The vault runway at the Ocean Parkway Jewish Center was approximately half the length of a competition standard runway, blue panel mats laid over the rotting wood floor planks. I didn’t realize at the time that the vault runway was not the regulation size. Not that it mattered much when it came to the easy vaults my teammates and I were performing. You don’t really need a whole ass runway to do a simple handspring, which was the most difficult vault I worked on during my years as a recreational gymnast. But the lack of a proper runway did signify that this was not the sort of gym where one should expect to learn a very high level of gymnastics. The vault arrangement in the gym was hardly the only thing that was sub-par about the place. The uneven bars were very old; the rails were thick and oblong shaped and had absolutely no give to them. The suede covering of the balance beam was peeling. The matting of the trampoline was worn and sagged nearly to the floor when you landed. And those thin blue panel mats that lined the runway were the same we used for the floor exercise mat, also overlaid over the unforgiving wood floor.
My favorite event was the balance beam. I loved it for its slow deliberate pace, for the focus on aesthetics, and also because I was good at it, at least relative to the other three apparatuses. My weakest event was the uneven bars because I’ve never had much upper body strength to speak of and bars. And given the demands of a yeshiva education—I was in school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Friday due to the Sabbath—I never got a chance to practice more than a few hours a week. (As an adult, I do more training in CrossFit and powerlifting than I ever got to do in gymnastics on a weekly basis.)
While I dealt with fear on all of the apparatuses—just because I was doing relatively low level skills doesn’t mean I couldn’t be afraid of doing them—the event I was most afraid of was the vault.
Hayley Graham, the protagonist of Stick It did an excellent job of explaining the absurdity of the whole damn event. (Here’s the oral history I wrote about the excellent movie.)
Of course, running at top speed towards an inanimate object is simply the optimal way to vault, the best way to generate the power and velocity to perform the maximum number of flips and twists before landing. But you could also undercut the speed of your run by taking little half steps as you approach the springboard. It makes the whole process far less scary but it does end up greatly limiting what you can do on the apparatus. It’s an unintentional form of self-sabotage rooted in fear, as most forms of self-sabotage are. I don’t recall ever consciously thinking that I’d shorten my gait in order to approach the springboard at a slower speed. It simply happened that way. I’d start out running as fast as my little ten year old legs could carry but by the time I was about to jump onto the springboard, my pace had slowed to a jog. Given that there was a spotter there and that I was small and light, I was still usually able to squeak a handspring around but the way I performed this vault didn’t inspire confidence that I could truly master the skill and then progress to more difficult ones. (And I didn’t.)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about these little half steps of my childhood towards the apparatus. I have spent much of the last year not writing or publishing much, save for a handful of articles and cover letters for jobs I didn’t end up getting. (Cover letter writing is the lowest form of writing.) I knew that I should write and had things I wanted to write about—I’m rarely ever short on ideas—but I couldn’t bring myself to go full-steam ahead on any project. I’d stop something and then pick it up again. These starts and stops prevented any one project from gaining momentum. I couldn’t seem to drag anything of significance across the finish line. Not another book or book proposal or a screenplay, or any number of the things that I had been trying to work on over the course of the last several years.
While at least some of this can be chalked up to run of the mill procrastination and laziness, it felt like there was also something darker at play here. I was anxious all the time, especially when it came to writing. This is not exactly a new thing for me but it differed in degree from what I had experienced in the past. I have always worried about making mistakes in my writing, either factual or analytical or both, but that anxiety didn’t keep me from doing my work; it merely made the experience of publishing work very unpleasant for me at times. But this more intense anxiety of the past few years has made it increasingly impossible for me to even get to the point where I could experience my usual—or even heightened—level of publishing anxiety. If I had a particular deadline, I could still mostly get my work done, but if I was working on anything “voluntary”—a new book proposal or a novel or a screenplay or even this newsletter—I couldn’t seem to finish it, or at least finish it to my satisfaction. I have been cutting all my writing steps by half without meaning to. As was the case when I was younger and afraid of the vault but also so desperate to do a particular skill, I have still wanted quite badly to write things and finish projects and put them out into the world, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I know this is probably whiny and more than a little self-indulgent. I have been reluctant to share this but I felt that I owed you guys, particularly the subscribers, some sort of explanation for my prolonged absence. I had initially said I was only going on hiatus for a brief period of time and I was sincere when I wrote that, but then I disappeared for much, much longer. And in the newsletter I sent out earlier about the surprising virality of the Miami Boys Choir, a singing group that I had listened to as a young Orthodox girl, I did say that I would send out a newsletter that attempted to explain my prolonged absence. (I started this piece several weeks before I wrote the MBC one, working on it in the start-stop fashion I described earlier. Though I think if I hadn’t been felled by Covid a couple of weeks ago, I would’ve gotten this particular piece out a bit sooner.) So this is my attempt to honor the promise I made.
So where does all of this leave things for me when it comes to this newsletter project? I honestly don’t know. On the rare occasions when I’ve been able to get out of my own head and out of my own way, I enjoy writing these little missives, especially since some of the newsletters I’ve written are things that I wanted to write but didn’t think I could publish in mainstream publications. (I mean, where could I possibly publish a piece about the early Zionists’ obsession with gymnastics except in this humble little newsletter? Or a gymnastics dreidel game?)
Right now, I’m going to try to send more of these out and see if I can get my groove back and deliver work to you guys on a regular basis. If I can’t do that, I won’t restart charging again. (The payments have all been on pause since I announced the hiatus.) There are definitely some ideas that I’d love to explore via the newsletter and I hope that I’m able to bring them to you and that you’ll get something out of them. Thank you, as always, for the support you’ve shown me over the years.
Welcome back!
So great to hear from you Dvora. Keep keeping on!