The Squeeze

Not everybody in derby can be a star player. I think we all know that when we start. After we watch some derby, after we get involved in the community, we know that not all of us can be Suzy Hotrod. Not all of us can even be the best player on our team.

The truth is, though, that a lot of us feel like there is such a very large gap between us and people who are derby stars that we can never make it up. I know I can't be the best player on the team, but I've always told myself that I could at least be good at doing me. The problem is, I don't really know what I'm good at when I'm doing that.

I'm intensely frustrated right now. I spend a lot of time thinking about, reading about, watching derby. Absorbing strategy. Researching the teams we're playing. I devote time to off-skates practices; hell, I run off-skates practices, when a year ago, you wouldn't have caught me dead making a consistent commitment to go to them. In other words, I'm working my ass off. I'm trying to understand my strengths so that I can play to them, and understand my weaknesses so that I can correct them.

I think the problem is in not being able to find the strengths. If you asked me what I was good at, I'd tell you this: I'm pretty decent at positional blocking. I can take a hit like a boss, and most of the time, it doesn't move me. I'm aware of the jammers most of the time. If I can line up a hit and time it right, I hit hard, and I can do it effectively. I try to listen well in the pack and stick with my team. I try to communicate effectively. This season, I have worked harder than ever before at being a good offense player, the person who can help dig my jammer out of sticky situations.

But then there's the doubt. Sometimes, it seems like all those positives are just in my head. I've gotten complimented during practice recently for helping jammers when they're stuck - so maybe I can check that one off the list. But in spite of the fact that I know that I hit well, I'm never considered one of the team's hardest hitters, never one of the best blockers. And I want to be, oh gods, I do. But how do I get from point A to B? I positional block and set up set & spikes well, too. But I feel like the only thing that is valued is the spike, not necessarily the fact that I'm holding them back to set up a partner to take that hit. I feel like I'm considered slow - and I am slow, compared to our jammers.

I've started to wonder about a lot of things. How hard do I need to hit before I've done a good job? How fast do I need to skate before I have enough endurance?

I don't know whether it's necessarily that I don't understand what the coaches want out of me, or whether I am too critical of myself. I don't feel like I get enough feedback. Some people tell me I do a great job - like the captain of the Southern Misfits, who told me after the bout that I was a phenomenal blocker. NO ONE has EVER told me that before. But the truth is, just the way I am, I'm inclined not to believe it. Not to listen. To always find a reason why she might have been saying it just to be nice.

It breaks my heart that this is the one thing in derby that I can't get over. In the four years since I've started this sport, I've become tougher, stronger, smarter, more assertive. I am healthier. I am faster. I hit harder. And still, none of it gives me the results that I want. None of it makes me feel like I know where I stand, or even that I know what to work on. What I haven't been able to do is to get my inner doubter to shut up and let me become that blocker that does me.

At the beginning of this season, I made a list of goals. Some of those have really been worked on, while others have fallen by the wayside. I feel like it's difficult to set goals when you're not sure what your team needs of you. If you're tempted to think that your team doesn't need you, then it's hard to want to set goals. And I don't feel like that all the time, but there's certainly days where it's easy to give in to the temptation - well, I'm not one of their stronger players, so what the hell do they need me for? I'm just a warm body out there.

Self-talk like that hurts. It hurts when you believe in yourself so little. It hurts when you know that the fact that you don't believe in yourself makes your teammates more likely to see that lack of confidence, and when you know that your lack of confidence affects your ability to make plays.

I think maybe what makes it the hardest is that I don't know where to start working on the problem. Is it something that I need to talk out with my coaches? Is it something that I need to work on myself?

It's so easy to feel lost sometimes in a sport like this. When you're not the hitter that everyone dreads seeing in the pack, when you're not the jammer who can squeeze through the tiniest hole... where do you really stand?

I don't know. And I think a lot of us don't. So what is the solution? How do we keep reminding ourselves that it's okay to "do you" when "doing you" doesn't really give you what you want? If "doing you" isn't enough, are YOU wrong for wanting to "do" someone else? Or are you setting unrealistic goals? Or are you just unsure how to get from point A to point B?

I still don't know. I wish I did. I wish I had a magic button I could use to tell myself to shut the hell up because it's not like I'm just NOT WORKING ON IT. Life doesn't have many magic buttons, though.

One thing I do know... it's a puzzle that has some kind of solution. And if I look hard enough, I do believe that I'll find it. It's just that the looking is sometimes a really uncomfortable thing. I hope that, somehow, I can differentiate between my own ridiculous expectations and what my coaches want out of me. I hope I can begin to differentiate between my own negative self-talk, and interpreting every time they don't say anything as an affirmation of my uselessness.

It's really strange, sometimes, the way that derby can magnify problems that you're experiencing in your own life. In this case, the worst of derby brings my anxiety disorder to the forefront, writes it large on a screen, and forces me to confront it. Derby has that tendency: to make us face things that we don't like about ourselves. Things that are actually preventing us from getting where we want to go. Physical, mental, emotional, all of it.

There are really only two options: bitch about it, or change it. We all need to bitch sometimes, and this is my moment to do so. Bitching about it is recognition, and recognition can turn into a plan for change.

If there's one thing that I do think is positive about myself as a blocker, that I know no one, not even me, can take away, it's this: I'm always evolving. I'm always getting up after a fall. I'm always refusing to let the last game be the best ever, because then there's nothing else to live up to. The trick is in turning that into a sword to first take down this beast of negativity that is blocking the path to becoming a better Helley. Then, the real work starts.

4:32

Today: doomsday for lap times. WFTDA testing started at our morning practice this week, and I seriously thought I was going to barf when we lined up to do our timed laps. But once I got into the rhythm, I didn't even think about the time, just about counting down laps until I was done. 4:32. Exactly where I wanted to be when I set my goal of getting in under 4:30.

Now, I can set goals for when I skate with the other 25 in 5'ers, or when I go to help my derby wife get her lap times down on Tuesday. No pressure, just me and my time, and getting better. That, I can deal with.

The first half of the WFTDA test went well today too. Although some of my skills felt a little spastic (grapevines? Really? When have I ever used that in a game?), for the most part, I felt like I was on target. Ready to start a new season. We have left pacing, hitting, pack interactions. Those are the sorts of things that many new girls get worried about, and I hope our fresh meat aren't freaking out. The newer skaters that we had at practice today did exceptionally on the stuff we tested.

All in all, it's impossible not to have a huge sense of pride in our team right now. Things haven't been moonlight and roses down here in Burn City, but after struggling to get the new business license off the ground and then struggling to make sure everyone held on through the hard part, the light at the end of the tunnel is finally becoming brighter. People are working hard. Our new skaters are amazing-really nice women who have infused a major breath of life into the team. I really haven't felt more assured that we will make it, and not just make it, but succeed than I do now.

Derby does a lot of strange things for you. I realize now just how different I was as a skater even just last season. I do not remember the person I was last season, the blocker who was scared to block for fear of making the wrong decision. I am excited about bout season, ready to get back into the game and see what I can make of a whole new set of opponents and damn near a whole new team.

Without this, I don't know if I'd have any consistent model of persistence and change in my life. Derby is one of those sports where if you want it bad enough and you work hard enough for it, it's yours. I know not everything in life is that easy - but then again, derby is not that easy. To say the phrase above oversimplifies a lot. Wanting it bad enough means coming home crying when you can't perform as well as you want. It means not understanding why your team lost or fell apart at halftime. It means believing that there is absolutely nothing you can do to improve yourself because you are unimproveable. But working hard for it means telling your brain to shut the hell up, because only whiners fall down and don't recover within three seconds. It means turning off your brain when your muscles are burning from strain and pushing harder. It means FINDING those extra few strides when you are about to finish a time trial, and FINDING that extra block at the end of the scrimmage to hold the other jammer.

Derby can cause you to lose a lot, believe me. I've lost a whole team. I've lost friends. I've seen other people lose relationships, even marriages, whether directly or indirectly related to roller derby. It can be a consuming monster. But somewhere, after we're consumed, that's where the magic happens. Somehow, we become obsessed with this sport and being better at it, and somehow, we're made more whole than we were before. More confident, more apt to believe that we are strong and decisive and fabulous women. If I can do what I do on a derby track, if every second of every drill can mold me into a better player AND a better person, then what happens if I apply those lessons to my life outside of derby?

And they say sports teach you nothing.

Starting Fresh

It's almost a new season. I have to confess, I don't really know what to expect (and I'm the Interleague Coordinator).

