There’s a glorious swimming pool you’ve always dreamed of swimming in, but it’s an invitation-only kind of place, and there are certain expectations you must meet. So you take swimming lessons. As you look around at the other people in the training pool, you discover there are some people who’ve been taking lessons for years but have never tried to qualify for entry into big pool. You realize you don’t want to be one of those people. The big pool is your dream, where you want to be. So you workout all through the fall, winter, and spring. You make good food choices and drink lots of water. You keep a food journal; seek support, advice, encouragement from friends and mentors; you tweak your exercise and eating plans where necessary.

Finally, warm weather arrives. You’ve learned all the skills necessary to swim. You’ve lost that extra ten (twenty, thirty, fifty) pounds and are pretty stinkin’ proud of the way you look . . . except that your legs are a little pasty, but, really, whose aren’t this time of year? Then, you see the ad on TV—your favorite department store is having a HUGE sale on swimsuits, this weekend only.

Suddenly, you aren’t feeling quite so confident about your toned up, slimmed down body. You wonder if you really learned the lessons on how to swim, drank enough water, cut enough calories, did enough spinning-pilates-yoga classes. Saturday morning arrives with the moment of truth: do you go out in public and let your appearance there announce to everyone else that you intend to swim in the big pool or do you stay home and just keep dreaming that, someday, you’ll swim there?

You buck up the courage and go. And you find the most perfectly adorable swimsuit ever. It covers what needs to be covered and flatters everything else. You also run into several people who’ve been swimming in the big pool for years and talk to them—you ask their advice, listen to how they first got to swim over there, share your dream with them. You take your suit home and hang it on the closet door so it’s the last thing you see before bed and the first thing you see when you wake up. It encourages you to keep eating right, to keep exercising. Now all you have to do is wait until it’s warm enough outside to swim.

Then, it comes. Your invitation to the big pool. You can’t believe it. You call all your friends and family to tell them the news. You write about it on your blog. Everyone celebrates with you.

The day arrives. You get to the changing room at the pool house—and it’s luxury you never imagined: Italian marble and Brazilian mahogany and Egyptian cotton. There are so many people sitting around, drinking iced tea, and complimenting each other’s swimsuits and tans. You step into a changing room and put on your perfectly adorable swimsuit. And then you worry. Those other swimmers looked so much better in theirs than you do. You’ll never measure up.

But this is your dream. So you come out of the changing room. You even garner several compliments on your figure and your swimsuit. Your confidence is restored. You think about just hanging out at the pool house today, but then you remember what you came for. You grab one of the thick, plush, fluffy towels, fling it over your shoulder and follow the “This Way to Pool” signs. You step outside. The sky and water are perfectly blue, the sun is warm. There are many people in the pool already (but it’s so huge that it’s never crowded).

You look around.

There are a bunch of people sitting in chairs under an awning just looking on. They’re kind of pudgy, very pasty, and look afraid of the water. But they got here, so they must have done something right at some point.

There is another group just beyond the chair sitters who are lounging in the sun, tanning up. They still look pretty good, but it’s obvious they have not come here to swim but to bask in the rays. Still, they must have done something right somewhere along the way, because they got their invitations.

Several people sit or stand at the side of the pool, dipping their toes in it. They talk back and forth amongst themselves and occasionally call out to the people in the pool—the water is too cold, too hot, too crowded, not crowded enough; it has too many chemicals, not enough chemicals; it’s too deep, too shallow; the requirements for entry aren’t strict enough, they’re too strict. They even tell the people swimming in the pool they aren’t doing it the right way and yell out advice on how to do it better.

Looking around, you realize you recognize people in each of these three areas from the training pool. People who, like you, went to learn how to swim because they dreamed of swimming in this pool. It makes you wonder why they haven’t gotten in the water yet.

There are dozens of diving boards—which everyone knows is the best way to get into the pool—so there’s never a queue. The most popular ones are low to the water’s surface, but there are some that are so high they make your head spin just looking up there.

