To be frank, I didn’t think I’d ever know how to fall in love again. Enough waves have crashed into the cliffs of my heart to create this sharpened, jagged edged landscape that has weathered one too many storms. Love has been a scary, sharp, dangerous concept.
Read MoreThere’s a harsh inevitability with life that we often feel like we are impervious to—until it happens. We are going to lose the people we love, but we wear a cloak of protection from loss. We remove ourselves from it, keep it separate. It’s seemingly far removed, and it won’t happen for a very long time. Why worry about it now? It’s a common story. It keeps us disconnected, but deep down we know it’s unavoidable. Most of us will lose our parents in our lifetimes. It’s a stern reminder of our impermanence. We are given one short and sweet life-- and an ending where the book is closed, slowly or all at once. It can be the chapter we fear the most. As the years tick on and I get older, I’ve tried to prepare myself for it—the loss of a parent.
Read MoreI’ve been asked, more times than I can count, why I stopped skating. It’s a fair question. You can’t just go from both skating, coaching and basically living on the ice, to saying “Just kidding, I’m moving to Hawaii!” without someone questioning, “What the hell is going on here?”. Every time the question comes up, I never know how to answer it without feeling some shame or grappling fear. So, I just say the easy thing: “Personal issues,” or “It was time,” or jokingly, “I was tired of being cold.” Avoiding the truth, the vulnerability, is easy. I can easily talk about my experience to someone close to me and completely lay it out there on the table without hesitating.
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