What I do know is that things have been hard in BCR land since about September-October. Most of it is not worth rehashing; it's one of those situations where the more you rehash, the more you wonder if you should have made a different choice, the more you lose sleep over trying to find that one miraculous solution that would have made every single person happy. I'm an idealist and a compromiser - I like to believe that solution exists, but the truth is, it doesn't in every instance. Sometimes, we just have to take what we can get and make the best of it.

So here we are. A lot of familiar faces from the very beginnings of BCR aren't around anymore. It's pretty surreal to look around and realize that Amyn, myself, and Bruise are the only ones who were there for the founding of the team. According to some people, that makes me an OG.

Thing is, though, I've been here forever, around roller derby, that is. I'll be involved for my fourth season this year, skating for my third. In a sense, I feel like I should be a better skater than I am - but who doesn't feel like that? In a lot of ways, I'm disappointed in myself, but in a lot of ways, I'm not.

I look back two seasons ago, to the Mary Helley that ended up becoming the captain of Belles 'n' Bombshells and eventually the President of the league. Comparatively, I am light years past that girl. I understand more about strategy and teamwork, and I am not so unsure of myself that I let opportunities pass me by on the track. Well - okay, I lie. PART of that unsure girl is still there. But I like to think that she's fading the longer I skate.

This team has really been through hell backwards in the past six months. Maybe the past year. I could let it get to me, but the truth is, nobody else can ruin derby for you. You're the only one who can choose to put out your fire.

I've taken the past week and a half off from skating to get my shit together for the new semester (and to have a nice birthday dinner). The guess, though, I really needed the time to re-evaluate derby too. Drama is exhausting, especially when you are involved in a leadership position and you're trying to work through it, reassuring the team that the league is stable and healthy, while at the same time having to pretend you yourself aren't terrified that it's not. The December break was nice. I probably shouldn't have given myself more time off the past week and a half, but I guess I just wasn't done thinking about it.

Ahead of us this season are twelve bouts. Twelve all new bouts with no prior bullshit, no prior expectations. Clean slate. Whatever I screwed up last year doesn't matter anymore.

Bout season gets closer every practice. As I've learned from my time in this sport, it helps to have goals, and that's part of the reason I wanted to write this post today: to set some. To set them down in front of everyone who reads my blog, to release them to the derby goddesses (who I imagine to be sort of Valkyries on skates), and to begin getting down to work.

I think it's the most reasonable to set short-term and long-term goals-things for me to work on now, and things for me to accomplish by the end of the season. I hope to update my blog here and there with updates on how I'm doing with them.

Short Term:
1. Lose 20 pounds by June. When summer kicks in and our season starts its more stringent timeline, I'd like to be slimmer and fitter. Keep the muscle, ditch the fat.

2. Attend every skating practice through the end of March unless I am out of town visiting family. Of course, it's necessary to attend every practice you can regardless, but I set my particular date for the end of March because a) that's when our bout season officially starts, and b) I need the off-season training to get back into shape for Hub City.

3. Improve 25 in 5 time to under 4:30. When I was with BnB, one of my greatest challenges was making the 25 in 5. My endurance was terrible, and I could barely handle it. Making the time is not my problem now. I've always wanted to be faster - at one point last season, I got down to a personal best of 4:27. Right now, I'm running about 4:40, and I'm not happy with it. Ten seconds isn't much to shave off, and it's doable within the next few weeks. A few seconds every time we do it at practice is my goal. I would love to have it down to 4:30 by the time we take our WFTDA test in early Feb, but I don't know if I'll quite make it. My goal, therefore, is to have my time between 4:30 and 4:35 for the test.

Long-Term:
1. Play aggressively. If there's anything I've figured out, it's that I'm actually a pretty hard hitter, and a pretty aggressive blocker. When I play aggressively. That's the key term. When I am nervous about whether or not I am making the wrong play I don't take any chances at all, nevermind making the wrong play. When I play more aggressively, yes, I screw up sometimes. But it's better to screw up and adjust my playstyle to be more effective than to be so scared to screw up that I try nothing at all. One of the games where we got our asses handed to us, vs. Nashville's B-team ,I felt like I played my best. I didn't know where that skater came from. But what I knew after that bout was that she was in there somewhere - aggressive, did what she needed to do without over-thinking it. Yeah, she got sent to the box sometimes, but she also made some pretty good plays. And then I spent the rest of the season chasing her, trying to bring her back. This season, I will not chase her; I will be her. I will learn to leave it all on the track, because I only get one shot at every bout - and I need to make it count.

2. Make a lifestyle change. I'll admit it, before derby, I was like a lot of other people: Lazy with a capital L. Never played team sports, never really liked exercising. But, as I learned pretty quickly, derby is about a lot more than just looking cute and smashing into people on skate. The sheer strength and agility and physical fitness needed to play this sport has been both a shock and a stumbling block at times. Whether or not I knew it would take this much, though, I know it now. And if I want to be the best Helley I can be, then I have to make a choice: I can keep treating my body like crap, and keep making excuses for why I don't want to exercise (even though I know I feel MUCH better after I do), or I can eat better, train harder, and make a commitment to tune myself up not just for my team, but also for me.

3. Jam successfully. At least once. I've known since I started that I would never really be a jammer, but I will admit: I am terrified of it. I don't want to be a star jammer; I'm not built like that, and I love pack play a LOT. But what I DO want to do this season is to learn how to jam. I want to take opportunities to take the jammer panty at practice, and make myself do it, even if I don't want to. There's absolutely no reason at all for me to be scared of jamming, and I WILL learn how to do it successfully this season, even if it's only during scrimmages, and even if it's only to make me understand jamming better so I can be a better blocker. I don't really have any goals to do it during a game - I just want to get over my fear of it, and learn how to use knowledge of what a jammer has to do to my advantage when I'm in the pack.

As I look at my list of goals, some of them seem awfully big, but I think that's okay. If we don't dream big about ourselves, we're short-cutting ourselves. Who else will do it for us? If I don't believe that I can be that effective, hard-hitting blocker that takes care of business in the pack, why will my teammates believe it? Why will my jammers think I can protect them?

I think it's important for every player to self-evaluate. We may know that we're not experts at derby, but we can always get better. There's always something. These are my somethings. What are your somethings?

P.S. - Welcome to the new season, Burn City! <3

Writing the Silence

As I walked into the rink tonight, I was sick and anxious. I put on my skates first, lacing them up just like I always have done. Tonight was any old practice.

Except, of course, that it wasn't. It was the first time BCR has had a team skating practice in a month, the first time we've met as a team and skated together since what turned out to be our last bout of the 2011 season. A big win - sure, we went out on a good note - but it was awfully surprising to all of a sudden have all this time, and no derby to fill it with.

At first, it was a relief. The season had been hectic. I skated in every bout we had, every six hour drive, every marathon road trip back on the same night, and every late night crash in an unfamiliar hotel with the smell of bout still lingering in my hair.

It reminded me, though, of last year. In early October 2010, we made the difficult decision to close Belles 'n' Bombshells for good. As much as I've tried to move past that decision, the present situation was uncomfortably close. No practices for a month, people drifting off, forgetting about why derby was so important to the in the first place.

My anxiety returned. I've been angrier. My medications don't work as well. I've gained weight. A month off from skating has brought all kinds of bullshit that I was not even remotely interested in entertaining.

Tonight, a handful of my teammates and I strapped on our skates together again. The rink was mostly silent for the first few moments after we stepped onto the floor. Except for the rhythmic whoosh and scrape of wheels on coated concrete. Nobody needed to talk. I could see it in the way Amyn's eyes seemed to light up as she skated those first warmup laps. The way that Scar blazed past me on a corner, crouched low in derby stance and speeding around like she'd never quit skating. The way my own feet suddenly remembered the motions and my muscles started pushing smooth and deep through long crossovers. Ziggy grins like she hasn't done anything so wonderful this entire week, and in spite of her pregnancy, pushes herself just as hard as she always has. Sabrina bears down on her wheels, cuts hard, pushes herself - she's newly back with the team, and I can tell that the exuberant drive of returning hasn't worn off yet.

Tonight was not an endurance practice, and it was not a scrimmage. I still left with sweat in my hair, but not with the burnt-out-candle exhaustion of one of Trick's endurance fests or the last scrimmage before the weekend game.

It, though, was exactly what I needed. It came back to me, it all came back in rushes, like someone had broken a dam upstream.

