Why Do I Pursue My Interest In Gymnastics?

1365 Words3 Pages

By the time I was in first grade I had already learned my alphabet, I could count, I could even read a couple of short words. But it was in first grade that I went about learning to read and to write. My teacher Ms. Wiggins would have us write in our notebooks for what felt like forever every single day. I remember trying to write from right to left in that notebook (because I’m left handed) and spelling the word “like” as “lik”. My handwriting was, as to be expected, illegible. When we weren’t writing until I felt like my hand was going to fall off the whole grade would get together for a reading workshop in which we were separated based on our reading ability. It was there that we would read books that were to our specialized reading level …show more content…

I had been interested in gymnastics since kindergarten. However, my mom thought it was dangerous and refused to allow me to take classes. Instead she threw me into swimming hoping that I’d be happy with that and I was for a while. But my true passion had always been gymnastics. I had, over the years, taught myself cartwheels, round offs, and back-walk-overs. My schools playground had a set of bars in which were probably meant for pushups and pull ups. But many of the girls in my school used it to practice their uneven-bar routines and skills. This is where I learned my basic skills and I built on them. As an 8 year old my motor skills were becoming skilled and like many 8 year old I was beginning to display a level of athleticism that had previously been missing. I was determined to explore this new found athleticism and everything that my body was capable of. When it became clear that I was going to practice my gymnastics whether I had professional training or not my mother finally relented and put me into my gymnastics …show more content…

This was not surprising to me as it seemed that at this age that this was something that all the girls had been talking about and anticipating for a year or so prior. By the time I was eleven I was often mistaken for a sixteen year old girl, something that both flattered and confused me as it made me the object of attention that an eleven year old would otherwise have never received. Though I had known that puberty was imminent I had been unprepared for how it would change my world. Gymnastics was harder and flexibility was no longer as natural. I had to relearn many of the basic skills because my body just wasn’t the same and it affected how I moved. In school, platonic friendships that I had with boys were changed as well. Trailing behind my peers socially I was uninterested in engaging in the turbulent arena of “boyfriend and girlfriend”, and preferred to simply sit the whole thing out. The temporary nature of such relationships held no interest to me, and as I could readily see, these relationships only served to cause discontent and distraction in the lives of my peers. It was here that I began to spin my own personal fable, so certain that my experiences were unique and that there wasn’t a single person in the world who could possibly

Open Document