Intent

I'm not good at falling.

I remember falling very often as a child. I wasn't particularly clumsy. In fact, I didn't fall everywhere, all the time. I fell often, but only in one spot. On the way to school. I can't remember what the area looked like, but I remember the falls. For weeks I fell in that one spot. I bloodied my knees. I was always a mess. I didn't fall easily or delicately. I fell with unintentional determination for calamity. My mother was with me on these walks, but nothing could prevent this daily occurrence. It was destiny. This sidewalk would not let me go until it had proven a point that I should carry with me through the rest of my life: traps await you, you will fall hard, it will hurt, there is nothing you can do to escape. Unless, maybe you weren't on this sidewalk at all? I didn't learn to accept falling. I learned to fear it above all else. It was an unnatural spell. It was a curse to fall so often. I would never do it again.

This is relevant because I've become obsessed with Yuri on Ice. I'm fatally susceptible to depictions of enduring love. I'm sure everyone loves a good romance, but love for me is that jagged bit of sidewalk I can't seem to get over safely. It's the one other consistent experience of failure that I have not been able to move on from or avoid. I don't play a lot of sports because I'm afraid of the damage. I don't climb. I generally minimize risks. I never invest too much in anything I like because I don't really want to know I'm no good. But even the illusion of love, even an unbelievable depiction of love, the inkling of an unrealistic dream of love can motivate me to cast caution aside.

So I'm psyching myself up to learn to fall, because I want to learn to ice skate. I know even if I learn there's no chance at the edge of 30 that I'll become competitive, so it takes a little bit the weight of my constant nagging ambition off. I don't have to worry about perfection. It's just a fun little thing to add to all the other little things that I can claim I've done. I just want to learn to fall and get back up. I want to be able to skate fast knowing that if I fall it might hurt but that hurt doesn't have to be cataclysmic. I think if I can learn a spin, maybe a single jump, I'll be satisfied. The only other thing stopping me beyond my aversion to falling is the dread of embarrassment. I suppose the two could be tied. The physical pain of falling is bad enough, but the psychological trauma of failure compounds the injury. I have to let go of my desire to protect my self-image. It's not like I'm great at doing so, and it's not like my self image is grandiose, either. The underlying absurdity of this fear is that I'm being overprotective of someone I hate.

Luckily, they encourage beginning skaters to wear a helmet. It's impossible to take oneself too seriously in a helmet.

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