We skated a 25 in 5, and even though my endurance was shot to shit after so much time off, my body settled into a rhythm. I sat back into it. I didn't worry a damn about my time, I just skated. I paced myself like I knew I needed to, and I didn't let up. My body took over and steered me through, reminding me ecstatically 'yes, you DO remember this!'

Later, there was an obstacle course. Weaving through tiny holes, hard cuts right on the inside and outside lines, jumps. The first few runs through were awkward for me, but then there was that rush of knowledge and remembrance. When I felt my muscles suddenly spring up, my knees reaching for my chest to extend the height of the jump, it was all still there. The knowledge that the harder I work, the better I'll be at this.

Liza is braver than I've ever seen her, asking questions and bounding delicately over the cones like a doe. LJ scoots in late and throws her gear on like she's been waiting her entire life just to do this. Broken wrist or not, she is here.

Like always, derby has been there. It's been a year since I came back to BCR, and I've never once regretted it, not even when it felt like every game was just another ass-kicking that I didn't want. Whether I wanted it or not, I went. Some people might say derby is a cruel mistress who runs hot and cold, who tells you to go to hell when you bring her flowers.

I guess the truth is that I'm the cruel mistress. Derby's still there waiting when I get done whining or taking my 'burnout breaks.'

Derby's still there, still willing to sharpen me, hone me into not only a better weapon for my team, but into a better person. It may not make sense to everyone, but it doesn't have to.

It makes sense to me. Toe stops grind and squeal against the floor as I whirl around to stop. My wheels skid and howl at every hockey stop. My skates bend left, right, as I juke around cones. I pick up speed for the jump and a breeze blows past me, a breeze that's part of me, part of the machine I become when I lace up eight wheels and tool around the track. My knees bend, my quads engage, my arms swing in perfect arcs as I swing out wide on the straightaways and dive close on the turns.

Nobody needs to talk.

10 Things I Learned This Weekend - BCR vs. Regulators

10. There is such a thing as a full moon in Georgia... in the middle of the day.

9. A crowded bar that plays 8 Metallica songs in a row so loud that you can't talk over it is not a good after-party venue, no matter how cheap the PBR.

8. Don't dare tell Amyn you have sweet tea if it's not real sweet tea. She WILL try to get all up in your kitchen and handle that business.

7. Savannah is not only an awesome city, it's also full of awesome derby girls.

6. The phrase "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink" applies as well to drunk derby girls as it does to anything else.

5. Murphy's Law corollary: if you have four women in a car on a road trip, the number of times they will have to stop and pee is inversely proportional to how much they have actually drank.

4. It's not all about winning... but it feels pretty damn good when you do, especially when you know you're the odds are against you.

3. Teamwork trumps ego every time. Roller derby is not a single player game. If you make a great hit on an opposing blocker to make yourself feel good at the expense of stopping her jammer, then you're doin' it wrong.

2. BCR got game... no matter how long it took us to find it.

1. Mindset is the most important thing about derby. If you go out on the track and flip your shit, you won't play the kind of game you want to. Ever.

10 Things I Learned This Weekend

10. Some penalties are worth it. Whether it makes me a "bad derby girl" or not, I was damn proud of my one major penalty, and I wouldn't trade it in to play safer.

9. Soup is not always a good thing.

8. Car rides seem much shorter when you're laughing the whole way there and back.

7. The score does not always reflect how hard you play. We lost by almost 200 points, and I am still damn proud of how we played out there. Whatever the score, we made them work for it - down jammers, down some of our hardest hitters, we made them work for it.

6. Chatty girls are awesome on and off the track (and a big shout-out and congrats to Rita on her trial-by-fire first bout!).

5. Focus is not an unreachable goal.

4. Losing but learning something very important makes the loss worth it. There's no pride lost if you try your hardest.

3. I CAN. In spite of all the insecurity I've had this season about whether or not I'm pulling my weight, I proved to myself yesterday that, just as I suspected, the only person keeping me from reaching my potential was me.

2. Minnesota may have ugly colors, but they looked amazing out there last night with their death defying jammers and their speedy blockers.

1. I love my derby family. Amyn and Saintly reminded us to feel pride in what we've accomplished, no matter the loss. Scar and Bea reminded me that each and every one of us has that fire inside us, we just need the right atmosphere to release it. Beezy reminded me that if you get knocked down eight times, the important thing is that you get up eight times. Loss or not, I loved yesterday, and I needed it. I've never felt so strongly that this was the right place for me to be.

Rollin' on the River

The last time I took the track for a bout was almost a month ago. I've been grateful for the break in what has otherwise been a blistering pace this season.

Maybe I needed this time, these three long weeks, to really reconsider things. After our June bout, I felt just a little bit heartbroken about derby. Not that that's unusual - generally, people who never get a little bit heartbroken about derby aren't putting that much into it.

One of the last jams of that bout stands out to me. Our jammer was stuck in the back of the pack. Our pivot had us walling in the front. I took the outside of that wall and stuck to them like glue, holding the wall together.

That's when the voices started, and I wish I could say they were only in my head. The jammer was yelling for our help. The pivot wanted us to hold fast in the wall. One voice from the bench screamed for me to drop back. Another swore at us for not doing anything, for not fighting harder.

My brain turned roughly the consistency of uncooked eggs. We had set it out once when we argued before about who should give orders on the track - the pivot is the voice you listen to. But it's hard to listen to you when there are so many other angry voices telling you to do other things. Can you just sit and watch them pound on your jammer? Isn't it better to listen to the pivot, who presumably has the strategy that you need in mind?

Though it's hard to feel like a good player when I compare myself to some of my very talented teammates (a bad idea), I know I've come an awfully long way since I started skating. I know I've trained hard, and I know I've gotten better, even if I also know that I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be.

After that game, I was in a total funk. Our team leaders felt as though nothing had gone right in that bout. I knew it hadn't been perfect, but there were at least some of us who were trying. I wanted to regroup, logically discuss our mistakes, and move on. But I felt like a chastised Catholic schoolchild waiting to get rapped on the knuckles with a ruler.

Last week, I saw my first derby wife at open skate, along with a lot of my old teammates. People I had bouted with ten months ago looked to me like they hadn't skated in more than a year. She ignored me completely, even though she talked to everyone else, making it plain that she has always, and will always, blame me for Belles 'n' Bombshells falling apart. Bittersweet medicine, that.

I needed San Fermin in ways I didn't even know I needed it. I really wanted to go last year, but just didn't have the money to make the trip. This year, I was damn well determined that we would go, even though I knew funds would be tight (though admittedly, not as tight as they actually are).

I was nervous. I knew before we ever got out of the car on Fulton St. that it was going to be hard to skate on the New Orleans streets. Trying to hobble over cobblestones on my toe stops didn't make it much better. We got to our ambush point a little after 7 AM; the run was set to start at 8.

Somewhere around 7:30 I guess, it started to make sense. I was, quite literally, standing outside of New Orleans' World Trade Center, dressed up as a bull in skates, holding a wiffle bat, with which I was about to beat people. People were stopping on street corners to stare at us and take pictures.

Finally, whistles blew. A slew of white-clad runners streaked around the corner, some in elaborate costumes (Richard Simmons, Elvis, flamenco dancers, even a duck). And then they blew the airhorn to release the 6 BCR skaters.

I sped onto the street, screaming and menacing people with my bat. Adrenaline flooded through every part of me as I realized that people were yipping and screeching as they saw us come flying through. In the middle of the streets, I was walloping people as hard as I could with a stupid black plastic bat in a ridiculous tutu with fuzzy horns, and it was the best I had felt about skating in a long time.

Nobody on the streets cared if I missed a block. They ran like hell when they saw me. Screams of "OWWWW!" and "SHIT!" were like music to my ears. This whole thing was derby through and through - camp and cheese, and power. It's not often that women get to feel like they're making the men run from them.

I couldn't stop talking about it on the way home. I babbled nonstop about how this one event could really show a community's spirit and style, about how thankful I was to have found derby, because without it, I'd probably weigh 300 pounds and be skulking around the house miserable.

Two days from now, we'll be packing up the car to head to Nashville, where we'll play their B-team in a pick-up game that a good number of our team will not be attending, in spite of voting for having it. Our roster was down to nine before we got subs - doable, but probably miserable.

One thing I hope I can pack with me is that joy that I rediscovered in New Orleans, my favorite city, while doing my favorite thing. It's too bad there's no tangible way to pack it in the car.

