I Have Thalassophobia. I Became a Scuba Diver.

I grew up in Barcelona, fifty metres from the beach, and I was terrified of the sea. Not the shallow part where children played — the part where the colour changed from turquoise to deep blue, where you could no longer see the bottom, where the water became something else entirely. Something vast and dark and indifferent.

I have a specific memory from childhood: I was maybe eight years old, swimming with my family, and I looked down through my goggles and saw nothing but blue fading to black. I swam back to shore so fast I scraped my knees on the sand. I never told anyone why.

Thalassophobia — the fear of deep water — is not just about drowning. It's about the unknown. The things that might be down there. The scale of it. The way the ocean doesn't care whether you exist. I could stand on the beach and feel it like a physical pressure, that awareness of the depth behind the surface.

Elena was the marine biologist I met at a conference in 2019. On our third date, she told me she was a certified scuba diving instructor. On our fourth date, she asked if I'd ever tried it. I told her about the thalassophobia. She didn't flinch. 'The ocean is less frightening when you understand it,' she said. 'Most people are afraid of what they can't see. Diving teaches you to see.'

I started in a swimming pool. Elena was patient in a way that only someone who genuinely loves something can be — she never rushed me, never minimised my fear, never suggested I was being irrational. She just kept showing me things. The way light moves through water. The physics of buoyancy. How to breathe slowly and steadily from a regulator.

My first open water dive was in the Mediterranean, at a site with a sandy bottom at eight metres. Elena held my hand the entire time. I kept my eyes on the sand directly below me, not looking up, not looking out. When I finally did look up, I saw the surface shimmering above me, and I thought: I am inside the thing I was afraid of. And I am still here.

The transformation was not instant. There were dives where the fear came back — a moment of looking into blue distance and feeling that old vertigo. But Elena had given me something to replace the blankness with: knowledge. The fish I was looking at. The coral formations. The way light behaved at depth. The ocean was no longer an undifferentiated void; it was a place full of specific, nameable, beautiful things.

I got my PADI Open Water certification in 2020. My Advanced Open Water in 2021. Last year, Elena and I dove the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt — one of the most famous dive sites in the world, a vertical shaft dropping to 130 metres. I looked down into it and felt something I never expected to feel about the deep ocean: wonder.