She/They 🏳️🌈 | 🌛🌝🌜| Do No Harm, Take No Shit | Pro Choice | "Small and dangerous. Like a rat with a knife." | https://streamlabs.com/sailororbiter1/tip | https://youtube.com/@sailororbiter?si=C4F-hCgxyCy5dyyr | https://m.fanfiction.net/u/2305757
You are 60% water and every lake, river, pond, swamp, creek, and ocean you encounter wants to reclaim it desperately. Be careful out there.
Good, I hope it haunts everyone about to enter a body of water so bad that they wear a life jacket. 🙌
Every single person I knew (past tense) who has drowned was “a strong swimmer.” Water in the wild does not care how good you are at swimming.
I mean this with all due respect:
You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.
Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.
Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.
If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn’t going to turn you face-up while you’re unconscious.
You may be unable to return to shore. Rescue may be unable to find you quickly.
when you’re in water, moving cools you down. you lose heat faster in water, even relatively warm water on a pretty warm day.
as you cool down, your muscles stiffen, you lose the ability to swim much faster than usual (again, not even always in cold water!), and you drown.
to remain warm until rescue, it’s important to stay still and get into the H.E.L.P. position to preserve body heat.
you can’t do that treading water. You can only do that with a proper flotation device.
I once went into the water on a nice, sunny day at a popular boating lake surrounded by boaters. It took 45 minutes to be rescued. Could you swim for that long? Could you swim for that long while shivering and stiff?
Wear a life jacket!
Okay but genuinely are we supposed to wear a life jacket every time we go swimming in natural bodies of water at all? Like. Not allowed to just swim normally unless we go to a pool?
Good question! No. I’m a freediver and a paddling instructor, so I spend a lot of time wild swimming (sans life jackets) and in boats (wearing life jackets).
Life jackets are important when:
you’re on the water in conditions where it would be unsafe to get in the water
there’s a chance of entering the water unintentionally/accidentally.
Plenty of people boat & paddle in conditions unsafe for swimming (myself included). Cold water, strong currents, rough & windy weather, and being far from shore are all conditions that make swimming unsafe.
If anything happens and you go into the water, a life jacket will protect you in these conditions (even cold water, by allowing you to preserve body heat)
But what about when you’re out in safe swimming conditions? What if you even plan to take the boat out to go swimming?
The risk is ending up in the water unintentionally.
If you’re in a large or medium boat, on a paddle board, in a kayak, etc., and you end go in the water without meaning to, you’ve ended up in the water by means that put you at risk (capsizing, collision, sinking, fire, even just falling).
Injury, shock, etc. can prevent you from swimming, even if you’re a strong swimmer. If the water is cold enough, you might experience cold water shock and a dangerous reflex called the cold water gasp. When you hit the water, you gasp automatically. The risk is inhaling a huge amount of water as soon as you go in, inducing panic, increasing the shock response, and increasing your risk of drowning.
How cold is cold water? Some people experience cold water shock symptoms in water as ‘warm’ as 14 degrees C (57 F). Which you’ll find in plenty of popular lake and ocean swimming sites, even in the middle of summer.
The life jacket will save you if your ability to swim is compromised. It can even keep your head above water when you go in, period, keeping you warmer and preventing you from inhaling a bunch of water.
When you go swimming, you get into the water with intention, so the risk of being compromised is pretty low, unless you’re adding an activity like cliff diving or something (or you’re consuming substances that impair your ability to swim). So no, you don’t need to wear a life jacket swimming if you know how to swim. You accept some level of inherent risk when you swim, like you do plenty of other activities.
Final note: having a life jacket near you is next to worthless. It needs to be on you and fastened. Are you going to grab and fasten your life jacket as you capsize? As you fall overboard? As you flee a boat that’s on fire? Put it on and fasten it.
yknow when you can tell that someones opinion on the homeless is dictacted by the fact they seem to imagine every homeless person just like. spawned in the back alleys of a city as a fully grown scruffy hobo with no life goals other than scrounging enough pocket change for a hit of Drugs™ . like you suggest that perhaps a homeless person was not always homeless and probably had a life and a childhood like the rest of us and they blank like they genuinely didnt consider it. like they forgot thats a human being too.
You reach a point of familiarity with tumblr where you can see someone else’s post and go “I get what they were going for and regardless of how much I personally agree with the take, I think it’s reasonable and deserves of good faith discussion, but because of your strong choice of verb or lack of hedging statement, your notes are gonna be full insufferable for at least a business day”
it is funny having a big heavy purse bc people who don’t carry bags are always like “god what do u even have in there” and then every time you hang out they need something that you have in there
also it does feel insane how many articles will straight up say this shit and see 0 issues at all with outright pathologizing huge swathes of woman of color who have more body hair than the “average” white woman but you know im sure diagnostic criteria falls from the sky
“more common in people of Hispanic, Middle Eastern, African American, and South Asian descent”
You mean the GLOBAL MAJORITY???? It’s not “excess hair” if the majority of people have it. More like white women have a comparatively scant amount of body hair.
[ID by @neonstatic: Text that reads, “Excess hair on the body or face in females is known as hirsutism. It’s more common in people of Hispanic, Middle Eastern, African American, and South Asian descent.” End ID]
“When women have hair on their face and body, that is an abnormal condition. 85% of all women ever born have it.”
