I’d recommend reading this post first, for a little background on why I decided to humiliate myself by taking an adult gymnastics class.

Days after my first attempt at reliving an old passion, my body was still paying the price for my venture back into a sport that is designed almost exclusively for tiny-doll sized children.

I feel confident in saying, my first attempt was not a winner.

Anyway.

It has been a solid 16 years since I was in gymnastics. I have always looked back on my gymnastics days with a weird fondness, and it was easily the first thing that came to mind in my search to building better Mondays. I knew with this attempt, I wasn’t going to reignite an old passion, and suddenly start training for the 2016 olympics as the first 30 year old to win a gold medal in gymnastics. I was more interested in tapping back into the feeling of what it was like to be so in love with something that it consumed everything I did.

That’s me in the front, taking my gymnastics mall exhibition VERY seriously.

The amount of focus, passion, and dedication I had for the sport when I was a kid is pretty much the same feeling I am chasing to find with this blog. I am also open to the realistic possibility that this type of feeling might not even be something I am capable of anymore.

It took me all of about two seconds online to find a gym that offers adult classes, and once I did, I immediately shot a text to my best friend, Christie, asking her to join me. I knew this was something I wasn’t brave enough to try on my own. After almost no convincing (she’s a good friend) we agreed to show up on a Saturday at 3pm with $20 in hand and proof of health insurance.

The fear in her eyes is real.

Once Saturday morning rolled around, I was already thinking about ways to talk myself out of it. By the time we pulled up to the gym that afternoon, I was in full-fledged anxiety mode. Thoughts were racing through my mind: “What was I thinking?! What if we are the only ones there,” and “What if it’s all a bunch of 16 year olds who are really good and we look like idiots?”

Well, it turns out, we weren’t the only ones there.

When we walked in, it was like stepping into a time warp. The smell of chalk in the air, the sounds of gymnasts jumping off springboards and shouting encouragement to each other was like being twelve years old all over again. Except, in this time warp, I was 28 years old, and surrounded by children.

We had a brief moment of panic (Where were the adults?!) but after about 10 minutes, more people over the age of 8 started to filter in and sign up for the adult classes.

There ended up being about 12 other adults there, and at 3:00pm, we went to the floor and started with warm-ups. Christie and I spent the first 20 minutes refusing to look at each other so we wouldn’t completely lose our composure and start crying with laughter.

Because, let me tell you, we were something to laugh at.

It took me awhile to get out of the surreal feeling of being there, and to just finally let go of the reality of what we were doing. Once I did, I was able to see my childhood gymnastics obsession a little more clearly, and I was pretty surprised at what I saw.

Silently walking around the floor, following form instructions from the coach, and doing tumbling passes while my fellow adult gymnasts watched, reminded me of just how serious of a sport gymnastics was. I was catapulted back to when I was fully immersed in gymnastics, and what my life was like during that time.

Gymnastics is all about rules, form, precision, and perfection, and really REALLY hard work. It was pretty similar to how my life was outside of gymnastics at the time, too. As a kid working my way through school, sports and life, succeeding was about following rules, asking permission, and doing things the way I was told to. Not to say that this is a negative thing, but it has just been so long since I’ve thought or remembered what that felt like.

It was a pleasant surprise to see how quickly my body remembered what to do after a few practice rounds. I put almost no thought into doing a round-off back handspring. My body had some sort of super-cell memory, and completely took over once I started moving. It amazed me how our bodies can remember things so easily, when we are so completely different mentally.

I wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing such inappropriate gymnastics clothes 15 years ago.

Taking the adult gymnastics class reminded me of how much I’ve changed emotionally and mentally (one should hope some type of growth occurs between twelve and twenty eight) and that I’m going to have to take a few different approaches to this search for what I love. Pulling from things I loved as a kid may not work for me now, because I’ve changed so much. I no longer crave perfection and thrive on structure the way that I once did.

I have occasionally looked back on my childhood, teenage, and college years, and envisioned myself as a person who was much more carefree, and had so much more freedom than I now do as an adult chained to the responsibility of bills and a full time job. This glimpse into the past was like seeing my life through a completely different lens.

I am so much freer now than I ever was at twelve, at fourteen, at twenty. I can choose to spend my free time however I want, and I no longer have to ask permission to go to the bathroom from authority figures. I can live anywhere I choose, go out to dinner when I feel like it, and take a weekend trip to Boston with my mom, just for fun.

Yes, I have worked hard to have this type of freedom, but I have the type of opportunity I never had as a twelve year old obsessively begging her parents to drive her to open gym every Saturday, and to let her wear her authentic replica of the ’96 women’s olympic gymnastics team leotard to school (which they always did, reluctantly).

That being said, I should also call out another glaring reason as to why gymnastics is no longer meant to be my hobby. About an hour into the class, I was doing that whole super-cell memory tumbling-pass move I mentioned earlier, and completely pulled a muscle in my left thigh. I spent the rest of class lazily bouncing around on the tumble track, whining about my leg.

Gymnastics is a sport best left for the young.

Due to my serious injury, we left 15 minutes early, and headed straight for medication in the form of wine and sushi. I felt a sense of freedom walking out of that gym, knowing that I never had to go back to that class if I didn’t want to, or that time in my life.

As great as it was then, I have even better things ahead.

On to the next one.

From now on, I will settle for reliving my old gymnastics days in places like this.

One of my first steps to building better Mondays is figuring out what it is that I actually enjoy doing, and what brings me happiness.

I have always thought that the key to figuring out what you really love is found through your hobbies, or what you choose to do in your free time, for no other reason than pure enjoyment.

