How I Turned a Forced Passion into a REAL Passion

When I first started skating, I mean when I started back in kindergarten, it was because of pure passion, because I was genuinely attracted to the elegance of the sport in the shopping mall right next to the hotel where my parents and I lived in for 2 years in Wuxi. I would always just look at the people on the rink skate here and there in glittering leotards and smooth movements, while gliding across the ice like a swan. I wanted to skate. And my parents actually bought the card for coach’s lessons at that rink for more than half a year before they told me that they did that. I do not remember what happened specifically, but, all I can say is that I was definitely really excited about skating and my parents were trying really hard to ensure that I knew the lesson of if I can’t continue doing something in the long-term, I should not spend so much of my time and energy into doing it. I guess I kind of knew that, but I wasn’t completely sure what I was signing up for, as when you are little, you just see how things are on the surface, and not what it takes to get there. There’s this Chinese saying of “三分钟热度”, which essentially means a “three minute passion”. I guess that was skating was to me—at that period of time, I was extremely obsessed with skating and I really wanted to do it.

My mom signed me up for lessons with a well-known coach in China. I started to have lessons with him and also another coach at a nearby rink who was well-known in the region. I really have to thank them both a lot when it comes to skating--not only were they mentors for me at the start, when I took the skating exams, their advice and a lot of what they said when it comes to the fundamentals was really important, and a lot of those things were what a lot of skaters were missing in their routines. Thus, Mr. Ma and Mr. Liang, thank you so much for your advice and support!

To be honest, once I moved to Beijing and started to skate with the really strict coach, skating started to become a pressuring activity for me. I did not know whether I still loved it—especially when second grade rolled around and I was trying to ace the axel, I struggled really badly. Whenever I would fall when doing the axel, I would always fall and hurt my butt really badly to the point where I cannot even walk or do anything with that leg. However the coach did not really say what was the key issue that led me to falling so hard like that, until I met an elderly coach who also coached a lot of students from different age ranges at the rink. He told me what was really wrong with my jumps and after that, I had no trouble with my axels.

However, even though my axels weren’t a really big trouble for me after that, the pressure of passing the exams, winning competitions, landing even more jumps were simply so overwhelming that I could not know why I am skating if it brings so much pressure to me. Not to mention the toxic time where I had to starve myself everyday and eat salad for lunch that had absolutely zero carbs and I would go through the day with an empty stomach thinking that that was normal. Being an athlete is never easy, especially when you are demanded to control the other aspects of your life for it. That was time when I realized that it is becoming a forced passion.

Then, the present days arrived, and I am now fully awaken. As in I now enjoy skating. And I genuinely do. That is why I actually want to keep going to Shenzhen every week or twice every week to practice. Even if I may not be the best in the world, I still do it because I love to do it and I want to let it become a part of me.