I’m not good at sports.

I preface this post like that because it’s true: I’m just not sports material. To be good at a sport, you need dedication. You need practice. (You need to not hate running with all of your heart.)

I played a bunch of them in school—softball, volleyball, basketball, even badminton—and, y’know. I wasn’t terrible. But it was always something. I had a speedy curveball, but being left-handed and trying to throw ambidextrously screwed up my aim. I couldn’t serve. I could shoot, but I couldn’t dribble. I hit the wrong end of the birdie. I just didn’t have the spark. Which, really, was fine by me. I had plenty of other hobbies to fall back on.

Figure skating—which my mother encouraged both my sister and me to do from a very young age—was much the same. Truth be told, seven-year-old Serenity had very little interest in practicing three-turns and figures: She wanted to do the fun moves before the work. Jumping. Going backwards. Hockey stops. (The half-Canadian in her secretly wanted to play hockey itself, but overprotective parenting ensured that wasn’t ever going to happen.)

So, when we went to the rink, my sister would go and dutifully practice her choctaws and waltz jumps, and I would go fool around. Choreographing “I’m Walking on Sunshine” by speeding and dodging around the throngs of public session crowds. Practicing hockey stops until I could cover half a board in ice shavings. Hopping off to beat my sister’s coach’s son in Neo Geo or Time Crisis or Marvel vs Capcom. Silly stuff. And I had fun. No one ever looked to me as any sort of prize-winner; I was goofing around, doing what pleased me, and that was just swell in my book.

Time passed, I went on my merry little life, stopped skating as much as I used to (while my little sister went on to win competitions until an injury took her out of the game). Didn’t think much of it until a few years ago, after a miserable summer had left me with 15 pounds I didn’t want and a general lack of interest in my usual hobbies.

“Come watch my derby bout,” a friend told me over lunch. “It’ll be fun.” I’d seen Whip It a few months prior, which up until that point had been my only experience with the game. I’d enjoyed the film, in much the same way you watch superhero movies and other feel-good sports montages and say “That could totally be me. Just you watch. I could have this awesome, innate talent, and you’d never know it by looking,” but at the end of it, well: It’s a film. (Nice to watch, but 10,000 hours’ worth of blood, sweat, and tears to actually execute.) But, hell, it looked fun. So I headed on over. I figured I’d be confused, it would be a thrill, and maybe a good recurring thing to go to every so often.

Instead, as I watched, I found myself with a thought other than “Boy, this game can get befuddling when you only half-understand the rules.” I wanted in. “I could do this,” I mused, like a chump. “I can skate. I can weave. I can’t hit for shit, but I sure like going fast.” I left the event starry-eyed and excited, feeling stirrings of passion over something for the first time in months.

And then I forgot about it for half a year.¹

Eventually, I came back. There was the spring, seducing me with the premise of outdoor skating along the bike path. There was the (now 25 pounds of) weight I wasn’t particularly fond of. The lack of theatre in my day-to-day activities.² So, on a whim, I went down to the local roller rink, housed on the second floor of the old Hadley Mall, strapped on a pair of quads (rentals, which I’d never before skated on in my life), and promptly fell on my face.

Clearly, I was a glutton for punishment, because I kept on showing up—and falling, and twisting, and failing to skate backwards or go around a turn without slamming into a carpeted wall—twice a week, every week, for a month and a half. And, slowly—very slowly—I got better. I could stop on my own. I could skate backwards and not kill myself. I found myself dodging eleven year olds around the capital-I-shaped rink with ease. That sneaking feeling was coming back. “I can actually do this.” (Cue the training montage.)

Seven to ten years of juking around crowds of clumsy people on ice skates may not have seemed like anything but a whole lot of fun (and a whole lot of trouble) at the time. And, sure. It was. But you know what it also turned out to be surprisingly good for? Roller derby. The moral of the story, kids: Sometimes, you can accidentally get good at something just by repeatedly goofing off. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be aces at everything.³ But, hey. Just because the work is hard doesn’t mean it’s something you have to dislike.

The reason behind story time: My first time bouting in a scrimmage ever was today. I skated four or five jams in the period: Pack work, then jammed twice, pulled out a double Grand Slam for one of those jams. Feels kind of like hitting a home run your first time out the gate. It’s addictive. (Of course, I also fell, tripped, got smacked around, and generally got my ass whooped when not jamming, so, y’know. Still plenty of stuff to work on. But boy, the validation—yeah, I’m not completely rubbish at this—that feels good.)

Also, I finally picked a scrimmage name⁴ and made t-shirts, so I couldn’t resist sticking those up here.