Unfortunately, as I have gotten older, I have become extremely light on the hobby front, so I am now starting back at square one. I didn’t quite know where to start, so I turned to the person who knows me best.

My mom.

When I was getting ready to start this blog, I emailed my mom asking her to send me any pictures she had of me as a kid doing anything that might be a clue as to what kind of things interested me, or what my passions were.

I have heard that you can learn a lot about who you really are by remembering what you loved to do as a kid, before you had any awareness of outside influences. When we are kids, we don’t think about why we do things-we just do them, our main objective being to have as much fun as possible.

I was excited for my mom’s response, anticipating what little past Megan did to keep herself busy, and what deep insights she had to show her fully grown adult-self.

Well, I was not impressed with what past-kid Megan had to show me. My mom provided me with 16 images that best showcased my interests growing up. Here are the highlights:

Exhibit A: Animal torture

Exhibit B: Pretending to be something I wasn’t:

Just trying to fit in.

Showing everyone what an avid reader I am at six months.

Exhibit C: Nintendo

No time to concern yourself with fashion when you’ve got games to conquer.

Exhibit D: Gymnastics:

clearly I did this hobby anywhere I felt like it.

You get the picture. I didn’t exactly have a lot of past hobbies and interests to draw from. If anything, the pictures reminded me how all of my activities involved me being completely alone (notice the lack of people in any of the above images).

However, Exhibit D (or, ‘Gymnastics’) stuck out to me above all the others.

As a kid, I was obsessed with gymnastics. Even today, I’d be hard-pressed to find something in my life that I was more invested in. When I wasn’t at the gym, I was in a library getting my hands on anything and everything I could that was even remotely related to gymnastics.

I had loved the physical aspect of it, the thrill of mastering a new skill, and the sensation of flying through the air at the end of a tumbling pass. It has been over 16 years since I was a gymnast-but if I had ever had a passion as a kid, that was it.

That discovery just left me with a dilemma. Where does a 29-year-old former gymnast go to revive her love of gymnastics in a search to discover what her passion is?

Turns out, she goes to google. Which leads her to Lakeview Gymnastics Academy’s adult gymnastics classes (shockingly the only class of its kind offered in Chicago). Which also leads her to convince her 28 year old best friend and former gymnast to accompany her to prevent total shame and embarrassment.

This class is a story for my next post, but suffice to say that there is nothing quite like the experience of reviving an old passion 16 years after you have left it behind.

Like I said, if you don’t know where to start, try the beginning. Even if it requires the highest levels of humiliation.

Until next time.

Love,

Meg

Part two found here.

Yesterday, Al and I went skydiving.

I realize skydiving isn’t that unusual; people do it all the time. My instructor himself told me he would probably do it at least twelve more times after he jumped with me yesterday. The actual act of us jumping out of a plane is not what made yesterday important for me.

Al and I have talked about skydiving together since he watched me do it our sophomore year of college, back in 2006. We made lazy plans to do it ‘someday,’ but life and a million other excuses stopped us from nailing down when we’d actually do it.

We got married this past July, and decided a post wedding jump would be the perfect time to finally accomplish our skydive. We scheduled it for a Wednesday, four days after I walked down the aisle. We woke up that Wednesday morning to a lightning storm, and brutal Chicago winds (we don’t get much of a summer here) so the dive was cancelled. We rescheduled it for a random weekend in August, and forgot about it for the rest of the week.

And then continued to forget about it for the rest of August.

We completely forgot to go on our rescheduled date. A notification popped up in my gmail a few days later that we had lost our reservation. At this point, we had both semi-given up on the idea that we’d get it done in 2015. The weather was already starting to turn, and our weekends were full with plans well into November. The excuses had won again, or so I thought.

We saw a break in our weekend schedule, and decided we would try again. October 10th. We woke up Saturday morning to a near perfect Midwestern fall day. The kind of fall day that would give pinterest a heart attack. We drove the 90 minutes to Skydive Chicago in Ottawa, IL, and tumbled out of a plane together.

When we were getting back in the car to head home, Al looked at me and said ‘I never thought we’d actually do that.’

But we did.

This is not my first attempt at starting a blog. This is not my first attempt at making a change to live better Mondays.  I have been wanting to get scuba certified for over 12 years. I have dreamed of traveling for an extended period of time with my husband since we became friends in 2005. I have dreamed of experiencing what it would be like to live near the ocean. I have wanted to get a moped (no matter how nerdy my sister swears they are) since 6th grade when the cool boy who lived down the street scooted his yellow one past me while I chugged away on my roller blades.

There are so many things we want to do, that we are too scared to do, that we just aren’t ready for, that we never end up doing. This blog is one of those things for me. It is more intimidating to me to start this blog than it was to jump out of a plane.

But, I think that everyone has at least one thing, if not several, that gnaws at them slowly and steadily until they can’t ignore it anymore. All those things that you have wanted to do your whole life, that you haven’t yet done, have not left you. Some years they just sit patiently on the bottom of your heart saying nothing, but existing quietly, waiting. You can ignore them for awhile, but they always come back.

These things that follow you your whole life, want to get done just as badly as you want to do them. If we hadn’t done our skydive this year, the desire would not have left us. Next year, it would start knocking a little louder, and a little louder, until we couldn’t stand just talking about it anymore, and were forced to actually do it. Skydiving is not that thing for everyone, but it was just one of many of those things for us.

So, here is my blog, the thing that has quietly stalked me for the past 5 years. I hope it becomes a space where I can slowly start knocking out those things that I’ve been ignoring, so they can finally shut up and leave me alone, and stop trying to make me jump out of planes.

Love,

Meg