I bring people to the water, despite the cold. I admire anyone taking up outdoor swimming in January. The ground is littered with icy footsteps some mornings now, where swimmers’ feet meet the cold ground on the scamper to the sauna. This is not the lido of lazy summer afternoons where you can stretch out on the grass to dry off. Not even the crows spend long on the cold, muddy ground, preferring to swoop low over the lido and then perch in the trees to study us.

They have different reasons for joining. My supervisor, N, has been curious for months and has finally bought a wetsuit to join the other mums who go to Brockwell. Last time we met, she told me she’d finally been in and even managed to take her hood off. There is an unnecessary shame about wetsuits for some people, I find. Do what you need to get in, I think, and don’t apologise for it.

C is coming tomorrow because she’s heard it’s good for anxiety. I hope it works for her. There is something about being made to breathe slowly and deeply, and to only have space to think about that, that could make the cold water very mindful.

The lifeguard stopped me yesterday to ask me why I come. “Everyone has a story,” he said. I’m still figuring mine out, but it’s a mixture of curiosity (can I do this?), stubbornness (everyone is telling me I can’t or shouldn’t), determination (I want to know what my body is capable of) and compulsion (I don’t understand it but I don’t want to stop doing it). I haven’t ever regretted a swim. I give my rage and sadness to the water and it takes it, gladly.

Here’s a thing that getting into cold water has taught me: if you’re afraid of something, just do it, even if you do it badly. Fake it, in fact, until you’re doing it for real. Because sometimes when you’re pretending to do something, you discover you’re doing it for real.

When I get into 5C water, I do it slowly. I will never be someone who dives in and immediately starts swimming face-down front crawl. I walk halfway across the shallow end, adjusting to the feeling of cold water on my lower half and splashing some on my face and neck to let the rest of my body know what’s coming. When I reach the lifeguard’s chair, I lower myself down and start doing arm pulls for breaststroke. The movement of my arms tricks the rest of my body into thinking I’m swimming, and before I know it my legs are kicking up behind me and I concentrate on breathing out because my lungs are working hard to draw breath in.

And that determined walk down the steps that starts this off: it comes with a voice in my head saying ‘you don’t have to do it this time, you know. No-one will know. Just turn around and get dressed.’ And every time I ignore it and walk in. Because listening to it just this once will turn into listening to it every time. It’s persuasive. It wants me to take the easy route and stay comfortable. But being uncomfortable, doing something even though I don’t think I can, is too important a lesson to learn.

Similarly with moving my arms before my legs realise what’s going on: it makes me feel like I am fake swimming. I start doing the motions and then suddenly I am swimming for real. And this is how I feel about setting up as a counsellor: I’m doing all the steps but none of them feel quite real, or deserved. But I do them anyway. I fake it and I get it done, and it turns out that’s the same as believing in it and getting it done. I email a client, I view a book, I make a booking, I write a contract. It all feels like play, like a bit pretence. But the end result is the same: tiny steps forward to the thing I really want to do. I move my arms until my legs join in. I swim. I counsel.

“And then, of course, he died,” he said, as we all sat gently steaming on the top shelf of the sauna. There is something about the post-swim sauna chat that tends towards death. Almost every time I’ve been, someone has delivered an anecdote that ends with someone dying. Sometimes, rarely, the death happened at the lido: a heart attack in the showers. More often, it’s happened somewhere else, usually unexpectedly: the running coach who had cancer, the parent who had a stroke, the partner who had a heart attack.

I think it’s a combination of the cosiness of the sauna – it’s small, warm and feels literally life-giving as our hands and feet defrost – and the vulnerability of bodies, near naked, all equal, that makes it easier to talk. That, and the fact we have all just done something that has brought us closer to death. It’s a ridiculous thing to do, like being stabbed all over with needles as your hands and feet sting, then become painful, then go numb so your hands form claws and your feet struggle to manoeuvre into flip-flops when you get out. An extra length could be the difference between walking to the changing rooms and collapsing on the side. We all have to listen to our bodies, from the tops of our heads to the tips of our toes, and recognise when it’s time to stop. And when we do get out, we are cold but exhilarated, feeling we have faced something and conquered it. Our bodies are thriving, we are here, we are alive.

And that thrill can make you think more about both what your body is capable of and your own mortality. There is such a fine line between safety and danger. We become vulnerable, and that opens us up to a new level of conversation between strangers. I will miss them when the sauna closes in spring.

One thing I’ve noticed since becoming part of smaller communities is how that feeling of belonging translates beyond them.

Being part of parkrun, and the lido, has made me more confident at talking to other people who go there. It’s easy to exchange a few words with the person next to me as we line up at the start of the run, or to ask the person behind me in the finisher’s funnel how their race was or where their leggings are from, or to chat to other swimmers in the sauna as we slowly warm up. It would feel strange not to have those conversations now, to sit in silence beside fellow swimmers or to ignore the efforts of other runners. We know we’ve got at least one thing in common, so let’s start there and see if we can’t improve each other’s day with a tiny moment of connection.