The bottom line is that I know my teammates get frustrated with me. I know that sometimes I make really boneheaded moves out there on the track. But, if I'm to be honest, the three bouts I played in during my first season, I learned damn near nothing. BCR has given me the first real and dependable season I've had, and I'm trying. Dammit, I'm trying. I'm certainly not the best blocker out there, but I want this, and I love it, and I hope to god I'm not the only one who sees that in me.

This season has been hard. It's been a season that tests whether love of the sport is enough. Can loving the sport make up for all the times you screwed up and cost your team a point, or even more than that? Can loving the sport make up for the times your teammates snap at you and hurt your feelings because they're frustrated too? Can loving the sport keep you playing and trying even during a hard rebuilding year, when you know your teammates are wishing you were someone else?

Yes. It can. In spite of the negativity beast's best efforts, love of the sport triumphs. My teammates, my team, my rink, my sport, I love it all. Even if I'm a total screwup sometimes, even if I miss blocks and I can't figure out why my performance isn't what I want it to be. No matter how frustrated, I'll still be here, because of how I was reforged in that sticky New Orleans heat: my body and mind are happiest and healthiest when they're cruising around on eight wheels, in bulky pads, slamming into other women who want me out of their way. It's a lifetime commitment.

Falling (Back in Love)

I was reading one of my favorite derby blogs today, having nothing much else to do now that work has ended for the summer. The esteemed Ms. Bunny Low-browski said the following: "Accept the things you can't change and let that be something that distracts other people, you have work to do. Don't give yourself any excuse to not succeed."

Her post was advice for skaters who are skating their first bout. I'm a long way from that now, as weird as it seems. By my count, I've skated 7 bouts and 3 mixed scrimmages, but I realized as I read her advice that I sometimes still feel like a brand new skater, going out on that floor for the very first time. You would think, at some point, that the "new" feeling would go away, that I would somehow feel less freaked out about this whole bouting thing.

One of my teammates got really irritated while we were scrimmaging last night. She put her hands on my hips, pushed me aside and told me to "get the fuck out of the way." Presumably, she felt like I wasn't doing what I needed to do in the pack, and that she would have to take care of my job for me.

The harshness of her words wasn't what stuck. It was the insinuation that I couldn't handle it. And immediately, I started criticizing myself. Well, you are really off tonight, Helley, I said to myself. Nevermind the fact that my grandmother died last week, I had to miss a whole week of practice post-Red Stick bout to go up to Birmingham and help plan the funeral... that was no excuse when it came to giving myself the opportunity to chew myself out. To agree with her frustrated criticism of me as though it was handed down straight from the gods on high.

Bunny's words gave me something of a different perspective on the incident. All this self-criticism that I do (a lifelong habit) is nothing but my excuse not to succeed. Of course I'll let my teammates down, of course I'll skate poorly, because this is the best I can do.

Only it's not.

Succeeding in derby has always been more of a mental struggle than a physical one for me. And the physical part has been no picnic - going from a sedentary college student who had never played a team sport to where I am now has been a long, hard journey, and it's one that isn't near done. But the hardest part of all has been telling my brain to shut the hell up long enough for me to do what I do out there.

Lately, I've just been mired in it. Stressed out over everything I've had to do at the end of the term, and further stressed out by the unexpected sadness of losing a family member. I've been a sea of negativity, firmly believing that every time I go out there, I'll perform poorly, and you know what? I've been an accurate predictor of that, because every time I've told myself something negative, I've believed it.

I know I can't turn it off like it's a lightswitch. But what I can do is stop giving myself excuses. Every step I take forward as a derby skater is another step towards defeating the crushing negativity that sometimes seems like an overwhelming black wave threatening to inundate me.

On Sunday, I have a lot at stake. I knew about the Tragic City Rollers for a long time before I ever met any of them. I read about roller derby on the internet, and I wanted so desperately to be a part of it that I could hardly stand it. But while I lived in Birmingham, I never went out for their team for one reason only: I was scared.

I was determined to stop hesitating and take the opportunity when a fellow MA student (later to become Paina Skully) invited me to the interest meeting for BCR in fall of 2008. On that day, I fell in love with this sport and the people who do it for real, for keeps.

Since then, I've fallen and gotten up, literally and figuratively about a million times. I tore a meniscus, sprained an ankle, and came up with more creative bruise shapes than I ever thought possible. I believed in myself, stopped doing it, then struggled to do it again. I have cried over derby, laughed myself sick in the stomach over derby, made friends and lost them over derby.

It's my third season of roller derby. For the past three years, roller derby has been a part of my life, whether on the sideline or encompassing every moment. It seems like so long ago that I first stuttered my way onto a skate floor, sweating and burning through derby position exercises that felt, at the time, like they were going to kill me.

Our team founder, Cho Cold, wrote a post on her blog recently discussing how even since the beginning of her derby career, she has had a hunger for knowledge, and a desire to be better that has kept her going, no matter the situation, no matter how much she wanted to quit. When I read that, it reminded me of something. Or rather, someone.

It reminded me of me. I remembered how for years before BCR was ever even an idea, I wanted to skate on a roller derby team. I remembered how even after I probably shouldn't have been skating that first season, I kept putting myself through it because I wanted it so badly. It was incredibly foolish to keep skating on a torn meniscus, but I just couldn't get roller derby out of my head. I wanted it.

It's the very same reason I went to Montgomery. When I realized that these girls wanted me, well, I wanted them too. They wanted me to skate for them, not ref for them, and I thought I would burst with joy. I felt like someone in roller derby wanted me around as much as I wanted to be there.

And this season, with BCR, I've felt like much more of a beast than I ever could have with BnB. The weekly practices we have are practices that, last September, I could not have handled. I would have quit less than half an hour in. No matter how ridiculous I feel out there with the amazing athletes on my team sometimes, I know I'm better than I was.

And I remember how much I wanted it when I first started. How much I wanted it before I first started. How much I still want it.

The real truth I've learned in the past week is that roller derby doesn't throw you out at the first screwup. Or the fifth. Or the fiftieth. Roller derby opens its arms to take you back every time you are willing to get up and keep going. Or, more specifically, roller derby players do all this.

Because one thing that's become increasingly clear is that it's not my team that expects me to fail. It's been me. When my team gets frustrated with how I play, it's because they are expressing a faith and a belief that I can do better. It's because they've seen the progress I've made since I came back to BCR. They don't over-analyze every mistake I make (sometimes they may not even notice them). I think I've been harder on myself than my team could ever be.

I'm not the star player on the team, the one that everyone is awed by. I doubt I ever will be, and to be honest, I don't really think I want to be. But what's more important to me than any of that is making sure that I get that negative bitch inside me to shut the hell up so that my teammates never have a reason to doubt me again.

I'll be taping her mouth shut Sunday when we play TCR. I've got something to prove.

Feeling the Burn...Out

Thirty-five minutes until practice starts. I wish I could crawl into a hole.

Saturday, we have a bout against Red Stick Roller Derby. The thought makes me nervous in ways that playing against Greenville, a relative unknown to me, did not. Greenville handed us our asses in ways I'm pretty sure that Red Stick will not. But still, there's a lingering memory associated with Baton Rouge, one that I know my teammates don't share. They were never in that position to have it in the first place.

C'mon, Mary, that was right in front of your face! You're not gonna call that?! What the hell is wrong with you?

I remember wincing, maybe visibly. FFE, Red Stick's coach (whose full name is perhaps best not spelled out for impressionable eyes), had been on my case for this entire bout.

By half-time, my eyes were brimming with tears. Back in the ref room, I bitched bitterly about how disrespectful he was, and how I couldn't concentrate with him riding my ass every time I did (or didn't) make a call.

Come to think of it, I'm not actually sure I made any calls in that game. I'm not sure that I raised that whistle to my lips even once to call a skater off, or even to call off a jam.

The first time I ever reffed a bout was one of the worst experiences of my derby career. It certainly wasn't as bad as the second bout I ever reffed, but that's another story for another time. I hadn't transitioned from rollergirl to ref that long ago, and I knew without a doubt that I was not ready to ref a bout. I kept telling myself that.

I'm pretty sure my lack of confidence showed. For a ref, that's a deadly disability, and rollergirls will prey on it. I didn't understand the interplay between teams and referees, the way that during a game, rollergirls will not only cuss you out but curse your entire family line, and then be totally fine at the after party. It takes a while for refs to get to the point where those insults roll off their shoulders. Some refs never get there. I imagine that plenty quit under the strain of that load.

