On Being Replaced

I really never thought the end of my skating, my partnership, and my relationship would be while recovering from an injury after an accident, especially in the shadows of my former partner’s developing new partnership—someone who had once been so much more than just my skating partner.

Locker room three was where my bag, sneakers, and personal belongings waited for me after each practice session. As your typical growing teen, I first reached for my phone as soon as I sat on the locker room bench. While a text from my mother was most likely the notification on my phone, it was someone different one day.

A boy appeared on my screen as an Instagram DM. It went along the lines of asking me if I was interested in trying out with him to become a pair partner. This was new and thrilling, and I felt very flattered. But I rejected his offer. Pairs wasn’t a discipline I ever envisioned myself doing. Singles was set in stone for me, so there was no desire to switch over. I proceeded with my usual training on my own, and through the rink board glass, I’d see all the pairs people from the pairs program training off-ice—all their lifts and fancy partner tricks.

Ever since his DM, a small part of me flaunted each time I skated past them—like yes, I am good, continue to want me. Especially since his coaches would be right there, watching. Maybe that worked because he DMed me again. This was a second chance. Yes or no. The two options split in my head. My coach said I should consider it, and I wasn’t opposed to it this time. So, I responded with an agreement to try out. When people heard I was trying out with him, it caused a little stir. But in skating, almost anything is enough to cause some drama—I didn’t let it steer me away.

He and his mother drove down to the rink on the day of our tryout. There was an instant connection. It was a silent, mutual agreement that this partnership was most likely. But to make it official, we explicitly agreed to this partnership.

Being so excited, I could hardly eat dinner the first few weeks. Because we were new, we had to start training immediately to compete in the upcoming competitive season. We squeezed in practices on Saturday mornings—just him and me—with a pair couple that taught us. Our mothers talked to each other while watching our practices.

When summer was over, we had a finalized training schedule that meant no more Saturday practices. Somewhere and somehow, our partnership developed into a relationship. Off the ice, during our personal time, we texted each other every day, updating everything we were doing. It was so sweet then. I looked forward to skating with him more and more; every weekend couldn’t go by any slower.

It’s been almost a decade, so I no longer remember the little details of us anymore, but I want to say that after six months is when we started dating in secret from our parents. The secret was exposed four months later when we held hands while walking around New York City for a competition. While we never got to see their faces from behind, I can almost confidently predict their eyes were open twice as big, glaring at each other, then at our locked hands.

While we were gushing in young love, our mothers hated each other. There were many disagreements between them—one of the biggest ones was who was the better skater. They bickered like hateful sisters, but he and I were ride or die. Glued at the hip. A mirror of each other. Absolute best friends and so in love—he was the first person I loved. Though I was young and didn’t understand much about mature love, those feelings I once felt for him are something I still carry with me as guidance in my dating life. 

As much as you can try, keeping a skating partnership and a personal relationship separate doesn’t work. Living with our mothers, it was impossible to keep their bitterness separate from us. That meant personal arguments eventually carried over into our practices, and bad practices carried over into our personal lives. Everything intersected, and we couldn’t stop it. All of this turned us into oil and water—just like our mothers.

After winning Nationals in 2018 is when things between us shifted. I will not write about the kinds of arguments we had or how intense things became between us. But I sit years later still asking my younger self, “Why didn’t you speak up?” throughout our time together. But to whom? I'm not sure.

The male takes the favoritism in figure skating, I’ve learned. To put everything into perspective, it was a common act for the girl to pay for the boy’s training—because my family refused to do so, this is what made his mother despise us—despite that much of the work in the partnership is not 50-50. I would describe it as more 60-40.

The boy lifts, yes. The boy also has his independent elements, as does the girl. But the girl is responsible for being the stronger one. If the girl doesn’t land her throw jumps, it’s her fault. If she can’t hold herself in a lift, no matter how strong the boy is, it’s her fault. If she doesn’t get her legs in the proper motion for a "twist," it’ll all fail and be her fault. If the girl isn’t stronger, the partnership won’t work. It’s an unspoken, skewed perception.

The crumbling between us led to resentment. There was always something to be mad about: I fell on a jump, a lift was put down, or we simply couldn’t sync with each other anymore. Everything was functioning out of rhythm. Without rhythm, we couldn’t sync our timing—and without synced timing, the risk of accidents increased.

And then it happened. We went to take off for one of our elements, the twist, but something went wrong that resulted in me being lost in the air. Rather than rotating horizontally six feet above him and then being caught by him, I plummeted from a total of twelve feet headfirst vertically. According to others who witnessed it, I bumped into him on the way down, which oriented me back to my feet, twisting and breaking my right fibula into a spiral fracture as I impacted.

When you break your fibula, you can usually still walk on it and don’t need crutches. But my break was directly above the ankle, so I couldn’t walk and needed crutches for at least a month. And suddenly, I was projected to be out for at least eight weeks. We were definitely missing Nationals.

One day, as I lay with my leg propped up on its usual pillow during recovery, my mother burst through the door after work like a storm.

The sentence, "Your coach is an ass," struck the room I was sitting in. She had just gotten off a phone call with him. He called to talk about lessons that were due to be paid, despite being months earlier than the written agreement that she could pay later when my family had collected enough money to afford it.

My mother is an intelligent woman. She knew the hidden message beneath it: there’s been another girl set up for my partner.

