59. On Olympic mediocrity
It's a Herculean effort to sustain such luxury.
By the time this essay is published, the Winter Olympics will have just concluded following three weeks of fervor (the Winter Paralympics take place in March). Yet for the majority of the United States, those three weeks will have been no different from their typical routines; less than 10% of all Americans are projected to have viewed the primetime broadcasts and coverage on average. Although these figures don’t seem to include on-demand streaming viewers, it appears to be a fair estimate that the majority of U.S. consumers don’t keep up with the events.
I confess that I am one of the many Americans who have paid diminishing attention to the Olympics, and I attribute that only in part to the fact that I don’t have my own cable or streaming subscription(s). I haven’t had cable since moving out of my parents’ house decades ago, and I never hopped onto the streaming train because I’ve never been a habitual watcher of television. (Whether I may or may not be currently using someone else’s subscription to watch The Real Housewives is irrelevant because this is a relatively recent development for me.) Olympics coverage is totally commandeered by one broadcaster in the U.S.—NBC has exclusive rights through 2036—so, absent a subscription to that broadcaster, the only Olympics content that I usually consume is anything I’ve accidentally chanced across on social media. It’s a perfect case study on the enshittification of media as a direct result of corporate monopolies, but I digress. After all, as I admitted, this is only a flimsy excuse for why I haven’t been keeping up.
The truth is that the Olympics are a very minor trigger for me, which is to say that I experience the smallest twinge of sadness each time they come around because they remind me of a life that I once lived and left behind: it used to be my greatest aspiration to attend and win a gold medal at the Olympics as a competing figure skater.
I originally commenced this sentence by writing that I never seriously believed I had a chance to medal in men’s figure skating, but I think that would be both inaccurate and immaterial, and such a statement would disrespect and disparage my childhood self. When I began training as a figure skater, I was young enough to count my age with my fingers and I didn’t yet possess enough self-awareness, maturity, insecurity, or whatever it is that would have caused me to doubt myself before I even started, to preempt myself before even trying. Instead, I simply trained. I dedicated hours and hours to practicing, attempting spins, jumps, and edge techniques until I’d mastered them. I committed full performance routines to rote memory in advance of (very junior) regional competitions such that, by the time I stepped onto the ice when it was my turn to present the fruits of my labor, I would excel, commonly placing first or second. I was never even nervous.
My most triumphant routines were set to “Theme from Jurassic Park” (composed by John Williams) and Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” (performed by Donny Osmond). I even had a wooden baton for my performance soundtracked to the latter (I actually have no idea how or from where my mother procured it). All these decades later, the opening chords to both songs still activate long-dormant emotions that have since been buried deep within my psyche; I can’t listen to them for too long because I’m liable to start crying. Figure skating was the one thing in my life to which I could point to celebrate my accomplishments on the basis of my own merits. It came easily to me, and I loved it in return. I spent most of my after-school afternoons at Norwalk Ice Arena, where I had weekly scheduled sessions with my coach who would choreograph my movements and set goals for me to achieve, and I would achieve them handily. Nothing frustrated me, not even my elusive first axel, because it was simply a matter of practice and repetition. Regardless of how often I fell, I could rest assured that I would always eventually master my techniques—it was a given. All I had to do was try and try again until the pieces clicked into place.
My dreams for Olympic success were real. It was my North Star, my raison d’être, it was how I defined myself before I really began to parse my identity in my teens, before I posited myself as gay or Asian American—I was a figure skater first and foremost. I heavily modeled my ambitions after Michelle Kwan: whatever she accomplished, I sincerely believed that I could too.
There are just certain voices that help you find yours. […] Your taste is formed by the people that come before you. Your impulses are encouraged or stifled by all of the things you consume.
—Kristen Stewart, on The Chronology of Water
Nobody could tell me that I wasn’t going to be standing on that podium one day with a gold medal strung around my neck. Yet I would describe my diligence as one in passing or an unintentional consequence, and it was paradoxically true that I didn’t practice because I was so deeply enamored with the sport but rather because I was already there. I loved to skate, but it was also that I did it because it felt like an inextricable and uncontroversial part of me. It was a foregone conclusion that my free time would be spent at the rink; I didn’t really have a say in the matter. I was still young, and I did what I was told.
Before I turned fifteen, Norwalk Ice Arena announced its permanent closure and demolition. Yet that had no impact on my training because by then I had already switched to skating at Michelle Kwan’s East West Ice Palace and, later, was told to quit. I remember this time of my life as being characterized primarily by upheaval, when my parents’ divorce, my move away from my childhood home, my change of skating coaches (I went through four within maybe a year, if memory serves me), my growth spurt, and the formation of my anxiety all neatly coincided. It’s best exemplified by my struggles with mastering the “butterfly,” a slightly advanced maneuver defined by its mid-air switch-kick with a rotation technique.
