tramitem_comm | Text to Ben (Obi-Wan)

"I don't know," he admits. "Because I don't have it together."

"What's wrong with teaching skating- you said you love it," Anakin said. "Do you need better pay? I know New York is fucking expensive."

"No, I'm okay." He wasn't going to get rich, but he did all right. "And I do love it. I just don't know how ambitious I am."

"What do you mean?" Anakin asked.

Answering that is hard, but only because he had to put feeling into words, and his feelings are... fuzzy. "Just that I don't know if I have a... drive for making more money and to advance."

Anakin nodded. His cupcake was frostingless now and he finally took a bite.

"Then what's wrong with sticking with teaching skating?"

"For now, nothing." He took another bite of his cupcake. "But I can't do it as long as I'll need to work. Which makes me feel... less than together, I guess."

"Why not?" Anakin couldn't see the limits here.

"Physical breakdown," he says, once he's swallowed that bite of cake. "If one of my more serious, older, students gets even more seriously, it'll allow me to do better paid private coaching for fewer people for longer - but it also means more physical demand from me. I'll be able to teach tiny kids until I die, probably, but that won't pay the bills. I could cut out doing exhibition skating and extend that way by... conserving what I'm using my body on, but frankly that doesn't sound like fun. Mostly, it's just an athletic career, and unlike most you're at the height of your game when you're young. I have had more stress back and ankle fractures than I can count, my ankles are trash, and my knees aren't far behind. It just... isn't a viable lifelong plan."

Anakin nodded, "Ya, I can see that about performing... but... Okay, maybe I'm missing something, but last winter Olympics I watched, most of those coaches looked like they couldn't do one of those triple spinny things if they tried. Skate? Ya, but a lot of them looked a bit, um, athletic and I bet they could but not all the stuff you can do right now. And they still seemed successful at teaching skating." Their students were in the Olympics, after all.

"There are a few things going on there," he says, without offense or being more than conversational. "But most of them come down to who they're teaching and how many people they've got on a team around those Olympic Skaters. If I got someone with serious Olympic aspirations, I would be much higher paid and also have more room to delegate - and I'm not going to claim it's impossible that it could happen - just that it isn't where I am right now."

Might be kind of nice to be able to counter some of the bullshit in the sport, too.

Anakin snorted. "Oh, ya, totally sounds like you're not ambitious at all," said with a gentle teasing tone.

He wondered if this was another facet to Ben's complex around feeling like he deserved, or didn't deserve things. Did Ben think he didn't deserve to have those kinds of aspirations?

"Do you want that? Coaching someone and helping them go to the Olympics?"

"I really don't know." That's just the truth, as is what comes next. "There is so much toxic bullshit at that level of competition.... If I could mitigate it, I would love to. I just don't know if I could."

"What's the toxic bullshit?" Anakin asked, he genuinely didn't know.

He is a little bit reluctant to verbalize it, but he was much more willing with Anakin than he would have been anyone else.

"A lot," he says, with a faint smile that's sad and a little grim, rather than amused. "Non-stop criticism of your body, not just for what it can do but what it looks like in spandex. Constant pressure to cut weight for a better appearance and increasing the height of jumps and number of rotations you can get. Hours in the gym and on ice. Having your body treated like a machine in general and if something breaks you tape it if you have time, don't if you don't, and either way you grit your teeth and get through it, see the physical therapist when you're done. The knowledge that the next time you fail to land a jump, that you're attempting after eating 500 calories today, spending 4 hours in the gym, and landing it on 2 sprained ankles you risk breaking your leg. And that if you really break your leg, you are out, your shot is gone."

Edited 2020-08-15 18:47 (UTC)

"Wow," Anakin said. And he was surprised. "I didn't know that. That's... a lot."

In some ways, he understood a flavor of criticism of his body, but that was just because he now looked different from others. But it wasn't linked to performance, and then self-worth through that performance. That was something completely all its own type of experience.

He wondered how much of that Ben had dealt with directly, but didn't ask. That seems a bit too forward.

"That's a lot to fight against."

"It is. Build a team right and it's possible, but it would be really hard." He isn't going to volunteer information, either.

He finishes his cupcake and takes a drink of water.

"Enough about me, anyway. it's your birthday."

Anakin shrugged. He balanced the water bottle in the palm of his hand, slowly it started to rise in the air just about his hand. He was getting better at using the Force this way. He much prefered this power of the Force than the empathic abilities.

"This is all I wanted for my birthday," he said. "Not being alone. I don't care what we talk about."

Text to Ben (Obi-Wan)

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CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise

Re: CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise

Re: CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise

Re: CW: Disordered Eating/Exercise