The Ice Is No Stranger

I step onto the ice at Mullins Center Ice Rink in fall 2024, but it’s not like the ice is a stranger to me. That familiar noise of my blade crunching beneath my blade rips into the air when I lean into a deep outside edge. The last time I skated with a purpose—not just some college girl dawdling during public skate to avoid schoolwork—was when I was a Team USA figure skater. How rusty having a purpose on the ice is. Now, I’m stepping onto the ice as the president of the UMass Ice Skating Club.

It's a quick ten minutes I have to myself before students hobble onto the ice, one by one. I gather them all and start with the very basics: falling, then getting back up. A few glares meet me with confusion when they realize their most feared outcome—falling—is the first thing they’re learning. Someone raises their hand and jokes, “But isn’t the point of you teaching us so we don’t fall?”

I’ve never been president of a club before, and being a former skater hasn’t exactly prepared me for it. The club is less than a year old, but the skater in me takes over without even thinking about it. Planning practices, organizing ice time, and teaching—it all starts to flow back so naturally. And yet, here I am, trying to separate the two identities: I’m a college student running a club, not a figure skater reclaiming lost ground.

 ***

It's been a complicated, long-term relationship with figure skating. I started at the late age of eight but progressed quickly to be sucked into the sport for most of my life, straying from my brick-and-motor middle school after sixth grade for online school to have a full-time training schedule. Most of my trainings started at 9 a.m. at the latest and ended at 4 p.m. at the earliest. I would have at least three to four one-hour skating sessions and one hour of off-ice training. After my long days of training, I’d hop straight onto the computer at home to complete my day’s schoolwork.

Skating had its strings attached to everything in my life. Whether that string was pulled from within or outside, something was always affected, like my family. It divided us for years in ways I don’t think any of us have acknowledged with each other. Every penny, every minute, every word, every thought, every breath inhaled and exhaled was all for skating. Mom and I got into many arguments at home when skating wasn’t going well. Some days, we couldn’t speak to each other and would go through the motions of our own routine.

At some point, that’s all skating had become to me. I suffered from mental blocks, a mind rut that stops you from doing the things you need to do. Except, this rut lasted for years. Everyone around me––my coaches, mother, judges, the nice parents and skaters––were telling me the great potential I held as a young skater, to not screw it up with the mental blocks. The thing is, mental blocks are not a choice from will. It’s beyond a symptom of self-doubt, but a true mind-body disconnection that left me hanging, with a void inside my head. Nothing there. I could’ve had the whole world tell me my future in skating was prophesied, and I still would’ve never believed it or known what it truly meant. Like in any sport, there’s the feeling of continuously raising the standard when you achieve a goal. It’s a good thing, for sure. But for me in skating, it felt like every milestone didn’t matter. There was always another one, then another, and another. There was simply no stopping for savoring.

Skating also isn’t a cheap sport. Skates costed one-thousand dollars (which needed to be replaced every year), costumes were at least nine-hundred dollars if you could bargain, lessons were two dollars a minute (every lesson was for one hour), the ice costed thirty-five dollars per hour (I skated at least three a day) and then travel expenses for competitions were more than two-thousand dollars (skaters competed in at least seven competitions before the big ones: regionals, then sectionals if you qualified, then nationals if you placed from sectionals). There was a sacrifice in everything to stay in this sport I had claimed a promise in.

My dad picked up a second night job at Lowes to support the costs when the house bills started piling. This means my family didn’t eat dinner together for the last three years before I stopped skating. I’d get dropped off at home at 4:30 p.m. before my dad went to Lowe's, my mom and I would eat the dinner she’d cook after work, then my dad would eat what was saved for him sometime at midnight, when we were asleep.

Even though I can say I was a national champion and represented Team USA, there are achievements in this sport that will never outweigh what it took to get there. The very first dinner we had altogether since quitting skating in 2019, which meant no more working at Lowe’s, we did not know how to function as one.

It was deafening to sit in our silence.

College was seen as a “restart” for me, a chance to intentionally separate my skating identity from this “new” version of myself. You fall, you get up, you forget, and you move on. That was the only motto I carried with me from skating to turn against it. I hardly told anyone I used to be a figure skater for multiple reasons. One, because it was a past I didn’t want to resurface. Two, I’d lived by my motto so well that I actually did “forget” a lot of it. And three, I simply didn’t want to answer the lovable, awkward question, “Were you good at it?”

By junior year of college, I tried numerous times––whether for simply myself or a writing assignment––to reconnect myself with the memories of skating. The first time I tried to write seriously about skating was fall semester of 2023. It was for my Medical Narrative class. The purpose of this class was to learn how to write about traumatic events in a way that could heal us. We met once a week, every Tuesday night from four to six-thirty. Those hours felt like the whole night. By the last forty minutes, I was a hostile monkey, banging on its caged walls, squealing “set me free!” There were only six students in that class.

