Buy Walking VideosIngrid Michaelson Writes “OUCH”
When Ingrid Michaelson released Girls and Boys, she started a MySpace blog and has faithfully added to it. Back in May, she related a story about water-skiing. She started out the entry with the words, “I am not an athletic girl.”
She had such great dreams of what water-skiing would be like:
The water felt good. I felt alive. I was bobbing up and down while marla crammed my skis on my feet. I began to think that this might actually be a success. I imagined myself gliding across the lake, one handed, smiling and waving as I flew by all my friends, their jaws dropped in awe of my swan-like figure and grace. I would hop back onto the dock, kick off my skis and wrestle with some small child, not even acknowledging the applause. I would be so modest.
Unfortunately, it was not to be:
Why was I never able to stand up? Was I destined to always be dragged like a limp doll in the bathtub? My face was red in an unhealthy looking way and my chest felt like a large man was sitting on it. My confidence, like a an old sweater, was unravelling all over this lake , but there must have been one thread of it left in tact, because I held up my pointer finger and gurgled the words “one…more….time”.
In the end, the only success she was able to achieve was “water squatting.”
It took about week to feel normal again. The pain left me, the bruises, the broken blood vessels in my eyes faded. But what has not faded is the fact that I tried to do something that I feared. And while I did not succeed fully, I succeeded partially. And thats good enough for me.
Next time you’re confronted with a physical activity that looks impossible to you, remember Ingrid Michaelson trying over and over to water ski and continually ending up with water filling every orifice of her body in failure. If she can keep going, then so can you.
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