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hannahrose457-blog · 8 years ago

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The Fall

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the most significant events in my life have always taken place in the fall. Symbolically, spring is supposed to be the time of rebirth and renewal, but what I’ve learned over the years is that those things can’t occur until fall has made room for it by letting go of the old and welcoming the new.

In my life at least, this law of nature has always held true.

Throughout high school, fall was my busiest time of year. While everyone was transitioning back into school, into new classes, into new friend groups, I was also transitioning into a new diving season with my high school team and attempting to move up a competitive level in gymnastics with my club team. What always felt like the most pressing transition however, was making it to the next level.

I needed to learn an array of newer, more intimidating skills on each event and perfect them for competition before the season could start in December -- and knowing me, it would take forever to learn them all. The majority of these fall practices were filled with irritated warnings from coaches that if I didn’t speed along the process, I’d be stuck repeating the same level for another year. Not that I needed to hear that -- I already knew. My mind would get stuck on that frustrating ‘what-if ’ scenario for so long that my throat would go tight and tears would well up in my eyes. I needed to move up. I needed to prove to my coaches, and myself that I could do it. But here’s the thing...

Big girls don’t cry, and in gymnastics, little ones don’t either. It doesn’t matter how badly you want to do well, how frustrated you are at daily failures despite 110% effort, or how the day in general is going in or outside of the gym. We were all taught from a young age that gymnasts are meant to be strong and brave. To cry at anything other than a serious injury undercuts both those things. So instead, as little warriors, we learned to channel those emotions into our routines.

Most of the time this rule served us well. In fact, more often than not, this technique turned crappy practices into great ones. However, there was one night that this technique didn’t work in my favor. On the night before Halloween in my sophomore year, that technique would actually reign in the beginning of the end to my gymnastics "career".

That night, as stood in the corner of the floor, physically ready to tumble across it, my mind was wandering everywhere else. I remember thinking that while I was stuck at the gym doing the same thing over and over, like an insane person, my friends were making plans for the next night without me. I knew my best friend from the team quit a week earlier because she was just as tired of missing out as I was, and that idea wasn’t helped by the fact that, based on previous patterns, I already had a pretty good handle on how the night would go after practice. My Mom and I were probably going to fight again like we did on the car ride in, and I knew that after a long day, after an exhausting practice, I was gonna end the night, sitting in the same old slump at my desk, trying to figure out how to finish all the busy work from my teachers before 2:00 a.m., only to wake up like a zombie the next day at six to start all over again.

I couldn’t shake those thoughts, so, like a million times before, I harnessed it for the one stupid tumbling pass in my routine that I couldn’t stop balking on. I said to myself “if you can’t stop thinking about it, just use it!”. So, I did. I ran, almost angry at the circumstances and threw all my power into the pass. It helped... for the first half, until I flew out of control in a transition between skills and heard my wrist pop as it made contact with the floor. When I sat up, the room was spinning and my arm had gone numb...

Before I get into what happened next, I think it’s time to give you a little background.

We all have some moment at some point in our lives -- conscious or not -- that reels us into pursuing a passion. It’s the moment we decide that this thing is not only worth our time, energy, and effort but that we WANT to make it a priority. For me, that moment was two-fold.

I was three years old when I took my first gymnastics class and I was terrified of bars. I used to cry whenever the coaches flipped us upside-down and over the bar. But one day, when all the parents came to visit, I managed to do it without crying. I think I was more surprised at myself than proud, the only thing I knew was that I wanted to do it again.

When I got really invested was the summer between third and fourth grade at sleep away camp, where I got to meet 2004 Olympic All-Around Champion, Carly Patterson. Almost as soon as I got home, I played back videos on YouTube of that competition, and decided that’s who I wanted to be when I grew up. A few interviews and montages later, I was certain that this glorified representation of sacrifice and determination was something I was not only willing, but eager to replicate.

But then things got real and I had to actually give up all other activities -- soccer, cheerleading, basketball, school plays, a lot of time with friends because practices would end too late…I’m sure there’s more.

It wasn’t until Freshman year of high school that I decided to break up the monopoly gymnastics had on my time. That fall, I decided to try out for diving so I could be apart of a team at my high school and this decision was anything but popular with my coach. She warned that one was eventually going to get in the way of the other -- and while at the time, I didn’t want to believe her, she was right.

