I took my figure skating test two days ago, on Sunday, as planned. For me, it was a rite of passage as a skater and a crystallizing learning experience. The outcome was mixed: not a quantifiable triumph, but a personal one.

Because the test would be my first ever as an adult skater, in the days leading up to it I tried to practice as much as I could without burning out, and I sought information from my coach and other skaters as to what the scenario would be like. Both, it turns out, are necessary for facing physical challenges.

On Friday, I had a lesson with my coach, Fred, at which we ran through the test as an approximation. We predicted the test could go either way; in some moves I was strong, in others still tentative. I was nervous. At the end of that lesson he said, “We’ve done what we can do,” in a positive (not resigned) way, and he gave me some last-minute advice on getting ready, which included a good night’s sleep.

On Saturday, I went to the rink hours for my club: the MIT Figure Skating Club (FSC). I continued practicing and tried to keep the urgency out of it. I felt sort of detached, in a useful way. There was no heightened emotion. I was calm.

I went home, washed my skating clothes, thought about what I would eat for breakfast, and went out to dinner with my family. Not nervous, I was still looking ahead to the next morning. I did not overeat at dinner, which might have required a correction bolus with unpredictable results later. I drank only half of my glass of wine, not wanting to experience the paradoxical low blood glucose (BG) sometimes brought on by alcohol consumption.  At bedtime, my BG was close to the ideal 100, so I dialed back on my basal rate by 20%.

Sunday morning, I awoke at 5am, alert. BG was 130 – pretty good. Got ready, double-checked my bag. I ate some whole-wheat crackers and peanut butter and filled a bottle with water. On my hand I wrote: Take off pump! I knew I would want to remove my pump before the test, not wanting the jitters of low BG to coincide with the jitters of test nerves. I arrived at the rink early, and talked to other early-bird skaters who were also registered for tests. A little nervous, not too much.

Went into rink. Judges arrived. Watched the first set of tests, one skater at a time. More nervous. Thirsty.

The 10-minute warm-up for my set of testers was announced. Heart pounding in chest. Knees trembling. Skated and warmed up, thinking too much.

I noticed that my coach, Fred, had arrived, and I was relieved to see him. We stood and watched the two skaters who tested before me and talked in low voices.  He prompted me to say out loud the order of the moves in my test:

1. perimeter stroking, both directions
2. forward and backward edges
3. forward and backward crossovers
4. waltz 8, twice
5. spirals

Abruptly, without fanfare or announcement – just a nod from the test coordinator — it’s my turn. I fumble at unclipping my pump; I swig from my water bottle and drop the cap. I have practiced a calm skating face, and I put it on. I begin. My knees are shaking. I remind myself to bend into them, harder. I feel awkward. The rink is totally silent; there is no music, and the judges and other skaters do not speak. During my least comfortable moves, I hear my toe picks scrape the ice loud. So loud! They are not supposed to be scraping the ice. I frantically think: Oh no! I can’t stop this sound. I can’t fix this move. I know I am supposed to be skating on the balls of my toes, not on my toes, but I can’t make my feet get back to the balls. Still, I tell myself what Fred has told me: Keep skating. Go through the patterns.

I keep my outward composure, my skating face. I remember the order of all the moves, and I skate them all. My heart is pounding behind my sternum, and my knees shake. My arms, strangely, are steady. My T-stops are firm.

I finish; I skate off; I wait.

The judges’ feedback and scoring sheets are brought over and handed to my coach. Fred holds them, running his finger under certain comments. “Good. Yup, more work on these. We knew that.” He doesn’t say pass or no pass, and I can’t decipher the arrangement of the summary sheet to see if it explicitly says “pass” or “no pass,” but I can tell: no pass.

But, I’m okay. I’m not elated, but I feel lighter and proud of having done it. I feel as though I’ve been initiated and gone from being one kind of skater to another kind, and this is a kind that can’t be measured in technical skill, but in desire and determination.

And I kept skating. I did not back down or lose track of what I had to do.

The main judge, on his way out the door, stopped where I was standing with Fred. He said, “Don’t be discouraged” (I wasn’t), and he gave me some advice and more insight into his score. I thanked him.

