I’m still glowing from the joy and satisfaction of going skiing yesterday for the first time again in over eight years, and for the first time ever in America!
I went with one of my climbing buddies who also got back into skiing this winter after a decade’s break. And he had reassured me the muscle memory would come back really quickly. He was right, and it felt wonderful — so much fun but also liberating, empowering, like rediscovering & reclaiming another part of myself.
I used to ski quite a bit back in Europe but when I moved to California a little over eight years ago, I stopped doing it, partly because I was intent & interested in discovering and/or reclaiming other parts of myself, partly for practical reasons (too far and/or expensive and/or not easily accessible). But it’s always been nagging me at the back of my mind until the nagging started becoming a strong draw once I moved to Colorado. My first two winters here were just logistically too difficult for me to get back into skiing so I could rationalize the fact that I wasn’t skiing easily enough. But this winter I just felt like I kept letting my own self down by not managing to get around to it and I was trying to make peace with yet another season in Colorado that I had let go by without even dipping my toe back into skiing. Until this climbing buddy last week, once again, invited me to join him to ski and this time I just went for it even if my gear wasn’t ready and I had to rent skis.
Until this past weekend, as I got ready to go skiing again after such a long hiatus and then as I finally got onto the slopes with my friend, I hadn’t realized — I had sort of forgotten or hidden to my own self — how much skiing means to me.
I started skiing three decades ago, when I was eleven. Back then, it was something I did with my parents & sister for a week’s vacation for several years in the late winter/early spring. I also did it with some of my close friends and their families throughout high school and into college. So it has a pleasant taste of winter vacation, mountain huts, hot cocoa, and fun outdoor activities.
But it’s even more than that. I realize now that starting to ski (& to run track) in middle school was for me a very important step towards being able to find and express fundamental parts of my identity. In the “normal routine” of the school year, my mother put me & my younger sister into ballet — something more aligned to my sister than myself but that my mother saw as “perfect for her two pretty little girls”. My parents tried to put me & my sister into the same ski class but it didn’t work: despite their being only two years between us, there was a gulf in our personalities that quickly made my sister dread skiing (she was really scared) and me love it and progress in it really fast. So skiing (along with running at school) became the first physical activity I was able to do by myself, without my little sister tagging along, and actually pushing my limits by adventuring onto harder slopes and even off-piste. It also became one of the very few, if not only, activity that I sometimes shared one-on-one with my dad, he & I going for a long day skiing up into the mountains by ourselves or with another friend of mine and her father: it was one of the very few moments I had when I felt “special to my dad just as I was”, without having to be different from my true self. As I grew up, skiing also became one of the first activities that I did by myself with friends, in high school, taking a weekend or week away from our families (in a relatively controlled & safe environment), which felt wonderfully liberating. Then, in my last year of high school, on the ski slopes I met the first guy — the very first person — with whom I had sex (& with whom I also had some of those liberating weekends away skiing). Later on, in grad school, skiing was something I did only with my then-romantic-sexual-partner. At first, it was nice, it was something that drew us close, a shared interested, especially when we started doing uphill skinning and backcountry skiing together. I remember how empowering it felt to me to be able to go up & down those steep mountain slopes away from the resort crowds. But I also remember a painful exchange between me & my ex-partner as I once asked him, “Aren’t you glad that I’m so strong and adventurous that I can do these things with you?” (which was clearly my boy-identity yearning to be recognized and validated by him) and he replied, “Not really. These are things I would be perfectly happy doing with my guy friends. I’d rather be planning a family with you”.
Well, now I, as a guy, am skiing with my own guy friends.
Yesterday’s outing on the slopes with one of my climbing buddies marked a reclaiming of yet another part of my own self.
The Little Prince and the Fox 