When I think about Red Stick Roller Derby, that's what I remember. Being absolutely terrified of skating as a ref, but being forced to do it because (surprise!) they hadn't brought any refs with them, and hadn't thought fit to tell us until they set foot in the Skate Center. I'm at least Facebook friends with many of their skaters now. Meeting them face to face, I understand now that they're not the ten foot ogres they seemed when I reffed that bout.

But, I know that this weekend will be no walk in the park. Red Stick is a WFTDA Apprentice League now. They've been trained by some of the smartest and best in the sport.


***

Thirty-five minutes after practice, and I'm not sure what to make of what just happened to me.

When practice started, I felt short of breath. I figured that had a lot to do with me, you know, missing about a week of skating due to tornadoes or the mass of papers sprawled all over my office floor, one or the other. No big deal, right?

Uh, wrong.

During our warmup (our damn warmup, for gods' sakes), I sat down, panting for breath. During our second drill, I practically collapsed on the sidelines. My breath sounded like a noisy hacksaw, I was dizzy, my knees were weak, and a steady tattoo of I can't, I can't, I can't was pounding against my forehead.

That same summer, the one I described above, the one of that disastrous Red Stick bout (and my second disastrous bout), I started having panic attacks.

They were frequent. My thoughts raced, one after the other, taunting me because no matter how hard I focused on calming them, they wouldn't slow down. My hands trembled, my heart pounded, my breaths were shallow and quick. I felt like I was dying. The way the terror rose up in my throat and exploded into my brain was like nothing I had ever known before.

I couldn't do anything. Watching TV made me have panic attacks. Reading made me have panic attacks. Playing World of Warcraft (which was one of my only outlets that long summer) made me have panic attacks. It was literally impossible some days for me to get out of bed. I couldn't sleep, but being awake was torture.

More than ten times a day, I'd feel them coming on, and my body would start to tremble. Endless fear, endless overreaction to things that shouldn't have mattered. I couldn't make them not matter.

When I skated, I'd forget about those things for as long as I was at the rink. Reffing isn't for me, I know that now, but without it, I don't know that I would have left the house that summer. In a very real way, roller derby (and BCR) held me together at a time when all the seams were popping apart and nothing made sense.

That anxiety was crippling, and I doubt I will ever forget what it felt like. It reared its ugly head inside my chest tonight. It leapt up from what I thought was certain death like some perverse black phoenix and said hey jackass, remember me?

It's like some fated movie showdown between good and evil, only I'm not really sure I'm either one of those things, but just me, my surname being entirely appropriate for someone who's somewhere in between most things, content to be neither this nor that, but to exist unlabeled and unquantified.

One drill I sat out because it was a race. I knew my heartrate would get up again, and I didn't trust myself not to freak out. But halfway through it, when it was my scrimmage team's turn to go do burpees while the other team sprinted back and forth, I just said the hell with it and went and did burpees with my team.

It was like flipping a breaker into the off position. Once the current quit flowing into those neurons at breakneck speed, I just skated. I skated and I hit people and yeah, I definitely nailed some people in the wrong places, and yeah I definitely didn't always pay attention when I should have, but it was about more than that for me tonight.

Panic Disorder (if that's what I even have - maybe it's just what they call "Generalized Anxiety Disorder," which never seemed like a very helpful label to me) isn't something that just goes away. You can treat it, but it's more along the lines of managing than it is disappearing it completely.

I knew someday I'd have to face it again. It's ironic that it's rearing its ugly head right before our bout with Red Stick, the very bout at which I started to discover that something inside of me was going very wrong.

I take a low dose anti-depressant every day, and I have for almost two years now. If things get bad, I have a mild anti-anxiety pill that I can take to stave off the panic attacks. Usually, I only take one a day, with my anti-depressant, but either way, I'm tethered to those little orange bottles because sometimes even with them, I don't manage the condition well.

One of my greatest fears once that summer was over and I'd finally gotten some relief from it all was that it would come back one day. It's not realistic for me to expect to never have issues with anxiety again, or even to expect that I'll never have a panic attack again. Tonight was a jolt that reminded me of that fact.

There's one thing I've learned since 2009, though, and much, if not most, of the lesson came to me from starting to skate derby, which I didn't even have the courage to pursue until long after my knee had healed.

It's perhaps best phrased with the tag line from Treme: "Won't bow, don't know how."

If there's anything that I know about myself, it's that I'm a resilient person. I've been through far too much bullshit (there's really no other way to phrase it) than is worth recounting in this blog, but I'm still here, "bloody but unbowed," as it were.

I've been apprehensive about playing Red Stick ever since I saw our season schedule way back in December. Maybe, though, it wasn't Red Stick that I was anxious about. I had a sneaking suspicion, and after tonight, it's becoming a certainty: the monster in the closet may actually look a lot like me.

War Music, Part I

I warned you all that I'd be writing about music. You should have listened.

I should explain at this point that my music taste is somewhat... eccentric. I could rattle off a list of my favorite bands that would positively baffle most people. Is that even a band? Where are they from?

However, I believe it's a good thing for people to broaden their horizons. In the area of music, that's something I do constantly. You might say it's a bit of an obsession. Music for writing, music for concentrating, music to get hyped up for this, that, and the other. As I mentioned yesterday, it's pretty bizarre to me that I've never written about music in this blog before, but there's time to remedy that, at least.

Five songs I've been spinning today to get my mind in the right place for derby mayhem tomorrow:

1. "Valkyries," Amberian Dawn - A song that talks about the mythical Valkyries. For those of you not up on your Norse mythology, they are women warriors who would fly over the battlefield choosing which warriors would die. Could anything be more badass than that?

Favorite lyrics: "Shieldmaidens ride the wolves in the sky with ravens
scouting the battleground for souls of slain heroes.

Choosers of slain.

Valkyries ride through the night sky
singing fierce battle-cries,
Valkyries, choosers of slain, come ride their wolves!"

2. "Voittamaton," Villielain - Another fine product of Finland, who I shall ever maintain puts out the finest rock music there is. Not only are there amazing coloratura soprano vocals (in a metal song), the chorus translates as "I am, I am, I am now invincible."

3. "Wings of Darkness," Tarot - Yet another Finnish band, and one of my favorites. Old-style power metal in another song about how Vikings will kick your teeth in and use your skull for a hat. I seem to find that metaphor rather inspiring this week, but then again, what's more inspiring than some of the most feared warriors in the history of the planet? That's right. Raise your sword.

Favorite lyrics: "No place is safe from us in underworld of sky
Live on the edge, looking danger into the eye"

4. "Wreak Havoc," Angelspit - Angelspit is a relatively new acquisition of mine, but I don't really know how I lived without them. Crazy, dark, industrial, hard - and I love it. This song in particular helps me get ready to play derby, because it reminds me of what I said yesterday: my aspiration to one day be the Cthulhu of jammers.

Favorite lyrics: "Right now right now RIOT NOW
WREAK HAVOC
Right now right now RIOT NOW
UNLEASH HELL!"

It's impossible not to yell along.

5. "Sturm & Drang," KMFDM - It's always hard for me to pick a favorite KMFDM song, but this week, this is it. It's driving and aggressive, the mood I need to be in for a good game of derby.

Favorite lyrics: "You make and break your own restrictions
You write and prove your own revisions
You become new

You sweat and bleed pure fascination
You thrive upon disintegration
You break through

The truth the lies all fabrications
Only you control your destination
You are what you do"

A perfect reminder of those goals I set yesterday, and a ridiculously awesome song to boot.

So that's my five - this time around. Be sure to post and let me know if you found some new bands from my list. You can also let me know if you absolutely hated the songs, but remember, I'm all hyped up. I may hurt you. ;)

Good night, and may Quad bless your travels this bout weekend.

Flippin' Switches and Hittin' Bitches

Some of the best derby advice that I have indirectly received is a quote from, if I'm not mistaken, Heidi Volatile: "When in doubt, hit a bitch." It is a quote that I have oft-repeated, especially when I talk to fresher meat than I who need some reassuring, and especially when I was team captaining back at BnB.

As it turns out, that's harder advice to follow than I figured. Then again, like most things worth listening to, it's much harder to commit and do it than it is to talk big about it.

Saturday is approaching with a vengeance. It's the first home bout of the season. Wednesday night, I feel like shit. My hormones have chosen this particular week to run wild on me. I am snapping people's heads off left and right, my back is killing me, and my stomach is tied up in knots, though it's difficult to tell what of that is what we might delicately call "woman troubles" and what is what we might delicately call "bout tummy."

