Marlene Nishime
31 March 2011
RD3
Transitions
The first thing I notice when I open my eyes is the ground—black and rubbery, with dark blue speckles patterned over. Bits and pieces of glitter, rhinestones, and crystals decorate this ground like leftover stars that had fallen from the sky. Girls around my age are sitting next to me, struggling to balance their outstretched legs on the bare and almost broken bench that I myself am having a hard time sitting on. There are a few girls in a corner gossiping while tying their laces together, and a few more walking around the room as if their legs had fallen asleep and they’re trying desperately to wake them up. I breathe in the cold air nervously, trying not to pay attention to all of these distractions. I stand up and face the wall behind me, trying to stretch out my body and keep it warm. We are all dressed in tight dresses with intricate designs all paid for by our parents who love us so dearly. A few mothers walk in and begin their long process of hair and makeup, all to make their little girl look as pretty and presentable to the judges as can be. This act always makes me nervous. At any time my own mother will walk through those same doors and greet me with her own set of makeup and hair pins, and will give me a hug, and will tell me she loves me and that I have nothing to be nervous about. I look around the room at all the girls in their skinny little outfits and overly done makeup, smiling at their mothers who live to pamper them. Some mothers give whispering speeches to their daughters, either pressuring them to not mess up or praising them for being their little ice princess. Some girls are smiling with confidence and some are responding with a nervous silence. We are all preparing for the same thing, yet we all seem to be doing something completely different to get us there. [THESIS] I look around and I can’t help but wonder if I am supposed to be here [THESIS]. No matter how we look and feel on the outside though, we are all shouting the same thing to ourselves on the inside: I can’t let these girls beat me. I’m going to win.
The announcer calls our group out. All eight or nine of us rush out of the locker room with our mothers left behind to gossip and small talk amongst each other. My mother leaves this crowd and joins my family upstairs in the bleachers. I step onto the blistering cold ice, feel the wind across my bare shoulders, and let out the biggest bursts of energy to help me get around the ice rink. I feel as though I am stuck in the midst of a herd of galloping horses that have pushed their way through the heavy gates and found freedom on the other side. We stick together, skating the same direction and almost the same patterns, all until we’ve found our spot and have begun our individual warm-ups. For me, it didn’t matter at this point whether I was supposed to be here or not, because now, I am here, and now, I have to win. The wind against my face is harsh, as I feel like I’m skating forty miles per hour (but the exact speed I will never know). I feel free, yet nervous, because I look at all of these girls and how amazingly talented they are, and how I am so lucky to be the underdog who made it to final round. After our warm-up concludes, I am stuck back in the locker room waiting for my performance to come, and after it does, I am ashamed that I ever thought I could be a figure skater. My mother runs downstairs and hugs me, telling me that it’s okay and that I shouldn’t be ashamed of my performance. She tells me that I should be happy I even made it this far, and that it’s all for good experience. My coach also gives sympathetic hugs and tells me that I will do better next year. I know that I will not. I walk away with last place out of eighteen finalists.
It’s been over five years and I am still in shame from thinking about how often I slipped and fell that day. As a sixteen year old, I was born and raised to believe that I was a talented figure skater, and that I would go on to do “great things”. Regionals, Sectionals, Nationals, and then the Olympics—they were all waiting for me. At the time, I belonged in the skating world, and even if I had doubts about it, I knew that there was no other place I knew enough about to say the same. I had belonged there for thirteen years until the demands of college forced me to quit. I am twenty-one, a junior in college, an aspiring filmmaker, and I am wondering, do I belong here? Sometimes I feel as though I’m just chasing after another fantasy of the Olympics, except now I’m working for something just as far away, and in a much more sophisticated and competitive world. I can’t help but wonder if I made a mistake in turning away from my previous life.
When I was twelve, I would take group lessons with other figure skaters around my age, and we would all learn under one coach at the same time. It was like group therapy, where we would all address our problems and the coach would work on us while everyone else watched and learned. I hated how people would look at me. In fact, I hated the thought that people were looking at me so much that I wondered why I am even a figure skater, a sport the requires hundreds of people to watch and critique your every move for four minutes before applauding you off the ice until the next skater comes on. I think at the time I was looking to address my fears and face them, and so maybe that’s why I put myself through that kind of torture at such a young age. My group buddies included a little Chinese girl, Caroline, and an even littler Japanese girl, Mirai. Though the sessions didn’t last long, I got to know these two girls enough to know that they were the real deal. They were talented, small in size, and confident—all things I saw in the ideal champion. We watched each other make mistakes and get back up from them, all with the hopes that each session will make us a better skater. At the time they were merely two ordinary girls looking for the same thing as me. We wanted to make our families and ourselves proud, and we wanted to do this by winning the gold medal. We adored Michelle Kwan and other Olympians of that generation, and only hoped we’d be able to skate with them one day. It was not until high school when this dream became my reality. I became a regular at her family’s rink, skating almost everyday with either her or one of our mutual friends. Everyone seemed to be connected in some way, and Olympic stars that I used to see glittering on television were nothing more than fellow skaters in bland warm-up outfits who shared the same ice on different days. Of course, when competition season came around, they were gone again, travelling the world and doing what they did best. I would work out at the rink and watch them skate on the T.V. that was pasted against the wall. I wondered if I would ever be where they were one day.
When college came around the corner, reality struck me that I could not keep skating for the rest of my life. It was costing my family an outstanding amount of money to let me do what I loved doing, and yet I seemed to be going nowhere with it. I was too distracted with wanting to explore other worlds that I found myself less attentive to figure skating and more attentive to growing up. I wanted to be independent for once. All of my skating friends were so tied to their families for their own success, but I wanted to make my own. So I left to the place most faraway from the ice I could think of that might be able to help me find what I was looking for. Hawaii served not only as a place for me to grow on my own, but as a wild card that, for me, was filled with endless possibilities and opportunities. It was a jungle of my own self-identity where anything, good or bad, could happen. If I couldn’t be the figure skater that I dreamed of being, then I didn’t want to be one at all. Instead, I waved good-bye to my friends in California and pushed myself to the islands, where almost everyone was a stranger and barely anyone had seen ice before.
It was from entering the real world outside of the rink that I realized that I could never win in the game of figure skating because I wasn’t looking for a win at all. I loved skating because I loved the feeling of going fast, with the wind gathering my hair and my blades pressing against the hard ice. I loved the lyrical movements made with every nuance of the music, painting a visual picture of the tone I was trying to set with my body. And it was this realization that I found myself falling into cinema, a place where I could practice just that without the pressure of winning or losing. I found satisfaction in being artistic rather than competitive, and even though film in itself is a competitive world, I’ve found peace in choosing to go my own path and to flow with whatever comes rather than striving to win. I don’t belong in the skating world anymore. I don’t belong in a place where life is about winning and prestige. I belong here, in this life of being behind the spotlight, where I can practice what I love without people watching me all the time. I indulge myself in films as if it were my new skating sessions, learning from each one I watch. I stretch and warm up my body the same as I did before stepping onto the ice, except now I do it because it’s all I have remaining in myself from my skating past. Now, I turn on the T.V. and see Mirai, my old friend, skating at the Olympics, and I smile at just how far we’ve both come along. It took us eight years to arrive here. I can’t help but wonder if we will still belong here eight years from now.