Whereas I previously mastered all my elements by simply watching and doing, I was utterly baffled when instructed to attempt the butterfly. I could not envision myself mimicking the movement, and for the first time in my life I began to doubt. Hindsight tells me that those doubts started because I could no longer locate my center of gravity, which had abruptly shifted due to my sudden pubescent growth spurt (for context, I measure 1.83 meters in height), but I didn’t know it at the time because I was literally in the midst of my physical body’s changes. It was like I no longer had control over myself. I spent more and more time frustrated in the bleachers—not quite understanding why—when I should’ve been on the ice, and it was during such an episode that one of my parents walked in on me and forced me to quit so as to stop wasting their money.
That the end of my athletic dreams occurred within the very rink where I finally managed to obtain Michelle Kwan’s autograph in person, although I was too shy to approach her myself and had to enlist my coach for assistance—it shattered me. I had been so close to my idol, I had wanted to prove that I could be just as accomplished. It all fell apart. I was an unequivocal failure.
This is the full emotional spectrum that I undergo in milliseconds anytime I’m confronted by the Olympics, even in passing. It is my own personalized five stages of grief.
After quitting the sport, I steadfastly avoided ice rinks for the next decade. The borders of my life expanded, I met new people and went on new adventures, but the vestiges of figure skating were still ever-present. Learning to ski necessitated that my body recollect the art of balance, shifting my weight between hips as I cut grooves into slopes; landing my first job out of college evoked my latent athletic spirit, wherein I was my only true competitor and I had to prove my diligence as I worked towards demonstrating my worth to my employers. I went from medaling on a podium to being seated onstage with plaques and sashes at my college graduation ceremony to winning company-wide accolades in an auditorium full of enterprise colleagues. Career replaced sport as the source of my self-worth—I had new accomplishments to which I could point in validating my value, in defining myself. In my twenties, I was somebody.
It’s beyond obvious in retrospect that a very uncomfortable truth lurked beneath this high-achieving veneer: the so-called accomplishments of my twenties were extremely superficial and therefore unsustainable in the long run as a replacement source of my self-worth. At the same time that I was graduating from NYU with a special service award from my dean, I was in my tiny apartment on Orchard St making anxiety pies because I was full of nervous energy resultant of not knowing how to find employment post-graduation, and all that energy found an outlet in a sudden extreme fixation on banana cream pies. At the banking job I eventually secured, I was underpaid in comparison to all my friends who’d gone on to join the consultant or lawyer class, and my per-hour rate was not at all commensurate with the hours I devoted to the returns I regularly generated for my employers and my clients. Enter my thirties, and my self-worth predictably cratered.
It was as though I was putting myself through all these motions of farcical productivity to stave off impending doom. I could feel it in my bones, it was so clear that a reckoning would soon come and a disaster would be left in its wake, and all I could do was hope to the heavens that the universe would spare me. That reckoning arrived in the form of my most consequential ex-boyfriend and laid bare every contradiction in my life.
As I sought to define myself, I determined that my life would be upheld by two pillars: achievement in both career and love. Success at both meant living a worthy existence. Going the distance in my professional life would enable me to find a partner who would consent to be with me, who would want to be with me because we could afford each other. A dual-male income household could actually maintain the exorbitantly high cost of living in New York City, where I wanted to nest because of its sheer cultural diversity despite the atrocious associations of being situated within the United States. I dedicated my twenties to serial monogamy and searched for that perfect partner in synchrony with advancing my career. I had meticulous ideas about how and why things should be—I wanted to have the perfect body, the perfect job, the perfect husband, the perfect life.
My ex-boyfriend was a consultant who aspired to leave the industry for a cushy job in finance. He was kind, gentle, caring, all of the character traits that make a person look good on paper. More than that, he thought he loved me. So, when I separated from both him and my job in the very same year, I was forced to confront that I was not who I wanted to be. The life I had so desperately prescribed myself had instead decided to proscribe me. Once more, I was a failure.
It felt like I had squandered everything. I had exhausted every avenue; I had nowhere left to go, nothing in my life that I could hold onto as proof that I was worth the water it cost to sustain me. Days bled into weeks into months into years and time slipped between my fingers and I couldn’t stop it—I couldn’t even slow it down, just a little bit—and I watched my youth disappear before my very eyes, helpless as all my wasted potential circled the drain. I was totally aimless, and I sank myself even deeper into dating to cope with the crushing existential crisis of being a washout.
Time is something that scares me … or used to. This piece made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.