Practice was tense tonight. It always seems to be the Wednesday before a bout. People get snippy with each other. The air gets thick. Hits get hard, and sometimes they get sloppy. Curse words are said, and sometimes, they even sound like they're said with malice.

If our bout against Dixie Derby Girls was any indication, this must be just something we need to do before a bout. We need to use the scrimmage time on Wednesday as a way to get all our nerves out, all our frustrations and fears. When things start to look like a hot mess out there, it gets a little nerve-wracking to see us playing like that, but I know we can pull it together.

In Huntsville, we played like a well-oiled machine. It was the first time I've ever been to slow my mind down enough to do what I needed to do. In fact, for the most part, I just turned it off, and let my body go on auto-pilot. You know what to do. Block now. Stall now. Slow down now. Call out to your teammates now.

I felt liberated. Finally free from my over-analysis, my fear of failure, and my dogged inner critic that simply will not shut the hell up when it's time for her to do so.

It took me two seasons to get here, and one of those seasons, I was reffing - and was just as critical, and just as insecure.

Without a doubt, Huntsville, at least for me, was a milestone to celebrate. I'm not Amyn or Saintly - I don't have that kind of pack awareness, or the ability to just sit on jammers the way they do. I'm not a monster like Ziggy who sends jammers sailing every time she lays eyes on them. Yet. So while I may not have been the best skater on the team at Huntsville, I know on my own that I improved a lot that day.

Greenville, though, is no time for resting on my laurels. I've been well informed already that, strategy wise, this will be like nothing I've ever encountered before. Yes, I've watched slow derby, but it's another thing entirely to be using it. I'm nervous. That's putting it lightly. I've been trying not to think about it as much as possible, because I don't want to turn into a nutcase.

I read something tonight on Roller Derby Inside Track that made me think a bit about Saturday, though, and about my nerves: "Hungry teams excel by moving out of the comfort zones." The same can be said of hungry skaters, and all I've wanted since I started playing roller derby was to constantly get better at it. To one day be that blocker that nobody wants to mess with, the one that other teams yell for their blockers to stay on, lest she continually tear jammers asunder. The Cthulhu of blocking, materializing to - yeah, okay, enough of metaphors.

And I can't do that by being scared and sitting on my performance at Huntsville. One improved bout performance doesn't make me a good player, but continually doing something better at every bout will. So... it's time to set goals again.

1. Chase that damn jammer. I have a terrible habit of giving up every time a jammer passes me, and then getting mad at myself. At the core, it's two contradictory motions of the brain - You can't catch up with that jammer! You could have caught up with that jammer if you'd tried!

But I'll never know if I could have caught up with her if I don't try. Yeah, maybe I'll miss her. In that case, I'll slow down. And if I hit her, good game. And if I hit her and go to the box because I'm out of play, well I still hit her. A trip to the box is worth it in some cases.

2. Be aware of where my jammer needs me to be. Above all things, our jammer situation for Saturday is weird, to say the least. Sometimes I feel like I'm not always where my jammer needs me to be in order for me to get her through the pack. I feel like I defend against the other jammer much more readily than I get my own through the pack.

Saturday, I'm going to pay attention to my jammer just as much, because playing only defensively is playing irresponsibly. If my jammer has someone sitting on her and needs me to block her out of the way, then you better bet I'm going to try my damnedest to do that. Needs a whip? I'm there. Gets stuck? Not alone. My jammers need to know they can trust me to take care of them.

3. Play aggressively, but with a clear head. A team like Greenville wants other teams to get frustrated and blow their cool - that's how a strategy like what they do works. The other team gets mad. In their frustration, they don't think straight, forget how to defend against Greenville's strategy. And they lose.

It's hard to know what to expect this weekend, but easy enough to see that, maybe more so than any other games, if we get over-emotional, this one will go out the window. Part of the strategy of slow derby IS pissing off the other team. Throwing them off their game and leaving them without a defense OR an offense.

And part of the counter-strategy is to beat them at their own game. Adapt, build walls, keep your cool, play your game. I promise myself not to be part of a problem on Saturday, no matter how mad I want to get.

Time to set course for the weekend - tomorrow, pre-bout music. A perennial favorite of mine that I've somehow managed to never write about.

Ten Things I Learned This Weekend

In the grand BCR tradition started by 9lb., usually written on Facebook, I'm about to drop a knowledge bomb. I'm going to move all these notes over to my blog from now on, partially for interest's sake, and partially because I have more control over formatting and whatnot here than I do on Facebook.

Without further ado...

10. Saintly knows a thing or two about underpants preparedness. Just ask her.

9. Although this is roller derby, there is indeed a point where there is Too Much Booty.

8. Free food makes an after party happy. Especially good free food. Especially the cupcake kind of free food.

7. Slim knows many different ways to use a pool cue. I can't tell you any of them because that's classified information.

6. It's really, really funny when random bar dudes try to chat up your gay teammates. Do you tell them? No. Definitely not. You let them shoot themselves in the foot. You watch, and you wait, and you giggle behind your hand.

5. Having good refs is a joyous experience. Everything ran so smoothly that there really isn't anything to complain about from an officiating perspective.

4. WFTDA stat geeks impress me. Reading over our stat sheet from Saturday's bout, there is so much information that I'm floored. Who got points on whom, every single lineup we fielded, the percentage of the bout a player played. Amazing.

3. Bea and Monroe (who I insatiably desire to call Mo-Mo for some reason) played like seasoned players in their first bout. No fear, no problem.

2. It is insanely amazing to watch teeny little Lita go after a jammer. It is even more amazing to watch her knock them to the floor with her fierceness.

1. Although we won by a very large margin Saturday, and although those are usually the times when you start putting in your "second string" players, I think derby somehow handles this differently. I feel like if we hadn't skated as hard as we did for the whole game, that would have been insulting to DDG. They deserved our best, and we gave them our best. And I am very proud.

Derby Stories, Part II: A Team, by Any Other Name

March 19, 2011. It's time for a new beginning, I tell myself. This is where it all starts. It's where it all started in 2008 anyway. Maybe this is where I should have always been. Me and BCR, BCR and me.

We got to the venue pretty early, but we weren't staying the night, so we didn't have a hotel room to hang out in. The ride up was relaxed, but as long as I've known Slim now, I didn't expect it to be otherwise. My newest derby wife is the only one still actively involved with a team. She and I have seen, frankly, dumb shit go down. That we're still skating says something about tenacity and passion for this sport.

Chatty's place was huge, way bigger than the other convention centers I've skated in. The dressing room was tiny and hot. My stomach was doing trampoline acrobatics to the extent that I was tempted to bust out the huge jug of whiskey they gave us just to take the edge off.

I felt better, though, because I wasn't the only one. Seedy was one of the earlier arrivals, and admitted that she, too, had what we colloquially call "bout tummy." And I certainly wasn't the only one sweating up a ridiculous storm in my brand new turquoise jersey.

When we went out to warm up and test the floor, I could feel my leg muscles shaking. Trembling might be a better word. I remain cool as a cucumber in most situations, but bouts are an exception. Whether I show it on the outside or not.

I knew the other team was watching me. I tried out stops and falls. I analyzed every movement I made as too slow, too clumsy, somehow unimpressive. They were watching me, I knew they were, and even if they were nice, with every stride I took, I just knew they were analyzing every way they could to pick me apart. Who wouldn't do that to an opponent they don't know? What should I show them? Should I be purposefully clumsy? Should I skate my best and hope for intimidation?

I hate waiting for bouts, more than anything else. Most of the time, we get there hours in advance, we go into our dressing rooms, we strap on our gear, get everything taped into place... and we wait. We sit, and we wait. And the whole time we do that, it feels like a small beaver is gnawing at the inner walls of my stomach, trying to get out.

When the bout started, I admit, I was a little more nervous than usual because of who was wearing the stripes. Major Wood was jam reffing for the bout. From my time as a ref, I just knew - this guy is a big deal. As in, this is the guy that pretty much wrote the rules down. A Big. Freaking. Deal. There were two other WFTDA refs there, and I knew this was going to be penalty calling like I had never experienced before.

I was set to go in every other jam. One jam as pivot, one jam as power blocker. That, I was pretty sure, I could handle, although I've frankly never played a game that I would call a "good game" on my part. Then again, I've only played four real games.

When it was my turn to go in, I couldn't - the person who had played power blocker before me was in the box. I was antsy on the sidelines, wanting to put my feet on that track. Same with the next time I went in to play power. And quite a few other times.

