Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
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Roni Essex
Freediver, Spearo, Creator
Canadian-born Valentine Thomas is a -170ft freediver and one of the best-known female spearos of all time. What most people are not aware of though, is that behind the thousands of Instagram followers and the videos of her catching XL fish on Youtube, there's the story of a girl, who was bullied at school, suffered from panic attacks, but managed to ditch her old life and find her true calling in life.
"My name is Valentine Thomas, I'm 30 years old and I quit everything I had in life to become a spearfisher woman. I now travel the world to catch my own food, while freediving. Most people, that I come across, think that I've been spearfishing my entire life. They think that “oh this girl, she must be so courageous”. It's actually very far from reality. I'm actually a big wuss, but that never stopped me from pursuing what I love. Spearfishing is a very weird sport but it became my deepest passion and my journey to finding this out was not an easy one. When you see a picture of me struggling to get food or in the middle of the ocean, you would never think that ten years ago I was far away from the ocean. I'm born and raised in Montreal, Canada, where, yes, there are lakes and rivers, but I've never been really big underwater. And to be honest, the water is way too cool for me over there anyways. Also, when I was 14 years old, I went on a holiday with my parents in the south of France and I almost drowned. I passed out on the water, I got caught in an undertow and the lifeguard had to come to save me, the helicopter came, it was a horrible day. At that stage of my life, the water and I were definitely not friends".
"But the biggest thing that kept me from pursuing a lot of big things in life, or kept me away from the ocean, was that my daily struggle with anxiety. I was a prisoner of my own mind, of my own body. When I was a teenager, I got bullied in high school and that had a very big impact on me and created a lot of insecurities. When I was 19 years old, I started suffering from severe panic attacks, and doing little things such as going to school or going for a drink, became a big challenge for me. I didn't want to take medication so with the help of my best friend, Dominique, and with a lot of work in therapy, I managed to face those fears. So I was able to not take the meds and do it one meter at a time. Facing my irrational fears and the process of doing that was to make the uncomfortable, comfortable. And that kind of became my way of living after that. I was putting myself in uncomfortable situations until that became a source of comfort. But let's just start from the beginning".
"I have always been a very career-orientated person. I was dreaming of becoming the biggest criminal lawyer in the country. My idea of success was to be at the top of my field, have a big house, have a fancy car, I just wanted to be bigger. I wanted to be bigger than those bullies, I wanted to look at them and say “you are the loser and not me”. My family is a group of intellectuals, my mom is a corporate lawyer and she spent many many nights in the office. She actually still sends me university applications because she thinks I'm having a midlife crisis a little bit too early! So by following this path of my parents, I thought that success was made on studying hard and having a respectable and stable profession. So I followed this path, I went into my law degree and then I studied for my masters, but something was still wrong. I just couldn't take the plunge, I couldn't push myself to enter the system that I spend my entire life preparing for. I know it's not because I'm a millennial, it's not because I’m lazy, it's actually just because I could not picture myself doing the exact same thing for the next 40 years. But what would I do instead? That's the only thing I've been told, so I did what a lot of young, insecure people would do; I just ran away.
I grabbed my passport, I moved to London and, still not sure what I would do, I subscribed to university again, and I studied for two years to do my conversion course and be a lawyer in the UK. But to nobody's surprise, I was still unhappy. I was in my early 20s at that stage, so I just threw myself into a life of partying. I went traveling all around Europe, I was dancing as often as I could, I was drinking myself to delusional happiness. Everybody seemed so happy around me, but to tell you the truth, I've never felt more alone and disconnected in my entire life. I needed a change of direction ASAP. I started working in finance and I really liked it, but then I learned that sometimes it's not the decisions that you make that have the biggest impact on your life".
"I met this guy named Eduardo and he taught me about this weird sport, and I had never heard of before, and it was called spearfishing. So, I've never pictured myself as an outdoorsy girl, not in a million years. But here I was, ditching partying in Ibiza to go to Africa, to live in the most basic conditions, to catch my own food and share it with my friends and the local community. And this was a world that I never imagined I would find my true calling in life. Definitely not.
So, I was all of a sudden discovering a world where I was eating the best food I ever had in my life. It was one where I was pushing my body to new limits that I'd never even knew existed. It's a world where I was sharing and living in, helping different communities all around the world, and it's also one where my ecological footprint was at its minimum. It’s also a world that I never thought was accessible to me, especially considering how scared I was of the ocean, especially after my accident when I was younger. So when I was 28 years old, I just decided to go all-in. I womaned up and left my job, I sold most of the things I had and I went spearfishing".
"And of course, I don’t have the stability of a full-time job, but I make very decent money by doing something that I love. I hosted a TV show last year, I take people fishing and I’m just loving it. And the ocean that was my biggest fear became my home. And yes, this is a scary and dangerous play sometimes, and yes, sometimes I do put my life on the line, but I felt that facing an entire life of unhappiness would have been way more dangerous for me. So, you don't really find out who you truly are and how to become a better person by staying inside of your comfort zone. It's by putting myself in the least comfortable position that I manage to find through milling in my life.
So here I was, miles away from the coastline of Florida. I was holding this little fish underwater, facing an 8-foot tiger shark. I keep poking it, normally that makes them go away, and I was trying to remain calm as the shark was getting more and more aggressive. He had his mouth open, he was rolling his eyes back. I knew at that moment that the shark could have killed me at any second, but I stood my ground. I kept staring at it and I kept poking it away, and at some point, the shark turned around and swam away. Τhis is what I want to share with you today. When you're facing your own shark, you're gonna be surprised about how strong you are, you're gonna be surprised about the person you actually are. Just keep poking it and you are gonna be able to confront your deepest fear by doing that".