I felt like my 14-year-old self in my 22-year-old body. There was no difference between. I was fast. I was strong. I was happy and free. I moved at will like a spirit bigger than myself. I had forgotten what it felt like to feel so powerful.
From when I was six years old to 16, I was an ice skater. My mom would wake me up at 5 am on Wednesdays and Fridays to go to the rink before middle school. Tuesdays and Wednesdays again, I went at night. And Sunday, I went in the later morning. It was a huge part of my life. It taught me to be coordinated and graceful. It taught me to draw power from within. It taught me to pay attention to detail and to be resilient. And it taught me to enjoy the cold.
I quit when I was a sophomore in high school because I wanted to focus on music, because I was too busy to go with the added emphasis on academics, but mainly because going once a week after years of going five times was too much of a letdown. It was like being reminded of withdrawal symptoms consistently without being able to fully withdraw and move on. I was in limbo, in purgatory. I was afraid to let go, but more afraid to keep participating while seeing my skills slowly wane and wane till I had nothing. I quit and I didn't look back. I couldn't watch the Olympics because I missed it too much. I visited the rink one time - the rink that had been my home for so many years - the rink I had stayed at after hours when my mom was at school. It was my space and I remembered how it felt to be graceful, at home in my own body, and the rush I felt when I would win.
But it's not always about "winning" now is it? It's about feeling joyous and powerful in the moment. It's about feeling free and happy and having hope that even now, feeling somewhat broken, that you'll once again be whole. It's about detaching from all the times you've sold yourself to darker things and lost bit by bit your identity and instead feeling innocent, pure and light. Because those moments are the ones that make up your life. Those are the moments you think of when everything feels heavy. Those are the moments that remind you why you can and should stay present - that even when surrounded by a complicated world, you can be occasionally simple.
It's not about winning. It's about becoming closer.
Frodo asks at the end of LOTR, "How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold." And I often wonder about this. I often wish I hadn't experienced so much. It all felt so important at the time, but experiences take from you as much as they give and often I worry I won't get that energy, motivation, and pure connection back. But that's not always true. We can pick up the threads of our old lives. They cycle back when we need them just like in knitting, when you switch colors and loop the other color up through the sides until it's time again to switch back. Once you learn something, you never truly unlearn. Even if you feel you have, just take the chance, set your arms free and remember that you were once strong and powerful and you still are. Nothing has changed as much as you think it has. And life is less linear than we believe. We may miss a version of ourselves and often we need others to help us bring it back, but we are never far enough from it that we can't.
If you are bogged down with the complications of your existence, try picking up again something that you feel you abandoned. It could be writing, it could be music, it could be skating or something entirely different. But regardless of what it is, when you revisit an aspect of yourself that you thought you lost, you will forget a bit about the complications. You will feel light, simple and part of the world.
It was nice not to think about a goal or to think about where a small increment of truth could get me in the future. My forward-thinking anxiety disappeared and I was able to spin around and fly, suspended in the moment. It didn't quite matter when that next rope would appear. Because it's not about winning. It's not about an end goal or a continuing path or a fate to latch onto. It's about becoming closer.
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