After my brother died I turned to sea swimming and found it profoundly healing

Two life-altering events became the catalyst for her return to the water. 

“After my first child was born, she contracted neonatal meningitis and was very sick. She did survive, and she’s now 18, so that’s a happy ending,” she says. 

“But shortly after that, my brother died, really out of the blue, through hospital malpractice. So these two really difficult events happened really close together, and it really upended our whole family, particularly my brother’s death.”

Swimming became a form of healing. After that initial swim in Dorset, she began swimming in lakes closer to her home in Surrey. Now, she’s releasing her first book, Breaking Waves: Discovery, Healing and Inspiration in the Open Water. 

“It really is a love letter to the open water,” she says. 

It’s healing in so many ways, just helping me find joy again, helping me process grief, helping me work out feelings, getting connected back to my body.

Born in London to Irish parents, Emma had a brother and sister. 

“The three of us were very close, and we lived together as adults for 10 years. So I talk about that relationship that we had, and how it was just like losing your best friend,” she says.

Emma struggled to process her grief. 

“Because I had a young baby to care for, I never really allowed myself to grieve,” she says.

She was an air traffic controller, but was forced to leave due to chronic illness. 

“After Brian died, my mental health eventually deteriorated and my physical health in to chronic health conditions, and, ultimately, I wasn’t able to work in the conventional way anymore, and I found myself down at the lake, sort of feeling very lost and without identity,” she says.

Emma’s book shares the stories of other women she met through swimming. 

“I started just meeting women around the lake and at different places where I would swim, and we all had these stories to tell. And I started thinking, ‘Gosh, I want to, maybe, capture these stories’. And that’s where the idea of the book kind of came about,” she says.

The book expanded to include stories from women worldwide. 

“It’s not really a swimming book,” she says. “It’s about how we relate to the water. What is so strongly connecting about womanhood and water, about the communities of women that we find around the water, and how we navigate the ebb and flow of life.” 

Emma’s story is woven throughout the book, focusing on loss, grief, recovery, and the joy she found through swimming. 

“These are all such common threads that run through our experiences. Everybody suffers loss of some form, whether it’s loss of a person or a career or health that you used to have,” she says.

Swimming has helped Emma be more fully present. 

“Particularly if it’s cold water, it’s a place where you still your mind, because you just come in to the moment and in to the bodily sensations of what you’re experiencing,” she says. “It also gives you a real attention to your body, to understand how your body is, and how you are. I’m rubbish at meditating and things like that.”

For Emma, nature is healing: “Even if I don’t feel well enough to get in the water, even just being there and putting my toes in the water, and just connecting with the natural world in that way is profoundly healing.”

Open-water swimming is free of judgement or expectation. “Whether you’ve gone five metres or 500m, you’ve done it. There’s no judgement around it, there’s no measurement of what it’s supposed to look like,” she says.

Five years after her career ended, Emma can’t quite believe she’s written a book. “It’s been quite surreal, because my background is not in writing at all,” she says. She’s already got her next book lined up. “My second book is about tea, and actually that’s quite inspired by my stories from my mum of growing up in rural Ireland, and the placing of the old cast-iron kettle on the embers in the mornings,” she says.

Her dream is to swim in Antarctica and write about it. “The aspiration is to one day go and swim in those ice waters myself,” she says. She’ll leave the flip-flops behind this time, though. “I might wear some boots.”

‘Breaking Waves: Discovery, Healing and Inspiration in the Open Water’, by Emma Simpson, is released this week by Icon Books