"Tell me,” my mother pressed when he dismissed this idea, "should I transfer Jade back to [regular brick-and-mortar] high school?" Yes, that was what he told my mother. He phrased it as if it'd be in her interest to send me back to regular high school. And to confirm it, hours later, my partner admitted to it when I asked him about it. Then and there, it was revealed that for a few weeks, this had all been being planned.

It was as if, throughout those weeks, I wasn’t pressured back onto the ice at four weeks of my recovery to try to make Nationals. As if I wasn’t bearing the discomfort of the thick, plastic cut-out pipe—lined with a layer of foam—DIY-ed by our off-ice trainer to "protect" my fractured ankle while skating. As if the coach, the same one who’d later attempt to win but lose against us in court, didn’t witness me endure all this pain in my lessons with our other coach, whose hands I had to hold with every step I took.

My skating was worse than a toddler's, as I struggled to take even the smallest steps. What typically took me five seconds to skate across the rink took me a whole five minutes. I will never, ever forget the kind of pain I felt, and I will never believe that I returned with still a thick line between my white bones, clear as day in the X-rays. All for what?

To be replaced by a well-off girl.

I cried every day for at least ten months, then slowly moved on. There was no getting over it, or so it felt. This was the lowest point in my life. I was sent back to my high school, which wasn’t an easy transition. After many isolating years of skating and doing online school, I was tossed straight into the fire of a crowded high school world when I returned. The one friend I kept in touch with was in a different lunch period than me, so I replaced those twenty-five minutes with walking laps around the school and listening to music. Then, I'd go home and cry. For a moment, I believed there was no purpose for me in this afterlife of skating—of being an athlete.

Hopeless love muffles rationality. I continued to date this person months after, not understanding the growing distance between us. We broke it off a few months later, and then I discovered two months later that he was now dating his new girl. Breakups have their way of revealing many things—that our waning connection was because he had fully chosen her. When I asked him why or how, he replied, "Maybe because she's just a new girl." It's been six years since I’ve spoken to him.

I lost two things at once from this—skating itself and him, who was tied to it in every way. Splitting and being replaced made me feel worthless on an indescribable level. Like winning nationals with him wasn't enough or getting on Team USA with him wasn't enough. Then, it all became personal. I wasn't pretty enough, my personality wasn't interesting enough, I wasn't skinny enough, and nothing about me was enough.

What hurt even more was seeing some of my closest people rooting for them—like they were the new pair to watch, the next big thing. They acted like they were destined for greatness, like they were promised to become something bigger, something better—something that never would’ve happened if he were still with me.

But having money doesn't guarantee success—that's what I realized. I was very curious to see how they'd do. His new girl was also new to pairs, just like I had been when we started. She'd have to go through everything I did—the shaky first lifts, the countless hours trying to sync timing, the frustration of feeling out of step. It's not easy, even with the best resources at your fingertips. The foundation of a strong pair isn't built on expensive coaching or top-of-the-line resources—it helps, but it's not necessary. Connection, trust, and the ability to move as one are complex to manufacture but are the driving force.

Watching all of this was a cruel kind of pain—witnessing these kinds of people cheer on his new partnership, knowing I was seeing all of it. But also, just knowing that they didn't even know how it all occurred.

With all the time I now had alone, no longer on the ice and free to loathe all I wanted, I started to write. Nothing serious, but more so for my own personal sake, like journaling. Writing became a very powerful healing tool for me during this period. It's all I did for the whole summer. Coming from a family that doesn’t believe in therapy, writing became my therapy. I’m glad, though, that this was the way to healing. I am not devaluing therapy when I say this, as I know it’s a helpful resource, but I don’t know if it’d do the same as being alone and writing did.

Sometimes, I wrote so much about the same thing over and over that I felt sick in my head. I was actually talking to no one but myself yet writing as if I were speaking to somebody about it. This was the start of me living again, exploring, and creating a new identity. But this was the start of my writing career that would replace skating. Many personalities were adopted throughout the rest of my high school years, some being so far from who I am today that they keep me awake late in bed, embarrassed about it. But each one was a phase moving forward.

Those writing documents still sit on my hard drive. Today, I'm nearly done with my English degree. In less than two months, I'll be graduating. After years of developing as a serious writer, I look back at those documents and laugh. How poor of a writer I was! Nonetheless, they captured all the hard truths of everything that happened. In fact, it was perhaps the only time I could write about it accurately with fresh memories and emotions. It's been six years, and I've tried numerous times to rewrite it, but after shutting out the memories of skating for so long, it felt like there was nothing there to remember. This writing you are reading right now is the furthest I've written about our split without giving up. This is the first time in many years.

You may wonder why I bothered to rewrite it if I already have old living documents of it. I was just a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school who didn't have the breathing space from her trauma. I am now nearly twenty-two, and I've had six years of that breathing space. I've found my passion, one that developed into a photography business, and I’ve made new friends, experienced two relationships, preparing to enter the legal field, and have now rekindled with the ice in my own personal ways. I've matured. All of this was needed to revisit this very moment.

So, while I've been out of skating long enough to slip people's minds, I still write this to the version of myself who needed someone to know that she was not handling it okay—that she is seen. I imagine this writing as a letter sent to sea, where it meets my 2019 self, who traveled to the beach with her family during that summer to find peace, as an answer to whether there was a life for me after skating. Yes. A whole new one, one that makes me realize it wasn't skating that was supposed to be the peak of my life.