Skiing and imperfection

How do you feel about winter? If your answer is, it’s miserable and I don’t understand why it needs to last six months long, you’re definitely from northern New England. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel: winter sports! When I first moved to North Conway, New Hampshire, I knew I needed to try a new sport to help me survive the long dark winter months. Enter skiing.

Skiing is not for the faint of heart. It’s cold for one. Secondly, when learning to ski, you fall and fail. A lot. Being one of those “naturally gifted” children in school who held herself to impossibly high standards, failing and perfectionism usually don’t mix. I would thrive in sports and classes that I was naturally talented at - English, Biology, softball. Any thing that I failed at first, I would shy away from - basketball was one of those things. I was not nearly aggressive enough. As the great John Mulaney once said, “You could probably pour soup in my lap and I’d apologize to you.” I’m one of those people that tries to get along with everyone, not rock the boat. Having to fight for jump balls and scrap on the floor was not my strong suit to say the least. So after two years of riding the bench, I quit basketball to work at a candle shop for the winter.

Being a perfectionist has also prevented me from trying new skills. It’s part of the reason why I never stuck with guitar lessons and why I’ve never learned a second language (although to be fair foreign language classes weren’t offered in my middle school or high school).

However, learning how to ski was essentially trying and failing and trying and failing over and over. And guess what? I learned to allow myself to be uncomfortable-with the cold, with the falls that left me bruised and beaten and sore for days, with the feeling of looking over a ledge and seeing a sheer drop that plummeted into sheets of white. Ultimately, skiing taught me to be uncomfortable with failure. It taught me to take a breath and let it go and just- try. I began to measure a successful day of skiing as a day where I spent more time upright than on my butt, or a day where I made it down the mountain x amount of times instead of how many times I didn’t fall. I started to do full runs in shorter periods of time, and started falling less and less. Watching my progress was addicting. Skiing helped me shift my definition of success and redefine failure. Having my cousins and mom there to cheer me along helped motivate me too. Today I’m not the prettiest skier out there: I don’t have perfect form by any stretch of the imagination. I still fall and lose my skis, my poles, and occasionally a glove. But I’m out there making memories with my family and I’m so happy I stopped letting my fear of failure hold me back.

Perfectionism is overrated- instead, let’s all try to fail at something, just for fun. Once I left my perfectionist mindset behind, it opened up so many doors. This year I bought my first mountain bike, which I crashed into countless trees trying to learn how to ride single track. I also launched over the handlebars into bodies of water, lost my chain, and almost got chased by a black bear. All of these experiences sound like failure, and they are, but also they’re just pure unbridled childlike JOY. I really think that’s something we all need to embrace: finding things to fail at just because they bring us joy.