With consecutive or staggered practices, late night study sessions, and little sleep in between I was stressed out, and clearly overworked. No matter how much my body begged me to let go of one sport, I was too stubborn to listen. So, one day I was warming up for practice with a sore back (as per usual), and I began to stretch my shoulders, when felt something shift in my back. It was a disk. Multiple, actually. The only way to really summarize the months that followed is that they were spent worrying that I’d never get back to where I was, even after full recovery, and pining over what could have been. There’s this saying in gymnastics: when you miss a day, it’s like missing a week, if you miss a week it’s like missing a month… and I was out for almost 6 months. I started to think about what my life might be like without the sport, and I came up blank. I didn’t know who I was without it. So, in light of this identity crisis, I worked hard on physical therapy, did whatever I could in practice, and eventually regained what I’d lost -- in fact that summer I peaked -- but then came the fall.

That night before Halloween in my sophomore year, when I sat up to a spinning room, there’s a million things I probably should have felt, but what I actually felt was relief. Lately, I’d been putting so much pressure on myself to surpass expectations. Every adult I knew felt compelled to give their unsolicited advice, telling me that my hopes, my goals for my own high school experience, were unrealistic and that I couldn’t do it.

Being a younger teenager, if anything, their doubt motivated me even more to try anyway. I needed to prove them wrong -- to show that I was made up of tougher stuff. I thought that if I was only determined enough, I could push through and have success in everything. But on that eve of Halloween, I’d just about reached my breaking point. I was losing touch with my best friends and it felt like it was all for nothing. I was busting my butt to be a mediocre diver, to do well, but not to my potential in school, and to see my chances of progressing into the next level diminish by the day. I started questioning what I was really doing this all for. As much as I loved gymnastics, I hated what it was doing to me. In a way, this fall felt like divine intervention.

A lot of young people in competitive sports don’t reach their goals as quickly or as well as they would have hoped. For many of us, there is this painful moment of clarity, realizing that it may not be worth the struggle to continue, but you want desperately to keep going anyway. I knew I’d reached that point.

So, after healing my sprained wrist, I went back for more. But this time, knowing that my feeling of being overwhelmed is what caused my injury, I opted to scale back on my commitment. Through the end of sophomore and beginning of junior year, I joined my high school’s gymnastics team, but kept going to some club practices. Despite my efforts, come the next fall, as a Junior, I’d be sitting across from my head coach, struggling to explain to her why it was time to finally let go.

For the months leading up to the meeting, I could barely even think about quitting as an option, let alone discuss it out loud. So when the time really came, I was fighting to choke back tears at every word. I can still remember her eyes darting between my Mother and me with suspicion. She questioned whether my parents were pressuring me to make this decision, and if I was certain I had to quit now. She was always very protective of her gymnasts, and only wanted the best for us, but the truth was I did. Just like the year before, I’d over committed. Diving and gymnastics were a given, but I’d also waived up in two classes, started drivers-ed, needed to study for the SATs and needed to get a job. It was a heart-wrenching decision to make, given I was breaking a promise to my eight-year-old-self, that I wouldn’t stop until I physically couldn’t do it anymore, but in a way that’s what happened. There were only so many hours in a day and for my own well being I needed to do something other than spend them all worrying about how I could do everything -- or at this point anything -- successfully.

I hated this decision more than anything, but it needed to be made. After that, even though a partial burden was lifted, by letting go, I was throwing myself into in the cold unknown, with the new task of rebuilding myself.

Slowly, I started getting involved in other things. I spent more time with my church youth group -- the people who would become my second family. I got a job as a coach at the YMCA, and began discovering new passions like painting, music and journaling.

I’m still finding myself, and I still miss gymnastics but I look at it now as more of an experience to be grateful for. My roots are with gymnastics. It will always be a big part of who I am, but it doesn’t define me. It helped me build my work-ethic, and pride in what I do. But by stepping back I grew even more. I’ve become more confident as a whole, learning to laugh at myself more often, and not to take myself too seriously. I’ve also realized that how successful or happy I feel should not be contingent on validation from others, or my ability to fulfill former goals that have become obligatory and outdated.

What’s important to me now has also changed compared to before. What’s important is surrounding myself with friends and family who support and value me, and just as important, is being there for them in the same way. It’s important to me to be challenged. I want to seek out new mountains to climb, and new ways to get closer to reaching my potential -- so long as the attempt doesn’t negatively affect my physical, mental, and emotional well being. Its important to live in the moment, and it means so much to me to make those moments count.

I could look back and hold onto regret about walking away from something that I loved, but I know those moments in gymnastics counted for something. They made me stronger -- strong enough not to shy away from doing the right thing, and stepping out into the unknown. It was hard at first, but the best thing I ever did for myself was let the past fall away, and make room for newer passions and dreams to bloom.

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