Then, there was the mouthguard disaster. We knew Major Wood was particular about mouthguards. What we didn't know was his peculiar criteria for "particular." 9 was sent to the box when she was jamming, then given another minute because she took her mouthguard out before she sat down. We might as well have had no jammer for two jams at that point. We were scoreless.

We were scoreless for maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes, or hell, it could have been twenty. At some point, the time all starts to run together out there. Certain moments feel agonizingly long, until you look up at the clock and realize ten seconds have gone by. I mentioned that before, when talking about that scoreless Jackson bout.

Oh my God, it's happening again.

I wrestled with myself. Do NOT let this turn into Jackson. Do NOT give up on yourself.

Amyn ordered us back to the locker room for halftime, and I braced for takeoff. I knew she was going to chew us out, let each and every one of us know how terribly we were playing out there, pick out every single mistake we had made and display it for the world. That, after all, was the kind of locker room talk I was used to. It was the kind of locker room talk going on in my last bout in August.

In the locker room, 9 was in tears. Everyone was quiet. Amyn was quiet, at least until 9 said she felt like it was her fault we were losing.

"9, there's no reason to blame yourself. We win as a team, we lose as a team."

I wish I had heard those words in Jackson. They, along with Amyn's encouragement, kept me from crumbling at halftime into self-doubt. She kept me from giving up, probably without even realizing it.

"They think they got us," she said. "They're gettin' cocky."

I didn't care if they won at that point. I've still never won a game, so plainly, my love of derby has nothing to do with the outcome, and everything to do with getting better as a player and as a team. Cho said something similar: "I don't care if they win, I just want us not to give up." To play harder, to skate faster, to score more points, to hold their jammer.

We still lost by 100 points, but whether those girls thought they had us or not, they saw a different side to BCR in the second half. I saw a different side to BCR. The side where a team gets backed into a corner but comes out swinging. No fear.

People cried in the locker room, blamed our loss on bad individual performances.

Even that, though, seemed like something new to me. This was a team that understood something BnB didn't, couldn't. A team that was able to analyze its own performance and realize what could have been better - that each person could have contributed more successfully. That one player doesn't lose a game for thirteen others.

But at the same time, we were guided by people who reminded us of that. It was always us as a team. There were things that the team needed to work on, rather than placing the blame on one person, rather than destroying someone's confidence at halftime and expecting them to go skate another half hour.

Maybe this is why BnB failed.

In any case, past is past - we learn from it, and we move on. I made some bad plays at Chattanooga. I know of at least two incidents where I totally missed a jammer skating by me. I could have played harder, more aggressively. I could have played smarter as a pivot, and directed my teammates more successfully.

I overcame something that Saturday, though. It's been altogether too easy for me to give up. As I've discovered, I really didn't know what it was that 'team' meant last season. I loved my BnB teammates to the point where I never thought I could feel happy in derby without them. But all that love didn't translate into success on the track, and it didn't translate into knowing how to work as a team. Knowing how to feel proud as a team. How can you feel pride if you're constantly beaten down? All that love we supposedly had didn't even translate into the ability to keep the team together. It didn't translate into the ability to respect your former teammates enough to not stab them in the back by creating another team just to embarrass and defeat one person.

Whether they realize it or not, a lot of the BCR vets showed a lot of the newer skaters something very important that Saturday. Somewhere in between the nebulous area of vet and not vet myself, I feel like I can understand these lessons a little easier. There's a time to crawl up a team's ass, to yell at them to motivate them to play better. But there's also a time to remind everyone that the team as a whole is responsible for playing well, not just one person. Good leaders know the difference.

Derby Stories, Part I: The Honeymoon Is Over

Does this girl even play roller derby? some of you may be asking. Does she even know how it can destroy your life? How it can bring out the worst in people?

I do. I've seen a lot of those things firsthand. In myself. In others - opponents, yes, but also teammates, derby wives. Vixen once said that she was selling her soul for roller derby. The remark was intended to be funny, but sometimes, it's not. Or maybe it's funny in the way things are funny because they're true. Maybe I don't write about it that often, but the truth is that for much of last year, I didn't just see the dark side of derby, I lived it.

On August 28 of last year, I played my last bout with BnB. We walked into the Jackson Convention Center right on time. I had played in a mixed scrimmage there last April, so I knew all about the hard hitters, the fast, teeny jammers, and the slick concrete floor.

Unequivocally, I also knew we were screwed.

Tuesday, five days before the bout, three skaters had pulled Ember aside to "talk to her." Predictably, it turned into a screaming match. I always get chosen to moderate bullshit like that. People tell me I'm even-tempered. But even I lost my cool when one of the skaters started shrieking at me because I asked her not to interrupt Ember's explanation. While I tried to listen to their grievances, they accused my derby wife of being a racist, of plagiarizing our logo, of shorting the team on money for the Jackson trip, of attempting to deliberately injure them on the track.

They made their stance very clear: either Ember didn't skate Saturday, or they didn't skate Saturday. Ember had a history of making questionable decisions. I guess I should have see it coming. She refused to back down. Zelda, Fiend Club and Delirium refused to skate, even after I spent the entire week trying to convince them to just finish out the season and not screw over the rest of us because they were pissed at Ember.

It had been a bloody terrible week.

But we couldn't back out. Booking a convention center doesn't come cheap, and we would have owed Magnolia a LOT of money for canceling. We had paid four subs from other teams to fill our roster. We were ten skaters at our strongest, seven when those three quit. BnB had never skated a single bout without the extensive use of subs.

MRV's contract had specified that we were to bring no sub jammers to the bout. Ember chose our subs selectively. Only BIG blockers. If they wouldn't let us have sub jammers when we were woefully short on jammers, then we would stack the deck with huge subs who could lay a jammer out by looking at her. We must have turned down three people or more just because they didn't fit Ember's size requirement for the subs.

Midnight was a nervous wreck. On the drive down, I had joked with Midnight that we had decided to go to New Orleans instead of come to the bout. She believed me. I knew she was nervous, and I knew I was being one of those mean girls to mess with her. Maybe part of me was taking out my frustration on someone who didn't deserve it. That was, after all, a grand BnB tradition.

Some of the others seemed unaffected, mostly because they had no idea what had happened at practice Tuesday. They had no idea why three skaters were mad enough to leave the team. They were here to play derby. I wished fervently that I could trade places and climb in their heads and erase the last week of wasted effort. A cartoonish black thunderstorm surged over my brow, soaking me with very stereotypical misery.

When the first whistle blew, we fell apart. It was a long, long five minutes before we managed to score. Maybe it was longer. It's hard to tell time in moments like this, when seconds of failure stretch into forever. Everyone watched us flounder, dying fish on the sand.

A little more than halfway into the first half, I was playing pivot, at the front of the pack as usual. Our back blockers let Reeta slip through like water through a sieve, and I was the last person who could do a damn thing about it. I knew what I had to do. I dug in and sprinted as she came for the front of the pack. I was on a collision course, going to chase her down and block her to the ground, make the save.

I turned my ankle on that ice-like concrete floor. Hard. As the pain shot through my shin, all I could think about was that I'd let Reeta get away.

I suck at being a hero.

I sat down. I took my skate off. I quietly asked for my derby wife to get me an ice pack for my ankle. Nobody even knew that I was injured until halftime.

I was captain for that bout, as I always was. Ember was co-captain, as she always was. In the locker room, one of the subs was talking over how to redo the lineups with Ember. Ember was ignoring me, not even consulting me on the subject. The sub turned to me and emphasized how terribly she thought I'd played in the first half and what a useless pivot I was. She turned to my derby wife and said that I didn't need to play pivot anymore, and Ember agreed with her. The sub turned back to me and emphasized in her snottiest voice that I was only to concentrate on blocking in the second half.

My stomach twisted harder than my ankle ever could have. My eyes stung. Anger flooded me first and, hands shaking, I skated off to the bathroom. I found Midnight and Vixen in there and I sobbed most of my facepaint off.

It wasn't the first time Ember had made me cry. She was extremely competitive and hated it any time I did something better than her. She was always emphasizing petty things. 'Your kneepads are too tight' meant 'don't you think you're too fat to wear a Size L?' 'I predicted everything you planned to do during the scrimmage tonight' meant 'you're a terrible player without me to back you up.'

Tiny things, raindrops in the ocean, little drops of venom that gradually ate away at my self esteem as a skater.

But nothing Ember said had ever hurt more than what she said during halftime.

I skated only two jams in the second half. I'd love to say it was because of my ankle. But it wasn't. The sub took over running the bench - MY bench - and she refused to put me in. In fact, she refused to put any of us in.