The test session ended, and the ice opened up to all skaters. I skated, around and around and around. It was like breathing.

Tomorrow, I have another lesson with Fred. We return to the drawing board with more information. There is a 28-day waiting period to test again, and I will. From the experience, I learned that there are two kinds of preparation for an athletic test or competition: technical and mental. It is one thing to have the skills – and I believe I can skate better, privately, than I did during my test on Sunday – it is another thing to have the mental composure, toughness, and perhaps even bravado to carry me through a public scrutiny of what I can do.

I would never say I am glad I have diabetes, but my many years of living with it has taught me that I can make mistakes – even have a major fail – and I can take the feedback from those mistakes as data and apply them as knowledge to try to improve.

There are no assurances as to outcome. But going back to it, again and again, feels like progress. And on some days, I glide.

I am 47 years old; I am a novice figure skater; and on Sunday February 3rd I will take my first skills test: forward and backward edges, the waltz 8, forward and backward crossovers, and spirals.

Goals like this are clarifying. They simplify life. If my goal is to prepare for the test, other possibilities fall away. I look at the walls of my too-dark dining room and tell myself, “Painting can wait. Skate now.” I think of shoe-shopping and remember, “Skates.” Tired, I want to nap. I look at my GCal, and it says, “Skating, West Roxbury in 10 min.” I go.

I have built my plans for the last several weeks around this goal. I admit I have the luxury of time: there’s plenty of open rinks in the Boston area where I live, and I also can arrange my day, for the most part, to take advantage of their open sessions. I also skate at the rink at MIT, where I work.

Things were developing quite well until last week when I fell hard and hurt my right (writing) hand. I continued skating after one day off and trip to the doc’s for an x-ray, and a week later I feel better, but now on account of this fall my mind is getting in my way. It keeps stopping me in the middle of things I already know how to do.

This uncontrollable stopping — it feels like an arrest. I’m skating into a turn, for example, and something in my brain shuts it down, actually taking my body into its own mental hands. It’s hard to describe the feeling. Maybe you have had it.

Even writing this now, my heart feels palpable to me, like fear is coalescing around it. A buzzing cloud. It spreads up to my neck and I’m clenching my teeth; it spreads out to my elbows — not a pain, but a tension — and I want to wrap my arms around myself to reduce it, or maybe to contain this feeling of being on the verge of flying away or apart. A scream might be a relief.

My natural caution, which leads to vigilance, helps me in life. I prepare for things. I anticipate challenges and develop strategies for meeting them. I monitor my own actions; I reflect on them; and I imagine what I’d do next time.

Diabetes has given me lots and lots of opportunities to practice my gift for premeditation. And, readers, you know that the hallmark of diabetic health is control. Here I am, 20 years with T1D and no complications. My eyes are in beautiful shape, and my feet and kidneys are totally functional. My only medications are vitamins and insulin. I had three diabetic pregnancies, and I have three healthy kids.

And yet my caution, which can be a force for good, is standing in my way right now, and I have no tools to get over it. My inner voice is fluent at saying, “Be careful.” In fact, when my two older kids go out at night, I say to them: “Have fun. Be safe.” Are both possible? I must believe that they are. Or maybe I’m only saying the “Have fun” part to be cool.

Last summer, Jimmy and the kids and I went to Bethel, Maine. My sister Emily loaned us her house (thanks, sis!), and we went hiking or swimming every day. In Bethel and towns nearby are some swimming holes, scoured out by the mountain rivers, and you can jump from a boulder into churning water below. It seemed so fun in the guidebook, and I have always longed to be the person, like the characters in The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), who would do this: be an adult who jumped off a rock into a swimming hole.

Guess what? It’s one thing to fantasize doing it and another thing to let go and do it. In the home video above you can see me studying the water, thinking, studying the water, thinking, and trying to psych myself into doing it. I was holding back (and I did for almost an hour before this video was taken), even though my conscious, deliberate mind was telling my inner self: You can do this. You can swim, and hundreds of people have already done this today.

