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I came to love skating and surfing as an adult because I was conditioned to love pain as a child. I attribute that conditioning to an elderly Costa Rican ballet teacher who liked to poke me. After that, every ballet teacher, artistic director, and ballet master I’ve ever danced in front of also encouraged a friendship with pain. Authority figures in ballet have a gift for gaslighting you out of an injury by saying, “You’re fine” or by looking at you disappointedly and saying something like,“You’re sure you can’t power through it?”
The second toe on my left foot is permanently crooked because I danced with a broken toe, on pointe, through several performances of The Nutcracker when I was 14 years old. Nothing is more important than The Nutcracker when you’re a dancer at that age. My entire foot was a gorgeous shade of violet and the waltz of the flowers, the longest dance in the ballet, hurt a lot. I can still remember the searing pain that shot into every pique arabesque. But I did it. I danced on a broken toe, I survived the pain, and some part of my pubescent brain emitted a sizzle of prideful euphoria when I walked offstage, nauseous and throbbing.
In ballet, if you are not in pain or so physically exhausted that it is medically necessary to take an ice bath and consume 2000 calories, then you aren’t working hard enough. I spent my dancing years addicted to pushing my body past its physical limitations, and after I stopped dancing, I didn’t feel the same bliss of bodily accomplishment again until my knees hit concrete.
I first picked up a skateboard when I was seven. It belonged to my cool older cousin, Jamie. I did what a lot of seven-year-olds do when they have access to a skateboard for the first time: I stepped onto it with an empty brain and immediately ended up on my butt with the board rolling down the driveway into the street. I did not pursue the sport further, and as I got more into ballet, reckless activities like skating, skiing, and team sports became forbidden. I was only allowed to wreck my body within the confines of a ballet studio where I put my entire body weight on top of shoes made of glue, cardboard, and satin. The idea of skating didn’t cross my mind again until I started online shopping with pandemic unemployment checks in 2020. I saw a cutesy, pink board on Instagram and bought it impulsively. In retrospect, there may have been a subconscious part of me that remembered that first time falling off a skateboard. I think I wanted to feel that shock up my spine again.
Ballerinas often end their career after blowing out a knee cap, tearing their achilles, or any of the other charming, grotesque physical traumas that are common in the field. I was relatively lucky. I stopped dancing professionally at 21 with merely a ton of mental health issues and a pair of fucked up hip flexors. I went to college, where I still danced a bit, but mostly sat in chairs for many hours of the day. This transition from spending full days testing my body’s capacity for pain and risking constant injury to feeling maybe a slight back ache at the end of a long day at the library was difficult. I didn’t know how to quantify my productivity, or how to feel accomplished, or how to feel anything. The end of each day felt like nothing, and I was never as hungry as I was when I danced.
When I ate pavement after stepping onto my new pink pandemic cruiser for the first time, something sparked joy. It was the slam I had been waiting for. The cruiser, ultimately, ended up being the type of board you would buy if you knew nothing about skating, which I didn’t. I fell off a lot, hands first. I went down a ramp on this stupid board after only watching one YouTube video, and I still have a scar on my knee from the experience. It was gnarly and dumb and awesome. I got hooked. I began feeling, for the first time in a while, like I was utilizing my body in a way that went against the natural and basic use of the body. I was challenging it, it hurt, and it survived.
I would not say I’ve gotten much better at skating than when I first started. I go up and down and around, always slower than I think I’m going. I still fall, but at least not on my hands. I have a more serious board now: a deck with bunnies on it with proper trucks and wheels that I bought with the guidance of skate shop experts. I skate at the parks in Rockaway because they don’t get too crowded, and maybe that’s why I now own a surfboard, too. Getting washing-machined around in a wave and not knowing when I might come back up for air seems to stimulate me in the same sick way as skinning my knees.
When you’re a child, the body is regularly subjected to the consequences of decisions made by an under-developed brain. As we get older, we start to take less physical risks, confining ourselves to treadmills and keeping our knees safe from skinning. Using our bodies in a way that’s just risky enough can save us from monotonous physical neglect, and the scars and permanently bent appendages become reminders that we’ve tested our limits and survived.
In dance, repetition builds endurance. When you survive pain over and over again, what’s one more sprained ankle? So throw me off a ramp, slam a board in my face, break my toes. I can take it.
