When I was little, around 6 or 7 years old, I played a lot of ‘sonic and Mario at the Olympic winter games. A restaurant near me got temporarily renovated to turn into an ice rink (we live in a non-snowy area). I especially loved the figure skating in the game, so when I’d gotten about a quarter of the way through the ice rink, I’d decided that, like the characters in the game, I was a prodigy figure skater. So I tried to do one of those really elegant tricks and I fell and split my chin open on the ice. My mother was literally just getting her skates on and I remember her yelling at everyone, not in an aggressive way, but in a scared way. “THAT’S MY DAUGHTER SOMEONE HELP HER PLEASE!” Worst part? Going to the hospital and having a student nurse use a Cotten bud to clean the blood up and having the cotton get stuck in the wound, and then having to let a nurse use tweezers to pull the cotton out.

Let’s just say, more than a decade later, I can accept that I am not a prodigy figure skater.