Rambling about Gymnastics

 Too tired to even think, not allowing myself to sleep, silly girl!! and I need to sleep - all day!! Everything is driving me crazy right now. I had an awesome day - because - and maybe no one else will get this but me??, but... I started the day doing 100 sit ups. yesterday I did 50, up from 30 the day before...and when I got to 50 today - all of a sudden I knew I could do 100 quite easily...and I did. Then I did 100 of a couple of other abdominal exercises. And I went to the beach and did 3 sets of each of my scales on my violin...and I did a really good set of salutes to the sun - and I hardly did ANY busking - even though I need the money...and I felt GREAT...because -  I've wanted to re-own for so long the passion for being physical that I used to have...that amazing feeling of vitality, of sheer joy in being alive. Not because I want to show off about doing x amount of anything, but because for ages I've known that my potential has been so much more than I've been allowing it to be...Because once, before anything else, before music, before art - gymnastics was my biggest passion and joy in life...and stuff happened that really screwed that up for me, associations were made with that, that tainted that part of my life for a long long time....

 I was never a great gymnast - I didn't discover it till quite late, and having a fear of heights didn't help either..but I LOVED the feeling of freedom, of backbends and back flips, of using every muscle...of flight, of stretching - (then later I found it again with yoga - the absolute feeling of bliss, peace and relaxation...) having a body can feel amazing. But going back even further than that, my best memories of childhood are of going swimming with my dad at Waikuku beach - no matter what the weather - even if it was raining, even in the middle of winter in the south Island - he took us swimming, (when it was really cold the water was always warmer than the air outside)  and the indescribable feeling of the oneness with the water and the waves...losing all sense of time, staying out there till we were blue with cold and not caring...coming home to hot cocoa...and a warm fire.

 When I was fifteen they did a fitness test over the whole of the highschool. I remember when I first started doing gym at school a few years before...struggling to do one sit up. I remember my stomach muscles still hurting the next day after I tried to do more. And my legs being so stiff... I could barely bring my hands below my knees when I tried to touch my toes. But when I was fifteen they did that fitness test & I was the fittest person in the whole school. Fitter than all the boys that played rugby, and the girls that played hockey or did athletics. Just because I loved gymnastics so much. Every night before I went to bed, I'd do hundreds of exercise, sit ups, press ups, v - sits, leg exercises... stretches. And all lunch time at school I'd be on the bars, going round and round and round, and then flying off into the air... Shit - one time at intermediate I landed on my arm. It really hurt, my teacher said I looked white..I never told anyone what happened, it hurt for weeks, I don't know why I didn't tell them? It was weird because I was sick so few times as a child, that usually the fuss and attention was great, and a visit to the doctor was so rare that it was kind of exciting. But I just kept it to myself and eventually it just got better. (later I broke it at gym class- and did the whole hospital thing, which WAS kind of exciting - and painful.) strange. I remember feeling so sick that day at school, but I didn't feel like telling anyone - so I kept it to myself. My mum was usually pretty angry about one thing or another - and injuries were one of the few ways to get her rare, nicer side for a few days - makes no sense, but I never told her. I never told her about dropping her scrambled eggs on the way up the stairs to her room, and putting it back on her plate either, or melting half of her plastic plates and cups in the dishwasher by putting it on the wrong setting. I didn't tell her about getting my friend to get my report card out of our mailbox so she wouldn't get it...but that was understandable if you knew my mum.

 I won a few races at school, the cross country and the fifteen hundred metres... like most things I did well at, I just thought it was a fluke. Like when I came second in a science test in standard 3, that was a combined test with standard four, (and because I started school at age 4 instead of 5, I was a year younger than the rest of the standard 3's) - and the only one who beat me was the science nerd in standard four who went around giving everyone electric shocks - and no one else came anywhere close to the two of us - fluke. I mean I never thought I was any good at science, just felt kind of briefly lucky. I didn't know that no one else in my class was reading great expectations by Charles Dickens when I was seven, either. I just thought it was a good story. I just remember telling my teacher to "shut up!" when he read that really dumb poem I wrote - ( - and didn't read the other one that I poured my heart and soul into) and that's not the thing to do in a christian school. And I remember him punishing me for reading David Copperfield in class and not paying attention to whatever was going on???. That was school. Just a mystery that sometimes I surprised myself by doing well at.
 School... was just this weird place that seemed so exciting I couldn't wait to go - at four, and it was downhill from the first day on..

