Member Story | Darrell Ling
February 27, 2026
We’d like to introduce you to Darrell Ling, a strong-minded community member who proves that prioritizing yourself consistently is key to lasting physical and mental well-being.
Darrell has been attending our Centre over the past 2 years to learn how to swim. This experience has been a long, scary, and exciting opportunity. Learning how to swim is not always a positive experience. As a teenager Darrell’s father attempted to teach him how to swim in an unconventional way that left him with a fear of water. In his adult life, he joined the armed forces, becoming a marine electrician in the Navy. Throughout his profession he endured multiple traumatic experiences leading to a diagnosis of PTSD causing his fear of water to become more severe.
Darrell began attending our Centre in the Winter of 2023. He had been working with an occupational therapist (OT), they decided it was time to begin the journey of getting into the water. Before Darrell began his swimming lessons, he started with exposure therapy. This consisted of visiting the Centre and standing outside of the pool deck to see the active space and visualize the safety systems set up to keep members safe. As Darrell’s journey continued on, he and his OT were able to meet with our Aquatics Team to see if any of our staff had experience and felt capable in assisting Darrell in overcoming his fear of water.
In the Spring of 2023, Darrell was ready to begin his swimming lessons. Darrell began working with our Aquatics Coordinator, Susana, who as Darrell says is “a great fit…if you don’t have a great fit the lessons wouldn’t work out”. At the beginning of their lessons, they mostly walked around the pool getting a sense of the area. Darrell began by placing only his toe in the water
“The feeling I had was scary, but the OT is here, Susana is here, and the lifeguards are here… I felt nervous, especially of other people’s thoughts, I had to ignore what other people could be thinking”.
Darrell began his lessons by wearing a lifejacket for 6 months and then a swimming belt for 2 months; moving into a positive mindset has helped Darrell surpass his goals.
This past summer, Darrell began attending the Aquatics Centre alone, and meeting Susana for lessons without his occupational therapist. This was a huge milestone in his journey. After months of holding onto the side of the pool and practicing safe entries, Darrell began with the fundamentals of Swimmer 1 in September 2025. He started feeling more comfortable in the water, moving away from the wall and going deeper into the pool, Darrel says “coming to the Centre each week wasn’t getting easier, but going in was – the activity needs to be repetitive, telling yourself you aren’t scared helps”.
Since September Darrell has excelled in working towards the Swimming to Survive Standard from Nova Scotia Lifesaving Society. This consists of disoriented entry, treading water, and swimming distances. Now, Darrell can go into our deeper Competition Pool, standing in the shallower end. He can now swim up to 10m at a time, before he was swimming up to 3m, and is also able to dunk his head under the water.
The next big goal Darrell is working towards is being able to come to the Centre, enter the pool and swim on his own.
Both Susana and Darrell state that the success of their lessons is based on the fact that there is a sense of community between them. They are able to ground each other through conversation focusing on the positives rather than the negatives. Darrell was hesitant to begin his lessons at the Centre because he wasn’t sure how adults could learn how to swim, he believed “this was something I should already know”. But overcoming those thoughts and learning that this fear is quite common, he can help others by sharing his experience.
“If someone is reading this story, I want them to know, it’s not too late to learn how to swim”.
To learn more about Darrell and his story, you can watch the documentary series on Netflix “Heart of Invictus”.