I Choose Elena: On Trauma, Memory and Survival

I Choose Elena

Growing up, I was a gymnast. The serious kind. By the time I was ten, I had represented New South Wales at the national championships and won. At age twelve, I represented Australia at the world championships. By fifteen, I was preparing for my second world championships. I trained relentlessly.

Every morning I drank raw eggs mixed with protein powder and milk. I was training so much that my body had started using my muscle mass for energy, which could result in my muscles atrophying. That’s what the raw eggs were for: I needed to be consuming as much protein as possible to keep my muscles intact.

Weakness was the one thing we were all taught to avoid. I took this lesson seriously. No amount of eggs, protein bars, crunches, toe-points, handstand push-ups or weightlifts could deter me. I would push my body right to its limits, then further.

The kind of gymnastics I was doing required immense mental precision. I needed to synchronize wholly with my body, to pick up on every signal it sent me. I needed to master a very particular kind of mindfulness in order to step onto a velvet floor on a world stage, with five international judges ready to pick apart my every movement. My mind had to be so still that it could communicate with every pointed toe, every carefully balanced leg, every finger.

I had to be perfect, and it had to seem effortless. I had to be strong and powerful and graceful and light, all at the same time. I had to smile. To do all these things at once takes a kind of mind–body alignment that I have been dreaming of regaining ever since I stepped off the floor for the last time. My body and my mind, it seemed then, belonged wholly to me.

I was obsessed with this feeling. When I wasn’t training, I took ballet classes to fill the time.

We called the gym our second home. For some of us, at times, it felt like a first home. Each year when we qualified for the national team, we would go on week-long training camps during which we would wake up at 5 a.m. to go for a long run, then do three training sessions throughout the day before crawling into sleeping bags placed atop crash mats on the gym floor. When we were slow to wake up, my coach would play Rihanna’s ‘Pon de Replay’ on the gymnasium’s enormous sound system.

I would be thrown in the air by another gymnast and do a double somersault and land perfectly. Sometimes the somersaults would be in the pike position, or the layout position, so you had to jump high and hard enough to rotate your stretched-out body twice before reaching the floor. Sometimes we did triple somersaults. Sometimes we did double layouts with a full twist in the first rotation.

We balanced our handstands on the hands of another gymnast and then morphed our bodies into overarch – a move in which you arch your back so much in the handstand that your feet touch your hands – while the gymnast holding us up slides into the splits. Sometimes we did the handstands with only one arm.

These manoeuvres are not just complicated but profoundly dangerous – gymnasts have died or been rendered paraplegic by a missed landing. We were all okay with danger; we were fearless. But the thing about staying safe as an athlete at that level is that your technique must be perfect. You need to know exactly how to jump; where your arms need to be at each point in a double somersault; how to hold your legs, your chest and your fingers so your handstand is unshakable.

I knew every inch of my body so well, could feel every tiny sensation, could always tell if something was even just a little bit off.