—Félix González-Torres, on Untitled (Perfect Lovers)1
So went my Saturn return. I was back at square one. I had no more external validation to carry me, to propel me forward, and I looked for new connections everywhere like a drifting seedling searching for a place to anchor. I sprained my ankle at a birthday party in Greenpoint, after which a fellow attendee advised that I take up Pilates so as to reacquaint myself with my center of gravity. I briefly dated a drag queen, who read between the lines as I explained myself to them and all but commanded me to buy a pair of figure skates because it was clearly still important to me. Above all, I was most afraid of wasting away my precious few remaining days.
I listened to all these well-meaning individuals…sort of. I never attended a single Pilates class, but I did get into Barry’s and SoulCycle. And, most importantly, I rode trains to ice rinks all over New York City until I finally found a shop near Sunnyside (shout-out to City Ice Pavilion) to sell me a custom-sized pair of skates. I took my new blades with me to my favorite outdoor rink and confirmed, as I’d expected, that I’m still carrying the weight of all my experiences with me. My body still remembers how it feels to twist, to turn, to rotate. I can’t yet accomplish all the great feats of my past because I haven’t acquainted myself with my adult strengths (and weaknesses), but I feel like I’m on the right track.
As I’m watching the Winter Olympics through highlights and reels, I’m also confronting the truth that I wasn’t committed enough to stick with figure skating when my mother demanded that I quit. Even though that instance was but one in a long list of examples of her unpredictable fury that rears itself and leaves destruction in its wake, I’m admitting in hindsight that I agreed to quit not because I was terrified of her but because I was tired of being so easily puppeteered. I wanted one less aspect of my life that was under her control; I couldn’t get away from her fast enough. Yet I still harbor a lot of guilt and shame for having left the sport under such duress, duress that I couldn’t endure because I didn’t care enough to keep trying at the sport, and for not being as successful as I had imagined I one day would be. It compounds my feelings of worthlessness—I am worse than mediocre—because I am an abject failure who can’t dig himself out of his own hole.
It isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate all the good things that have happened in my life nor all the people who have extended me great kindness [since], but rather that I am wholly undeserving of it all because I have not achieved everything that I’ve set out to do—and perhaps accomplishments ought not to constitute the entire makeup of my self-worth, perhaps pride is a sin, but it is also factual that they mean something to me, even just a teeny tiny bit, because I want to be more. I want to be more than I am and I can’t seem to do it and I hate myself for it. And so I pour myself into my little written project here because words are easy, they come to me and they’re agreeably malleable, they go where I place them and I can shift them and sculpt them into something meaningful. This is where I can exercise what uncomplex agency I have, where nothing is a hassle or a burden and I can relieve myself of this invisible weight that I otherwise can’t seem to shed.
I think what I’m struggling with, at its crux, is no longer having something in my life at which I can excel. There is nothing at which I am the best, the expert, the prodigy—and, right now, I’m not even an amateur. As a result, it feels like everything I do is subpar. That I wanted to be great as a direct consequence of my own efforts and persistence, that it feels fruitless and immaterial because I have lived countless professional lives and watched mediocrity fail upwards while I languished because I either look or act a certain way or because I wasn’t connected to the right individuals, that insofar as being a person capable of conscious thought and theoretical freedom of will, freedom of choice, I struggle with my executive dysfunction and I can’t seem to just turn it off, I am well aware that it is a luxurious endeavor. Fearing my own mediocrity, lamenting my own uselessness, is an exercise few can afford. Still, it persists. I will never be an Olympic figure skating champion.
I recently begged my father to unearth my childhood trophies and medals from the storage recesses of his ex-wife and to mail them across the country to me. I have them set up in my kitchen, in a quiet corner easily overlooked, because I’m not trying to be ostentatious or flashy with them—they’re there for my eyes only. My inner blaze is now petering out into smoldering ashes, and maybe I relive my glory days of old when I look at them, relics of the bygone era during which I peaked in my pre-teens because I have nothing going for me anymore, but it means something to me that I used to be someone. It’s proof to me that I once was, that I was here. I existed. Possibly, one day, I’ll be someone, anyone, again.
“Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning.” Félix González-Torres conceptualized Untitled (Perfect Lovers) as having multiple interpretations, all intertwined. It was about love and its slow, inevitable fraying, represented by the side-by-side clocks ticking towards oblivion as much as it was about universal commonality and the undeniable humanity of the predominantly gay or queer victims of AIDS. His art was created during an era of homophobic extremism, and he explicitly designed works to challenge conceptions of "gay art" and subvert censorship because he understood the urgent need to humanize these people, the marginalized community to which he—and I—belonged. Other works such as Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) went further by inviting the audience to actually take candy pieces away from the installation, turning them into active agents in producing the meaning or impact of his art. Although such minimalist exhibitions appeared deceptively simple, they could not be divorced from the multilayered humanity of queerness.