Change your definition of success.

And other shit sickness keeps showing me.

My first memory of the word success was formed while watching the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in the good ole US of A. My cousins and I donned leotards and watched from my family’s basement—improvising our own acrobatic tumbles during commercial breaks—as Kerri Strug took one for the team and secured the United States’ first team all around gold medal by sticking the landing on her vault—on an ankle with two torn ligaments.

I was seven years old that summer and already spending most days of the week training at skating practice for the competitions in which I’m pretty sure I never got a gold. Success became what I saw on the screen emblazoned in stars and stripes—obtaining victory at all costs, including your own health. Success was being the exception instead of the rule, rising above the rest by the fingernails of your own goddamned grit.

I ended up quitting figure skating late in middle school when I got tired of coaches propping up the skinny blondes as the only ones worthy of their attention toward success while making snarky comments about my thick thighs and brunette locks. I also had approximately zero real friends at the ice rink or school. At the former, everyone was an enemy, the competition for judges and coaches’ attention. At the latter, no one cared that I could do a double salchow; they just knew I left class early for practice more days than not, practiced jumps in the hallways like an utter embarrassment, and appeared more comfortable befriending books than them. Was this success? Being friendless and exhausted at twelve?

I was ready for friends instead of frenemies, so I transferred my treasure trove of diligence to my newly picked passion, soccer, which I could play at school and then year-round on travel teams. I set aside the hope of gold medals and put my grit toward earning a college soccer scholarship as well as an academic one. Success. One month into my first season, my knees became too painful to reliably hold my place on the team.¹ And I loathed my teammates like the true academic/theologically-pretentious snob I had been training my whole nerdy life to become. If you’ve played college sports, you know this is a true tragedy. Because all you do as a college athlete is practice and practice, with a brief reprieve for class, and then ice baths next to the skinny bitches you are internally rolling your eyes at the entire time, and then walk to dinner together, then sit in a stuffy classroom for study hall together, and then it’s time for team curfew so you can wake up at five and do it all over again. Yay! College!

I was in an orthopedic surgeon’s office when I decided, once again, to reconsider my definition of success. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say, when my body begged me to reconsider. He was describing the surgery I could have to “clean up” my knee (which one, I cannot remember), since PT had failed to get me back on top. Why am I doing all of this? I thought to myself. Why am I making myself miserable just so I can say I was successful in living my dreams?!

I don’t regret quitting. I do regret taking as long as I did to stop judging other women. But that’s another story for another time. For now, let’s applaud the subtle shift, the slow U turn of having something shitty happen and deciding not to treat myself like shit because of it.

I stopped judging one woman as not enough, and she was me.