22 The Times MagazineArtnik found solace in sports, particularly
kayaking, in which she showed considerable
promise. “It helped me keep my sanity, basically.”
But her mother eventually remarried and
moved out of the apartment, and her older
sister left for the capital, Ljubljana, as soon as
she was old enough. With Simon also absent,
in and out of treatment programmes, it left
Artnik alone with her father for the first time.
Though now sober, his borderline
personality disorder manifested in intense
mood swings and what seemed to Artnik,
now a teenager, a deliberate effort to leave her
feeling both unsure of herself and of his love.
It was as if she were a dog, she says, and he was
the owner, sometimes throwing a ball for her
to chase, but at other times only pretending to
throw it. Testing and teasing and seeing what
kind of reaction he got. “If you’re living with
people with borderline personality disorder, it
can be really, really hard. All the time it’s like
back and forth,” she says, speaking quickly.
“It’s manipulation. Emotional manipulation.”
Already insecure, finding herself the brunt of
her father’s emotional maladjustment almost
pushed her over the edge. In her helplessness,
she contemplated killing herself, just to show
him the pain he was causing. “It drove me
crazy to the point where I wanted to jump
from the balcony. To show him how desperate
I was. And how desperate he made me feel.”
Instead, she too fled to Ljubljana. She
got a job at a skateboard shop, abandoned
her passion for sports, and instead tried to
lose herself in a party lifestyle. Having spent
her entire childhood trying to keep herself
together, as Artnik entered her twenties, she
began to unravel. “I was hurting myself. It was
like a valve,” she says of this attempt to lose
herself in hedonism. “It was the only way
I knew how to open up and show people that I
was f***ed up. That I needed help. I expressed
that through partying and drinking too much.”
She felt disconnected and alone, as though
she were trapped “in a vacuum”. She kept
drinking and partying and bouncing from
one relationship to another. And what made
it worse was that she knew she could do
something far more meaningful if only she
knew how. “I knew that I was a smart girl.
I knew that I had talents. I knew that I had
a good heart,” she says, frowning. “I just
couldn’t place them. I couldn’t find anything
I could express myself through. It was like I
was deliberately sabotaging myself.”
In 2004, her brother died as a result of his
addiction. The night before, he had tried to
call her but she had been too tired to answer.
That same year, her mother was diagnosed
with cancer; she would die in 2009. Not
long after, Artnik found herself on the bridge,
wondering whether she should jump. She
was, more than anything else, just exhausted.
“When I was standing on the bridge, I kindof looked up and said to the universe, ‘I can’t
do it any more.’ ”
It was, she says, an act of surrender. An
admission to whoever was listening that she
no longer had it in her to carry the weight of
her family’s dysfunction. She had spent almost
a decade trying to show the world that she
was not OK. But having finally admitted it to
herself, a funny thing happened. She began to
feel better. Not great. But at least, not quite so
bad. “It was like I was taking off this invisible
backpack,” she says. “And then life started
happening for me.”
A year later, an ex-boyfriend who had
taken up spearfishing invited her along to
the pool where he and some friends trained,
swimming lengths underwater to build up
their stamina. Artnik joined in. Though not in
great shape physically – “If they had taken a
blood test, they would have put me in detox
because I was still drinking way too much”- she found that she immediately enjoyed
the sensation of being submerged. She bought
some fins (freedivers do not call them flippers)
and signed up for a weekend underwater
course in a swimming pool. By the end of the
second day, she was completing length after
length after length without coming up for air.
It was uncanny. Nobody could quite believe
what they were seeing as she continued to
glide, back and forth, beneath the surface.
“I just felt like... this is me.”
She realised very quickly that swimming
underwater was everything her life on land was
not. It was quiet. It was peaceful. It requires
you to calm your ego. “It’s a place where you
don’t need to prove yourself. It’s a place where
you don’t need to fight for your life. It’s a place
where you just... are,” she says. “And you have
a right to be there. It is the biggest feeling of
freedom. And I felt that immediately.”
Artnik and her father had, gradually,
repaired their relationship. But when he too
died of cancer, it seemed that there was little
keeping her in Slovenia. Having already found
herself drawn to freediving and spent some
time training in the open-water discipline,
she decided to commit to this new passion.
Renting an old cottage near Sharm el-Sheikh
in Egypt, she spent nine months doing “super-
intense” training in the Red Sea, mastering
the practicalities of diving to great depths.
She learnt about something called the
mammalian diving reflex, an evolutionary
adaptation that triggers a series of protective
reactions in our bodies once we are submerged
in water. Your heart rate slows to conserve
oxygen. Blood is diverted away from your limbs
and towards your vital organs and chest cavity,
helping to prevent your lungs from collapsing
under the increasing pressure. Your spleen,
which serves as a reservoir of blood, contracts,
releasing more oxygen into your circulatory
system. So we are, she says, better suited to
surviving in deep water than many of us may
instinctively assume. “We all came from the
sea,” she says brightly. “It’s very interesting.”
But, of course, it’s not that simple. By
the time Artnik left the Red Sea, she was
able to dive to a depth of 92m and, shortly
afterwards, announced herself at the 2016
World Championship in Turkey, winning both
the monofin and bifin events. And to do that,
you cannot simply rely on your mammalian
diving reflex to keep you alive.
By then, she had mastered the essential art
of “equalising”, a process in which freedivers
continually shift air into their inner ears in
order to counter the mounting pressure that
would otherwise see their eardrums rupture.
She had learnt too of the danger posed by
nitrogen narcosis, a disorientating phenomenon
also known as “the rapture of the deep” that can
affect divers the deeper they go. “It’s almost
like being a bit drunk. But that means you can
lose orientation. You can lose your sense of
time. And that means you can black out.”
Artnik has never yet lost consciousness,
although it is not uncommon among CWT
freedivers, particularly on surfacing. Fortunately,
rigorous safety protocols – including the
presence of several scuba-equipped safety
divers and intense medical screening – mean
that fatalities are rare during professional
competitions and record attempts.
Nevertheless, in 2013 the American
Nicholas Mevoli died after sustaining lung
injuries during a world record attempt during
which he seemed to momentarily hesitate
before then continuing his descent to his
target depth. But Artnik believes the fact that
she does not push herself during her dives is,
though it sounds contradictory, the secret of
her success. The struggles she had experienced
earlier in her life mean that, today, she has
perspective on what is important. “All the
heaviness that happened has helped me take
life not so seriously,” she says. This, in turn,
means she doesn’t really get too worked up
about whether she breaks records or not. “And
that automatically takes some of the stress and
some of the expectation away. So you’re not
attached to a particular outcome or result.”
This lack of expectation is relaxing which,
as we now know, is the ideal state in which to
dive. “So that hard life? It is a gift now,” she‘It’s not just physical; the
mind has to be ready
to go deep.’ Can she go
deeper? ‘I don’t want
to put limits on it’
DAAN VERHOEVEN