Finally, we got to our first assignment: Write about a time that was difficult in your life, or something like that. Well, my paper was either going to be about my high school ex-boyfriend or my skating era. I cringed too much thinking about my ex, so skating it was. Having to remember skating was like being an inmate forced to recount the details of a crime during an interrogation.

1.     Can you remember the last time you thought about skating?

2.     Can you recall what training was like with an alcoholic coach?

3.     Could you please tell me (myself) when you started to hate skating?

4.     Can you recall the first time skating made you think about not existing anymore?

I should’ve just written about my ex. It’d be no different than talking about him as I did with my girl-friends. But I was five pages deep into this with a deadline four days away. No going back. I hated every part of it. As the cherry on top, the professor handed back my paper two weeks later with “no grade” and said, “I think you need to sit with this essay a bit more and rewrite it.”

Oh.

Grades are worth everything to a student, so I had no choice but to rework the essay. Nothing magical came out of rewriting it. Only a B+ letter grade, but that meant I was released from the shackles of this paper! Sometime next semester, not healed at all from that essay, I found myself rummaging through my old writings out of boredom. If there’s one thing about me, I am quick to archive the writings I hate. Luckily, archiving and not deleting my writings is something I learned to do, because someone once told me, “You just never know.”

And they were right. I never knew rediscovering my B+ worth essay would now hold so much weight for me––that it’d be the first baby step of recovering my skating identity. After re-reading it, a spark lit inside me. I wanted to try writing about it again. Maybe I had become a whole semester wiser and would nail this writing right on the head!

All times failed. I just accepted that skating must’ve been so irrelevant and didn’t matter to me, so that’s how I proceeded. I couldn’t deny the hole in my identity as a college student––a person in general––this has left me.

On January 30th, 2025, this hole would start to refill in trickles. My eyes could hardly open, still half stuck in last night’s dream, but awake enough to read the headlines across my iPhone screen: “‘Several’ U.S. Figure Skaters on American Airline Flight That Crashed into Potomac River, World Champion Russian Figure Skaters Also Reportedly Onboard”

Six of them were from Boston. Death has its unique way of reminding us that life is just blind fate. Discovering that all the skaters were coming back from a developmental camp in Wichita, a kind of camp I could suddenly so vividly remember, triggered a chain reaction of memories.

Not a day has gone by without me thinking of the skaters on flight 5342—all so young, brilliant, and future stars. Thinking about all the opportunities these skaters will never experience revealed to me what I denied for years––that skating really was and still is significant to me in many ways. It goes so deep, and whenever I catch a random moment of remembering, I don’t fail to journal it down.

Journal Entry

March 6, 2025

…I’ve been thinking of my days at the development camps those young athletes were coming back from––how absolutely honored I felt to be there. Because really, it’s such an honor to any growing skater. I’d fly home so thrilled. A little overwhelmed, maybe, but nonetheless hopeful of my future. I know they all felt the same way.

While I may not have known everyone on that flight, knowing that I was once in their shoes connected me to them in a way that’s hard to put into words. It’s reconnected me to my younger self too—the version of me who dreamed big, who once knew what it meant to live for on the ice. Skating is about more than the jumps and the medals—it’s about the community, as complex as it was. About the people who understand exactly what it feels like to lace up your skates, to fall hard and get up again, to push your body past limits most people don’t even know exist. And now, thinking of those skaters—their potential, their unfinished stories—I’ve learned how much this sport has shaped me, how much it’s tied me to others.

At some point in your career, you become a leader, impacting the generations to come after you. But you never think of losing them. In all my 10+ years of skating, I’d never seen the skating community across generations come so close together. It’s been wonderful to see us unite and support each other.

Loss has a way of making you reflect—not just on the people you’ve lost, but on the pieces of yourself that you’ve forgotten. And maybe that’s what’s happening now. I’ve been so focused on what skating took from me that I forgot what it gave me too: connection, resilience, and a place in something bigger than myself, even if I didn’t know it back then.

Despite pushing away my skating identity for years, it was part of my own recovery, and I’m glad it was throughout college. For so long, I tried to detach myself from the skater identity, thinking that moving on meant leaving it behind. And perhaps journaling is the best way for me to write about skating. As an English major, I’m wired to think every writing must be something grand. Perhaps that’s what failed me in every writing about skating. Journaling for the first time about skating, completely spontaneous and non-committal about being profound, has given me the extra space in college to dig out what’d been buried.

Having this time to reflect on what skating means to me has made each step onto the ice feel lighter. I still carry my past with me, but in a different way. The sound of my blades cutting into the ice remains unchanged, yet my perspective has shifted. My students have grown more confident, embracing new challenges with enthusiasm. Seeing their progress is incredibly fulfilling, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to pass down not just skills, but a love for the ice—something I continue learning to do alongside them.