So What If I Don’t Feel Like Skating?

So what if I don’t feel like skating?

How many days in a row have to pass before I go from being a Very Serious, Positively Consumed by The Sport That Is My Passion™ Skater into just being a random middle-aged lady who still bristles with surprise when people call her “ma’am”? Invisible in my street clothes in line at the bakery, not sure how to answer when people ask what I do.

I’m starting a business.
Oh, I’m just living the dream.
Sure, sure, I’m still skating.

The thing about doing anything is that it starts to define this story about you because it’s what people see. Then you start playing into that story and believing it yourself. It snowballs from being what you do into Who You Are, a teleplay.

“Who is who you are?” is the question I suppose I’m really asking, and I don’t have an answer yet. Am I a skater because I skate? Am I a skater because I skate three times a week? 

Are you?

What if I want to sit on the couch, or go to bed early, or make terrariums for a while instead? Am I still a skater then?

Do you want to buy leggings from a middle-aged lady who sits on the couch? Who talks in a high-pitched voice to her chickens, who needs to know the name of every bug and plant she sees? 

What does any of that have to do with skating?

I think it’s easy to simplify the stories meant for The Outside World, but it also ruins anyone’s chance of truly understanding you. I can show you a cool skating photo of me (they do exist!) and hopefully impress you a bit, and truthfully I’m going to plaster this website with them eventually, but that’s far from being the whole picture. 

I used to have three Instagram accounts. Not even split between personal accounts and my business, but just three Instagram accounts for myself. One for my face and curated colors, I guess. Then one for the fluffy things and the green things in my world. Flowers, dogs, chickens. And lastly, one for moving and dancing and skating, for that whole part of me.

“There’s riches in niches!” was the advice.
So I niched down. And three is the magic number. 

I never knew where to post the random thoughts, the things that didn’t neatly fit into those categories. Which core demographic does this musing speak to? Which subset of my audience would care to know what I thought about a thing?

Now, with Allez, I’m going deep into the dancey-skatey-movey part, but not in the same way. I am not saying “Wow, look at me go. I’m getting soooo great.” I want to be something different from that. It’s not about how awesome I am at skating, Lord no. Nor is it about me telling you how you can be awesome, too.

It’s about who we are as people. We can skate when we want to and stay home when we don’t and we’re still skaters, whatever that means. Ugh, scratch that. It sounds like corporate BS, the “Be a part of our family” for the aging millennial crew.

Gag me with a spoon.

Really, it’s all for myself. It’s because I want to. I want to sell you leggings and I want to sit on my couch, and I want you to wear the leggings while you are on the couch and while you are skating, too.

I better design some leggings that are comfy to wear on the couch, then.

There is something I always do. I can’t commit to A Thing, and then when I finally work up the nerve and commit to The Thing, I get scared and distant from The Thing until I tell myself it’s something I never really wanted anyway.

So when I don’t feel like skating for a few days or a week, I get worried. Worried that I’m too flaky about what I do, that I don’t really care enough about it. What if I don’t feel like skating because I never cared enough about it in the first place? 

Well, you don’t keep doing something for the better part of twenty years because you don’t care about it. Sure, I started my adult skating journey (blech) doing freestyle slalom and now I’m figure skating, but the line has been clear. 

So there will be no scaring myself off. Allez can’t be that for me. You see, it’s quite clever: I built the cheerleading right into the name. So that I keep going, so that I actually make it happen.

We can all use a bit of cheering now and then. It’s for you, but it’s for me too.

Allez Megan.
Allez, write.
Allez, skate.