And I’ve noticed that I’m more likely to start a conversation with people outside of those places, now that I’m more confident that talking to someone is more likely to make their day than to ruin it. More than that – other people are more likely to strike up a chat with me. Is it my demeanour? The fact I make an effort not to stare at my phone if I’m on my own but to look around at my surroundings? Am I giving off an ‘I’m ok really’ vibe? Whatever it is, it’s delightful. Yesterday a man came over to me at the lido as I sat at one of the tables and told me it was his first cold water swim and would I mind filming him? Of course not, I said, and he showed me which button to press and asked if I’d stand at by the steps to get his whole swim on camera. His friends wouldn’t believe him without proof, he explained, as I told him he would be absolutely fine and to enjoy his swim (he wasn’t looking for encouragement, looking back, but it’s my default position when it comes to swimming). And later that evening, after watching Knives Out at the cinema, a woman in the queue for the toilets asked what I’d thought of it and said how marvellous she thought it was and we both commented on Daniel Craig’s (mad! Southern!) accent.

And I find myself wanting to talk to more strangers – to compliment a woman on her dress, to ask someone on the tube what they think of the book they’re reading – because they all feel like they are part of my world. These tiny moments make me feel more real, more human, more cheerful than anything else I’ve tried. I am here, I am seen, I am making a difference.

When I started swimming in the lido off season, I read as much as I could about cold water swimming: how it affects your body, whether wetsuits are essential, the best swimming strokes, the quickest ways to warm up afterwards. Dealing with the afterdrop. The first signs of hypothermia. Why a hot shower straight away is a bad idea. I knew it all from early September, when the water was still around 18C.

But it turns out that the best tip was the one a woman shared with me in the changing rooms: just keep going. I’d tucked it away as a pretty basic rule, one to abide by while also adding other, more complicated rules on top. Because surely there was a reason why some people could swim in November? I would watch men in shorts and women in bikinis from the yoga studio overlooking the pool in winter and wonder what their secret was.

It turns out it’s the only rule you need. Just keeping showing up, getting in, moving around, getting out, doing it all again the next day. There are no shortcuts. You have to keep bringing your body to the water, as often as you can. Do it every day and you won’t notice the difference between 13C, 12C, 11C. What’s one degree?, your body and brain will agree as you slip off your flip-flops and walk down the steps. At 9C your brain will say hold on, this is single figures, I’m not sure we can do this. And your feet will keep walking down the steps as you reply shh, shh, it’s happening. Your brain will protest again at 4C because it has a thing about numbers but you’ll be in the water before it registers.

Because you can get in quickly now, and it’s only when you stop to think about it that you realise you don’t gasp and your heart rate doesn’t shoot up. Not to say it’s easy: the cold can be like tiny needles all over your body and the pain in your feet and the claws your hands form will be your signal to stop. But you will walk in and start swimming in seconds, and you’ll wish there was another you, a control group you, who hasn’t acclimatised to the water, whose reaction you could see. It’s easy to forget you had to work at this. That without showing up, day after day, you wouldn’t be able to do this.

And that’s the biggest lesson: that showing up is what matters. More than talent, what you need is dedication. Keep bringing yourself, again and again, and you will get better. You will do the thing that seemed impossible. There is only one secret. Just keep going.

My world has a two mile radius, aside from Wednesday when I make an anomalous journey of ten miles to Hackney. I walk almost everywhere; I am familiar with every bus route for times when I am tired or rushed. London is a village now, especially in the daytimes when there is no sense of rush. There is time to stop and watch the parakeets squabbling in the trees, or stroke a cat on a wall for minutes at a time, or take the longer route just because.

And in this village I have formed tiny relationships with people who regularly cross my path. There is Simon, the marshal at parkrun who I wave to three times as I loop round the course and then stop to chat to on the way home. He was the first person I told when I got a new PB, sweaty and giddy and wobbly with endorphins, because sharing it with someone was important, just doing it wasn’t enough. There is Patrick, the lifeguard at the lido to whom I shout a cheery hello when I arrive, mainly so he knows I am there, so he looks up from his book while I swim, in case I get in trouble, in case I start to drown. There is Yvette, who puts her mat behind mine once a week in body balance at the gym, whom I’ve talked to about the best classes and being mixed-race and dead dads. There is Kate, the counsellor in the room next to mine, whose door I bang on when I arrive to see if she wants a cup of tea and a chat. I go in and sit among her sea of papers as she gets ready for her clients. I hear her sometimes through the wall and wonder if her clients feel as safe and content as I do when I sit with her.

And there’s the ever-changing cast of other people: the women leaving the lido as I arrive who say ‘enjoy your swim!’ as they buzz with endorphins; the runners I chat to in the finishers’ queue at parkrun as we catch our breath and check our watches; the dog walkers who nod hello when I smile at their pets.

And they all matter, all these tiny connections. They are important in a way I would have dismissed years ago. It’s easy for me to spend an entire day on my own now, and I need these moments with other people more than ever. They are tiny anchors that reassure me that I am still here, I am real, I matter.