 I tried to ask a few questions now and then - and got soundly put in my place. Worked out it was better to just keep quiet after that. You don't ask,when you're told, (at seven- at a Christian school), that you should always do what your parents tell you...."What if your parents are bad?? What if they want you to steal or something"? Parents are never bad apparently, if they go to church) . It was the same school that the minister who was done for molesting all those kids went to.... that his creepy father taught at.
 My twin sister had an electric chair in her class. Fun! Spell a word wrong- zapp! Annoy the class leader - zapp! No reason at all - Zapp!

 So in contrast to the mystery that was school ...gymnastics made perfect sense because it was just - fun! It felt good, it was hard. Nothing at school was hard at primary school - so it was boring - (except for maths because I'd decided at about 5 that girls weren't meant to be good at maths - it was a boy thing, so I tried hard to fail at maths). Everything about gymnastics was hard. I'm not supple, so becoming flexible was hard work. I'm scared of heights, so the beam and the bars were even harder. And I loved it! At school it was all about reports. The usual - could have tried harder (B's) or A's. A+'s A-'s. if my report was better than my twin sister's (who had glue ear until her adenoids were removed) then I got the praise and she didn't - and it should've felt good, but when you're a twin it doesn't. It didn't feel good to be compared like that.Nothing that made her feel bad - (especially when she tried so much harder and it came so easily to me) - made me feel good - ever.

 When we were learning to talk, I was ahead of her. I walked way before her. She'd say "lellow potty" & I'd be correcting her (trying to help but it only made her mad) . When she said "I aren't" I'd say "I'm not" and she'd get mad at me. When I could walk, and she couldn't, I'd take her toys and walk away with them - but - it never felt good if her report wasn't as good as mine. My mum was a teacher, my dad was a professor (but he was pretty cruisy). Mum's dad was a headmaster, and to her reports were everything. You didn't want to make mum angry - but it was pretty much impossible not to make her angry. That was mum, she was mostly always angry about something. But mum - had no opinion about gymnastics. She couldn't care less about how I was going at gymnastics. And that - was great. Ok so she did have an opinion - it wasn't worthy of her attention - but that - was still great. Anything worthy of her attention was a nightmare - playing the violin - was a nightmare, (but not at night - only first thing in the morning while she was making breakfast).

 Playing the violin mostly meant getting clipped around the ear a lot first thing in the morning. But gymnastics was totally my domain. By 12 I'd managed to get kicked out by my violin teacher, and I didn't touch it again for ten years. By 13 I'd decided to let my sister get all the good reports and stopped doing any work at all at school. (except for about a month before end of year exams). I doodled & day dreamed my way through all my classes, stole some swat books from whitcoulls and studied and passed all my exams, then went back to sleep until the end of the next year. Sometime during 3rd form we went to live in England for a year. My sister and I studied music theory together. I watched the squirrels out the window -running around in the trees. She must have been listening because she got an A and I got an E. And I didn't care.

 Gymnastics in England was the best. I got as far as back flips (flic flacs) and aerial walkovers but never quite made it to somersaults. (except on the trampoline), and to back walkovers & splits on the beam. Mum bought Imogen 500 pounds worth of medieval musical instruments & I got nothing, because I'd given up the violin and the piano, (and gymnastics didn't count). But I loved gymnastics anyway so it didn't matter.. Even school was cool, those quirky English teachers were full of life. The ones that weren't good got crucified but most of them were really good. I even started working again, on physics and maths. Plus mum was studying in London and disappeared on the train every morning and came home late at night, so home was finally a relaxed place to be.

 It didn't last long - back in New Zealand a year later school was worse than ever. I started hanging out with the naughty girls...there were only about two of them. Hilary used to steal chocolate from the supervalue. She'd fill her schoolbag with king sized blocks of chocolate. She got soo fat! (She confided to me one day that aliens had taken over her body - but... I didn't find it as easy to believe as her best friend Leigh did). Leigh was totally into boys. . I was too scared of my mum to bring any boys home, but the 3 of us got up to a fair bit of mischief together the few times I was allowed out with them. At 15 we all went our separate ways, and all changed schools at the same time but the influence was still there - until I got caught stealing a perky nana bar at Woolworths during school time and was taken to the police station, and my dad was called in to pick me up. Mum hardly said a word when we got home. She was brilliant at making a huge fuss over something like putting the spoons the wrong way around in the dishwasher, but when big things happened like my being caught shoplifting, or my brother burning down the macrocarpa tree and the fire department having to drain the school swimming pool next door to put it out, she went all quiet.

 It's 6am and I've been up all night cause I didn't feel like walking home in the rain...so this long rambling story that was meant to go somewhere - has to stop. It doesn't really explain much - it isn't what I was planning at all, but I'm too tired to write anything other than what came out ...I haven't talked about what made gymnastics go wrong, and I'm not going to...I really wanted to say something about realising potential - but I can't, the only potential I have right now is the potential to fall asleep.