At age twelve, five years before auditioning for Ice Capades, graceful was the last adjective one would consider while watching me skate. I was in the middle of a six-inches-and-thirty-pounds yearlong growth spurt, and I had no idea what my body looked like in motion. Linda, my first coach, did. She was of a blunt but honest nature.

“You are the most ungraceful person I have ever seen,” she told me one morning, at six o’clock, while we put together an intermediate level program as my limbs flailed in unruly spasms of what puberty and I thought were artistic movements.

Linda shook her head. “Like this,” she demonstrated, her arm rainbowing above her head in a soft, flowing arch, “Like you’re a pretty skater in the Ice Capades.”

“Oh. Like this?” I zoomed out my arm and in doing so, clocked an oncoming skater in the face. Linda put a hand over her own face. “You just don’t have it,” she reiterated. She would retract these impressionable words years later, but their accuracy served as a turning point that frigid, winter morning. In that very moment that I decided I was going to get it. Some sort of superhero alter ego came to life when Linda labeled me helplessly uncoordinated, and Captain Graceful was born from the shadows of doubt and ignorance.

“I’m going to be in the Ice Capades!” Captain Graceful bellowed. Linda rubbed her temples, and I kept trying to maneuver my appendages without giving nosebleeds to my little friends.

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