Still, I held back for the longest time. Jimmy and Eli did it. Eli did it many times. A man standing near me on the rock, sensing my hesitation, remarked, “The mind is a powerful thing. You know you can do it, and yet it is telling you not to do it.”

Eventually I did it (see the end of the video) by suddenly invoking an image of my father, as though he was standing behind me on the rock, yelling, “C’mon, just jump. Jane, jump!” We are inhabited by more than one inner voice; they hinder and help us in unexpected ways.

I made myself do it, filled with both terror and purpose. I knew the hardest part would be taking three steps on the rock and then jumping off into nothingness on the fourth step. After that, the rest would simply unfold, in a way beyond my power. Gravity would get me down into the water. My live body would float up, and my preternatural will to live and breathe would make me kick up.

All those things happened. I was barely aware of the plummet. When my head broke the surface of the water, my sinuses stung. Water must have been forced into them. I swam over to a flat rock and pulled myself up, shaking with triumph and the residue of fear.

Now I have to do again the things in skating that my mind is stopping me from doing.

It’s funny (funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha) because I’m not especially afraid of the pain. I sometimes fall in skating and hurt my bottom or a knee, and these seem to be par for the course. I get up, and my mind does not dwell on them for longer than it takes to skate out the vibration associated with falling hard.

But my hands! These I am so afraid of injuring permanently. What if I couldn’t write? What if I couldn’t manage my own insulin? I feel that underneath a usually sturdy self is my frail self, just waiting for a tiny crack in the shell to come out.

This morning I had a skating lesson. At the end, my teacher Fred said to me, “Your body knows how to do these things. Yet you seem less sure today.” He is very sympathetic about my response to falling and hurting my hand, and he says he is an “over-analyzer” himself and understands my inclination to problem solve, yet I don’t expect him to be a psychologist. He advised me, as I continue to practice on my own, to just work on one thing, not to break down a move into the many micro moves that go into it, which is what my mind is doing, furiously. Just work on one thing. This might be a better mantra.

There is something close to panic that rises when I think of doing this, and a small thing has become a big thing. Maybe there is only so much I am able to do. Maybe I have reached my predetermined limit. Maybe I tried everything, and will try everything, and it will only fall apart. Maybe it’s not only onward-and-upward. Maybe there’s a stop, and not a graceful one.

I realize that whether I pass this test or not does not prevent me from skating for fun or, in the future, taking the test again. I also realize that, in the scope of all possible fears, this is slight, and the stakes are low. However, caution has a hold on me right now, slowing me down and making me self-monitor and doubt every move. Sometimes caution is on my side; this time it’s sticking out its tongue at me.

—–

iPhone video by Jimmy Guterman

It’s the end of the weekend, and Sunday night is spent as usual: folding laundry, tidying the kitchen, and organizing my work stuff for the next day. I just emptied out the pack I carried on a long coastal walk with my family today, and I found a handful of test strips at the bottom. In a two-hour period — the whole time of the walk — I tested my blood sugar 8 times. When I started the walk, I was at 105 and ate a banana, and yet my glucose went down from there: to 75, to 69, to 59. I had turned down the basal rate on my pump to 40% of the usual rate, but clearly that modification and the banana were not enough to prevent hypoglycemia, so I disconnected. For a while, I sipped at juice boxes. A few times my husband and I sat down on a bench and let the others go ahead. When I walked, I shuffled slowly, believing myself to be conserving energy but not actually sure.

After 59, the numbers started to rise again: to 77, to 101. At the halfway point of our walk, on Boston’s Castle Island, we all stopped at Sullivan’s for a snack. Everyone had ice cream but for me. I chose the French fries for their high glycemic index. Soon I was at 125 again, which is where I remained for the remaining 3 miles of our walk.

Low numbers are desirable until they’re not. You really can’t get too far very fast when your blood sugar is 75 and falling. Today I really felt myself to be disabled, when most of the other walkers in my party — the ones without diabetes — walked, skipped, and ran ahead blithely in the sun.

It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed it. Still, it was a task to manage that enjoyment.