We were losing, so she only put in herself and the other subs. Three jams or more we skated with not a single BnB player in that pack. More than once, I saw Midnight forced to continue skating when she was obviously breathing too hard to function in a pack, much less as a jammer.

I wish I could say I noticed what else happened in the second half. My teammates proved things to themselves while I sat on that bench. I felt like I'd had my head wrapped in cotton, insulated from everything that was going on around me. Numb. Of course we lost. I faked smiles in the after-bout picture, threw all my things in a bag, and shoved everything into the trunk. Many of my teammates were proud of their performances. I wanted to go home.

On the way to the after-party, I broke down in front of my long-suffering husband, my unmoved derby wife, and her smug jackass husband. I couldn't stop my voice from shaking or tears from streaming down my face. Ember told me it was my fault someone else took over the bench. That I wasn't assertive enough. That I should have said something. She told me the only reason she didn't want me to play the second half of the bout was because I was hurt.

I knew a lie when I heard one.

The hell with all the work I'd done to help her set up lineups (which I was not allowed to do on my own in spite of being team captain). The hell with how much work I had put into begging girls not to leave us skating short.

My feelings didn't matter to her then. They mattered to her now for one reason only: she couldn't afford to lose the only person who had supported her the past few months.

If nothing else, Ember had read the writing on the wall. Three skaters had quit the team. That weekend, they went to Atlanta with one of our former fresh meat and decided they were going to start their own derby team. By the time we got back from Jackson, they had a concept for their team, if not a name. In the ensuing weeks, they started recruiting our skaters. If Ember didn't have me, who would she have?

I pulled it together at the after-party. Maybe I just didn't think anyone else needed to see the stress I was under. I was, as many people told me, the glue that held the team together. If it had looked like the glue was failing, everyone would have panicked.

We were staying in a really nice hotel. When we got back, Ember broke out a bottle of rum she'd brought with her. It was the one time I'd ever really seen her get rowdy when she was drunk.

The guys decided they wanted to get some beer. While they were gone, Ember got into a wrestling match with her derby little sister. I'm not that kind of partier. While the two of them shrieked and slapped each other, rolling around on the floor, I sat in one of the hotel chairs and watched.

"Helley, help me!" her little sister shrieked, eyes wide as she tried to escape from Ember's grasp.

That was when Ember crossed the line. I don't remember the words she used, but they meant that I was too attracted to her to stop her from wrestling around on the floor with another woman.

Even after sharing that rum, I couldn't suppress the anger. White, ugly, hard anger that welled up after how she'd treated me at the bout. It was insulting, the way she said it. Helley will let me do anything. She's blindly devoted. She thinks I'm hot.

For the record, I find it hard to be attracted to people who are that mean-spirited. People who prey on the vulnerabilities of others to hide their own.

They broke the bed after that. Her little sister was hanging on to the headboard and Ember jerked her away from it. They pulled it off the wall.

"Oh, don't worry about that," Ember said blithely, "BD will pay for it."

It really didn't matter to me why she thought that was the case. For one of the first times, I was able to let my anger come through clearly. I wanted to hit her for saying it. I wanted to yell at her until my voice was raw.

All night, I listened to her whine and vomit. She was hungover and bitchy in the morning, just like she was always hungover and bitchy whenever she drank. I never understood why she drank like she did when she knew she got bad hangovers. But you can't always protect people from themselves. Sometimes people need to be allowed to self-destruct until they learn something.

And me? I wrapped myself around that core of anger, closing down on it like an oyster. It lay there like an irritant, a constant voice murmuring 'too much, too much, too much.' Until one day not long afterwards, it turned into a roar.

Ember would discover too late that, in the words of one of my favorite poets, "there is some shit I will not eat."

-----

*This post is written in its literary style with apologies to 9 Lb. Hammer, who has pretty much cornered the market on BCR writing.

Climbing Mountains

I started this blog almost a year ago. Looking back through the posts I've written, I'm surprised that I never talked about one thing that seems to be common to all rollergirls: bout day jitters.

Mine, of course, are not content to be bout day jitters. They start early. It's more like bout week jitters. I was nervous already at practice on Wednesday, and I certainly, shall we say, did not have my head about me.

From there, I've descended into madness. Difficulty sleeping because my thoughts are racing. Today, I woke up with a stomach that was certainly not purring with contentment. It was twisting, turning, dancing like there was a midget inside banging on the front walls of my guts, begging to be let out. I know I need to be calm, but every time I think about tomorrow, my heart skips a beat and I feel a little bit like I'm gonna barf.


To some extent, that's all normal. Nothing that I haven't experienced before, and nothing that doesn't go away after, say, the first or second jam you play.

But I feel like I've always had trouble with making it go away. When I play in a game, I keep a running tally in my head of every mistake I make. The more I think about the stupid mistake I made in the last jam, the worst the next jam is. So on and so forth.

Cho mentioned something at practice not too long ago, something that the team's old coach Maria used to talk about. I remember hearing her say it, if not the exact words - every jam is its own jam. Every jam, you start out 0-0 against the other team. Every jam is a new opportunity for you to do your job.

I've had such trouble remembering that. When I don't remember it, I turn into a train wreck out there, visibly getting angry at myself when I don't see a jammer, swearing like a disgruntled hobo when I miss a block.

In the spirit of what my teammates have done (see recent posts by 9 Pound Hammer and Cho Cold), I am setting goals for tomorrow, my first bout with BCR.

Tomorrow, I, Mary Helley, commit to the following:

1. I will be aware of my mental state. I refuse to overanalyze everything I do on the track looking for a mistake. If I do something I know was wrong, I will correct it if I can. If I can't, I will put it out of my head until it's time to sit down and unpack what I learned over the weekend. If I find myself freaking out, I will force myself to take deep breaths. I will not allow anxiety to rule the day, because I am prepared for this.

2. I will not eat crap before the bout. One of my Derby Resolutions this year was to be more aware of what I was putting into my body because the quality of the fuel determines the quality of the performance. Sometimes, I have been damn near determined not to listen to that, but tomorrow is not a day to play fast and loose with dietary rules. I am NOT going to eat fast food before I skate. In fact, I'm starting off tonight by eating some carbs. Tomorrow, I'm not skipping breakfast, I'm packing a lunch to eat in the car, and I am going to make sure I have something to eat at halftime - a protein bar or a banana, whichever happens to be available.

3. I will not allow myself to get dehydrated. I'll admit it: I get really excited during a bout. Even when I'm sitting out a jam, I tend to be on the sidelines screaming at my teammates. I forget to drink. And at no less than two of the three bouts I played last year, I got ridiculously sick because I was dehydrated. After Panama City, I had a migraine the size of Florida and puked for a good hour and a half before I could hold down some ginger ale to settle my stomach and get to sleep. After playing Pearl River, I had another migraine that I couldn't get to go away no matter how much I tried - and I had to drive an hour home afterwards, half blind because of the splitting pain in my head. Not gonna happen tomorrow. I'm starting on the water now, and drinking nothing but for the weekend. Maybe overzealous, but it's the most horrible feeling in the world to be that dehydrated after a bout when you're already exhausted.

4. I will not allow myself to get crampy. Last year, I struggled and struggled with muscle cramps. I could never quite get to a point where I didn't start cramping at some point during a bout. Tomorrow, I'm going to make sure I get plenty of potassium to start (either from my potassium/calcium/zinc supplement, or from bananas). I'm going to make sure that I don't skimp on stretching because I'm nervous.

5. I will not allow my temper to take over. I know this kind of goes along with the first thing that I said, but it's important enough to me to separate them out. I get frustrated at bouts sometimes, especially at bouts that start getting aggressive. And then I get angry. And then I turn into Helley Red Haze who isn't paying attention to anything but how pissed off she is. Tomorrow, I'm going to remember something about that part of me: she's not productive. I can get mad later if I need to. I can vent on the way home if necessary. But for one hour and twenty minutes, I have to keep my head on straight.

Going into my second season of roller derby, I've never won a game. I've never even been on the winning side in a mixed scrimmage. And now I'm skating with a team that had a pretty damn good record last season.

If we lose tomorrow, I'm not going to be heartbroken, though I want to taste a win. The first one will inevitably be the sweetest. What I want more than anything, though, is to know that I overcame the neurotic over-analytical nerd in my head that wants to criticize every move mid-bout.

The only person who can prevent me from picking up that win is me. And after writing all this about my particular version of bout-day nerves, they all of a sudden don't seem so unconquerable.