My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How Wild Swimming Helped Me Reclaim My Body at 40
By Beth, 40 — Burlington, VT
The summer I turned forty, I started wild swimming alone at dawn. Not because I was brave or athletic or having some photogenic midlife awakening — but because I was tired in a way that sleep could not fix. I had spent fifteen years as a veterinarian, holding other people’s animals through the worst moments of their lives, absorbing that grief in small, accumulating doses. Somewhere along the way I had stopped doing anything that was just for me. Wild swimming changed that, though I did not know it would when I first walked down to the lake in the half-dark.
I want to tell you this story because I think a lot of women arrive at forty feeling hollowed out, and nobody really talks about what it takes to come back to yourself. Not the big dramatic reinventions. The small, cold, ordinary ones.
The Morning I First Walked Into the Water
It was the second week of June. I remember because the lupines along Route 7 had just come in and the air smelled like cut grass and lake mud. I had been awake since four, which was not unusual. My body had been waking me before sunrise for months, this low-grade insomnia that came with the hormonal shifts nobody warned me about. Most mornings I would lie there scrolling my phone or making mental lists of things I needed to do at the clinic. But that morning I got in my car and drove twelve minutes to Oakledge Park.
The parking lot was empty. The lake was absolutely still, this pale silver color that made it hard to tell where water ended and sky began. I had not brought a towel. I had not planned this. I was wearing an old swimsuit under a flannel shirt and I stood at the edge of the dock for a long time, feeling ridiculous.
Then I jumped.
The cold hit me like a wall. Lake Champlain in early June is not warm. It is barely tolerable. My chest seized up and I gasped, and for about ten seconds every thought I had been carrying — the euthanasia I had to do on Friday, the leak in the basement, the unanswered texts from my sister, the fact that I was turning forty in nine days and felt nothing about it — all of it just stopped. There was only cold water and my heartbeat and the sound of my own breathing.
I stayed in for maybe three minutes. I climbed out shaking, drove home in a wet swimsuit, and sat in my driveway crying for no reason I could explain.
I went back the next morning. And the one after that.
What Wild Swimming Taught Me About My Body
I had spent most of my thirties treating my body like a machine that existed to get me through the day. Feed it, move it, ignore the aches, push through. As a vet, my hands were always on other bodies — palpating abdomens, checking pulses, holding a dog’s head while it went to sleep for the last time. I was exquisitely tuned to the physical signals of other living creatures and almost completely disconnected from my own.
The lake did not let me stay disconnected. Cold water demands that you pay attention. You feel your skin tighten, your lungs expand, your blood rush to your core. You feel alive in the most literal, physiological sense. There is no multitasking in fifty-eight-degree water. There is only your body and the lake and the strange, fierce pleasure of doing something your nervous system is screaming at you not to do.
By the third week, I noticed something. I was sleeping better. Not perfectly, but better. The four a.m. jolts softened into five a.m. stirs, and sometimes I would lie in bed for a few minutes just feeling my limbs, the weight of the blanket, the warmth. Small sensations I had been numb to for years.
I started paying attention to what else I had been ignoring. The tension I carried in my jaw. The way I held my breath during difficult procedures. The fact that I had not touched my own body with any kind of gentleness or curiosity in longer than I could remember. Everything had become functional. Utilitarian. Even the private moments I used to enjoy had become another thing I was too tired to bother with.
One evening after a particularly hard day — we lost a golden retriever to bloat, and the family had three kids under ten, and I held it together for all of them and then sat in my car in the parking lot feeling absolutely hollow — I came home and ran a bath. I lit a candle, which I never do. I used the little waterproof device I had ordered months ago and never taken out of the box. And I lay there in the hot water and let myself feel something that was not grief or exhaustion or obligation. Just warmth. Just my own body remembering what pleasure felt like.
It was maybe fifteen minutes. But it was the first time in a long time that I did something purely because it felt good, with no justification beyond that.
Learning to Do Something Just for Myself
I think this is the part that is hardest to explain to people who have not been in it. When your whole life is organized around caring for others — patients, animals, family, the receptionist who is going through a divorce, the technician who needs a reference letter — the idea of doing something just for yourself feels almost obscene. Selfish in a way that makes your stomach clench.
I had a friend, another vet, who told me once that she felt guilty taking a lunch break. Not a long lunch. Not a spa day. A thirty-minute lunch break where she sat in her car and ate a sandwich without answering questions. She felt guilty about that. And I understood completely, because I was the same way.
The lake became the thing that broke that pattern. It was non-negotiable. I went every morning, even in rain, even when I was sore from a surgery the day before, even when I had convinced myself I did not deserve it or did not have time. The ritual of it mattered. Driving in the dark. The gravel under my feet. The shock of the water. The way the sky looked different every single morning — sometimes pink, sometimes gray, sometimes this impossible gold that made the mountains look like they were on fire.
Nobody was watching. Nobody needed anything from me. For twenty minutes a day, I was not Dr. Beth. I was not the woman who held the dying animals. I was just a person in a lake, breathing.
My friend Derek — not his real name — went through something similar when he moved home to care for his mother. He told me once that the hardest part was not the caregiving itself but the disappearance of his own identity inside it. Everything became about her medications, her appointments, her safety. He said he had to fight to keep even one small thing that was just for him. I think about that conversation a lot. I think about how many people — especially people in caring professions, especially people in their forties when the weight of responsibility starts to peak — lose the habit of tending to themselves.
Wild swimming was my way back. But it could have been anything. It could have been a bath. It could have been a walk. It could have been ten minutes alone with a locked door and the permission to feel good without explaining why. The point was not the water. The point was choosing myself, even briefly, even imperfectly.
How Turning Forty Actually Set Me Free
My birthday was on a Wednesday. I swam that morning. The water was warmer by then, maybe sixty-five degrees, and I stayed in longer than usual. There was a heron standing in the shallows about thirty yards away. It watched me with total indifference, which I found oddly comforting.
I floated on my back and looked at the sky and thought about what I knew at forty that I did not know at thirty. The list was short but important. I knew that exhaustion is not a personality trait. I knew that caring for others does not excuse you from caring for yourself. I knew that my body was not just a vehicle for getting work done — it was the only place I actually lived, and I had been neglecting it the way you neglect a house you are always leaving.
I knew that pleasure is not a reward you earn. It is a basic human need, like water, like sleep. And I had been rationing it as if there were a limited supply.
That evening I sat on my porch with a glass of wine and called my sister back. We talked for an hour. She told me she had been worried about me, that I had seemed flat for the past year, like the lights were on but dimmed. I told her about the swimming. She laughed and said it sounded freezing and wonderful. She was right about both.
It is September now. The water is getting cold again, really cold, and I know the lake mornings are numbered. But the thing the swimming gave me — the habit of showing up for myself, the permission to feel my own body, the understanding that self-care is not a luxury but a form of survival — that stays. I carry it with me into the exam rooms, into the quiet evenings, into the bath on the hard days when I need to remember that I am more than what I give away.
I am forty years old. I am a veterinarian in Burlington, Vermont. I swim in a cold lake at dawn, and some mornings I cry afterward, and some mornings I laugh, and most mornings I just drive home feeling like a person who is finally, quietly, awake.
That is my highlight time. The ordinary, unglamorous, shivering truth of it.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone and At 32, I Learned How to Date Myself. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
