When my parents put me in gymnastics at a young age, I’m pretty sure a goal of theirs was for me to learn motor skills and body awareness. At the age of 3 and a ½, I believe the gym was a great environment in which I could safely learn to move my body and play. Then, as I got older and my skill level increased, I learned to perform for a judge to get a score. Looking back, club gymnastics felt very individualistic as it was just me on the beam or the floor fighting for the best score I could get – always wanting to qualify to the next level and the next competition. At that point, I had learned how to move my body and perform for a score.
Then came college gymnastics; what seemed to me to be an entirely new sport. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to compete on the Stanford Women’s Gymnastics team for four years and that is exactly what it was – a team sport. No longer was it just me up on the beam, but I had the whole team right there backing me up. And it wasn’t just my teammates standing alongside the beam, but all the Stanford gymnasts who had come before. It was about legacy. I had all their energy supporting me and helping me to do my best, and I was performing for them and for all our fans in the stands. In college gymnastics, I started to learn about shared experiences and shared energy between the team and our fans and me. I pulled energy from my teammates and from the crowd to enhance my own performance while simultaneously giving energy back. I had learned to use the surrounding energy in order to move my body and to perform for a score for not only me, but for the team and for all of Stanford.
Today, as a professional acrobat, the sport of gymnastics continues to personally evolve for me. I continue to build on the skills I have learned throughout my career, learning to move within and around my environment in acrobatic and artistic ways and pulling energy from the audience to strengthen my performance in order to give them greater energy in return. Now, however, I’m performing five nights a week for strangers and there is no score. Now I know that performing means enjoying the moment, enjoying the energy I receive from the audience, and enjoying the energy I create for the audience in return.
I look back at my early gymnastics career and even my collegiate gymnastics career and wish I could go back and do it again. It is not that I did not enjoy it, but I just did not know how to enjoy the actual moment. I did not know how to just trust what I had trained to do and let the moment happen in competition. Of course, it is easy to say this now, but then again, perhaps I would not even be at this point now, if I had not gone through all the other steps to get here. Maybe, the fact that I do get to perform every night, instead of just a few times a year, I feel I can relax and enjoy the moments. Maybe I would not even know how to use the energy of the audience if I had not first learned to perform for myself to better myself. Maybe, I am still doing exactly what I did when I first started gymnastics – testing the body and its limits and finding new ways to move in my environment. Just imagine what I will be able to do in another 20 years!!
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