You decide you’re going to go ahead and take the plunge. You find an open diving board and climb up. Heart racing, you stand at the back and look down the length of it to the water beyond. It’s so long! You take one step, then another. The pool is so much closer than you imagined. Finally, you step to the end of the board.

In the pool, you see all of those people whom you’ve longed to be with, whom you’ve longed to swim like. Some are doing a leisurely backstroke. Some are freestyling to rival Michael Phelps. There are even three or four here and there who are synchronized swimming.

Your gaze moves to the water below your feet. Instead of clear and blue and warm, it now looks murky, dark, cold. Fear grips you. If you jump in, you’ll drown because you didn’t learn your lesson well enough. You don’t have your floaties, your life jacket; the training pool was less than five feet deep, while this pool could drown a giraffe. A couple of people standing on the side yell at you to get off the board because with your pasty legs, you’re definitely not ready to get in.

You look down and realize they’re right. You can’t get into the pool with pasty legs! You immediately get off the board and hurry over to the area where the sunbathers are. Looking around, you see so many people have such a massive head start on you when it comes to tanning. But you do have to wonder at those who have already reached what you think is the perfect shade—why are they still over here tanning instead of in the pool swimming? But it’s your first day, so you spread your towel and lie down—making sure you can still see the pool and dreaming, some day, you’ll be tan enough to get in.

The summer goes by—and before you feel like you’ve attained your perfect tan (after all, there were lots of distractions that kept you from going to the pool every day), the pool closes for the season. You’re disappointed that you never got to get in the water, so you console yourself by going back to the training pool. You recognize so many people there from the big pool—the ones sitting under the awning, the sunbathers, the hecklers along the side. They get into the training pool, but even here they don’t work as hard as they could. The sunbathers work on the same stroke over and over and over, never wanting to learn any other way to swim. The chair sitters swim half a lap with one stroke and then stop to watch everyone else, before finishing the lap using a different stroke, never mastering any. And the hecklers want to show everyone how they’re better at swimming than anyone else, even those people who were out in the big pool. These are not the people you want to be in the water with! But you realize that lying on the side of the pool all summer, you’ve let yourself go—stopped watching what you ate, stopped working out, forgot some of those lessons you learned. So you spend the fall, winter, and spring re-training, learning new swimming techniques, adding new exercises, cooking new foods.

The next summer comes, and you’re ready. You’re getting into the pool this time. You go get a new swimsuit (because sunbathing ruined last year’s). Opening day is announced. Everyone in the pool house tells you how much better you look this year than you did last year—your suit is cuter, your body looks better, you still have last year’s tan. This fills you with confidence, and you go out with your head held high. Once again, you get on the diving board and step out to the end. Sure, the water below you still looks dark, murky, and cold, but this time you’ve learned lessons on how to deal with that.

Someone standing on the side yells at you that your brand-new, cuter-than-last-year’s swimsuit is out of season, doesn’t fit right, doesn’t look good on you and you’re too pasty to get in the water and they remember you from the training pool and don’t think you have what it takes to swim in the big pool.

You stand there, unsure what to do.

This happens every day for weeks. You’re losing your confidence in yourself and your hope that you’ll ever see your dream of swimming in the big pool happen.

Finally, the last day before the season ends, you get up on the board. The hecklers are lined up, ready to tell you why you aren’t ready to dive in. You know what they’re going to say—you say it to yourself every night when you get home after not getting into the pool.

Then, down in the pool, someone swims up to the side, looks up at you and says, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

You ask them if they can come out of the water and hold your hand as you jump in.

“No,” they say. “You have to take that first step yourself.”

Someone else swims by and tells you they like your swimsuit and how you look in it.

But the hecklers’ voices are still loud in your ears.

Still another swimmer surfaces and tells you they saw you swimming in the training pool and you’ve got what it takes to swim in this pool.

The hecklers yell that the water is too far down and you’ll drown as soon as you jump in.

Another swimmer comes along and says, “We can’t swim with you if you never jump in.”

So you . . .