comb through them in hopes that I missed something. That my brain was wrong. That if I went through them just one more time, I would find something in there that would prove them wrong.
The remnants of my fears lived in the corners of my mind. My fear was like eye floaters—always there but ignorable until something reminded me of their presence.
One night, just before finals of a swim meet, my mom finally back with me, I read an article about a murder—and then couldn’t stop thinking about what differentiated me from the killer. Weren’t we the same? What was keeping me from doing the same?
My thoughts overflowed into my body, transforming into cortisol and adrenaline until I couldn’t separate myself from the terror.
I could do nothing to hide it from my mom. I burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” my mom asked, alarmed.
“I—I don’t know! I’m—what if I’m evil?!”
“What?”
“What makes people evil? What if I’m evil?”
“You’re not evil.”
“How do you know?”
My brain was spiraling. If I was evil, then—
My mind was back on hell. I couldn’t go to hell if hell was even worse than my thoughts. I could never do anything even marginally morally ambiguous. I would have to be perfect. Because what if I did something bad, and God decided that, as punishment, all my evil thoughts would come true?
“Do you need to come back home with me?” my mom asked.
“No!” A part of me wanted to, but that would mean giving up on my dreams. I didn’t want to do that. Not when I had already given so much. Gained so much. Not when I still loved swimming and was still making great improvements.
I had to make it through my thoughts. I had to push through. If I had to choose between inner peace and swimming . . .
It would be swimming.
“What about therapy?”
The fear intensified. “I’m not crazy!” Am I?
“It doesn’t mean you’re crazy.”
“No. I can’t. I won’t.” If you go to therapy, they’ll confirm there’s something wrong with you.
The more I told my thoughts to calm down, the more erratic they became. My stomach churned. Relaxation didn’t help—instead, I sought distraction. Anything and everything to take my mind off it.
The best distraction was fast swimming. Slow swimming allowed my imagination to go wild, but fast swimming turned my brain off.
There was nothing a race couldn’t fix. The excitement of diving from the block and taking off in the pool lured my thoughts away from the dark corners of my mind and into the light.
The second-best distraction came from writing my middle-grade fantasy novel, The Stolen Dragon of Quanx. Writing was like watching TV for me—my body recovered while my imagination roamed free. I relished when I was in the zone. I typed away, knowing I had full control of the words on the page. Knowing I was the god of this world, and if my characters could make it through their arduous quest, I could too.
My thoughts were overwhelming for a few months, then eased up a bit, coming and going in waves. The reprieves told me that there was hope that someday it could all go away. I just had to fight my way there. Things that were easy weren’t worth it. Everyone would do it if it were easy, like the Au’au Channel.
I stopped telling my mom when things were going badly because I knew she would get worried—and then her thoughts would be as bad as mine, and she would feel even worse than I felt, and I didn’t want anyone to feel that way—
Especially not because of me.
Despite hiding my rocky mental health from her, I began developing a codependent relationship. I clung to her even when she was halfway across the country, as if she were the sole being tethering me to home. I had never been away from her for so long. We’d FaceTime every day for at least an hour, and I’d gab the entire time about the exact speed I’d gone on every repeat of every set. I was desperate to prove to her that this move had been worth it.
I needed her at every swim meet. After swimming poorly at the first swim meet she wasn’t able to attend, I convinced myself that if she wasn’t there watching, I wouldn’t swim fast. I demanded she attend every competition.
I gave her homework—to look at USA Swimming’s age group lists and warn me if any other thirteen-year-olds were rising behind me.
There weren’t, so I made her track the fourteen-year-olds.
The answer was always no, until one day, on the way to swim practice, she said, “There’s a fourteen-year-old who went faster than you.”
“How much?”
“A few seconds in the 800.”
I shrugged, unconcerned. I was rapidly improving—I always surpassed the names my mom read.
“What’s her name?”
“Katie Ledecky.”
“I’m not worried about it.”
“She also has a faster 400—“
I waved my hand dismissively. “I’ll be faster in a month.”
Whenever someone who wasn’t my mom stayed with me, I was angry that they didn’t do things the way she did. I counted down the
