2d swimming platformer - animation problem sprite flipping on me

hi all im currently attempting to make a 2d platformer i had a idea of.
i have a 2d sprite that i setup animations for swimForward and swimBackward using the Xaxis my animations work correctly when only the left and right buttons are pressed using a 1D blend tree as well as returning to the correct idol static sprite animation.

however i also need to beable to move my player up and down but for the up and down i was just going to use a vector3 to rotate my players axis in Z to give the illusion of diving or ascending so i didn’t have to remake the sprites on 45° angles for all of the animations. (altho i havent researched this yet so im not sure if its possible yet)

but when i touch the up and down arrows my sprite will flip to a swimmingBackward animation unless im pressing down and right or up and right.

i have tried commenting out the animator.setfloat line containing the y movement as well as commenting out position.normalize() line

i have also tried switching from position to change as i read some where that position is for vector2(but ill need vector3 to handle my z rotations later anyways)

i have sprinkled debug.logs everywhere and confirmed that im not thowing any x values on my y movements(thought originally that possibly my .normalize was adding to the x)

i was reading about a setting “bake into pose” but from what i can tell this is for 3d graphics as its missing in my 2d animations i only have loop time and pose available to me(altho it says set rig to humonoid but i cannot find anything that pertains to this).

im out of ideas on where to look at for what is causing my animation to flip to a reverse sprite when im touching the up and down arrows

this most likely was not the most efficient way to do it but i decided to scrap blendtrees(every turtorial i have watched uses blendtrees) and just to play a little more in the animator i came really close using a 2d freeform but would still glitch sometimes, ultimately i ended up just using empty states and adding my animations…

now to figure out how to work in transform.rotate into the code for the 4 corners achieveable