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AIMEE MULLINS: I was consistently being told what I would never be able to do, never be
able to have from a very early age and I always knew they were wrong.
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I probably shouldn't be telling you all that.
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Certainly for me, sports, was the arena for me to begin this very private exploration
in a very public way.
To put on those cheetah legs as a teenage girl y'know I was confronting so many different
things inside myself because up to that point, I had just wanted to fit in.
I didn't want people's attention to go to my legs and y'know discretion was something
that I had always managed to incorporate for the most part into my life and this was a
full reversal of that.
Y'know, I was—whether I wanted to or not, inviting people to look and it's a scary thing
and that's why for me it's so beautiful to see actors on stage or athletes doing something
so private in such a public way because you're revealing and you provide catharsis to other
people.
There's something about competition where you can approach it the right way it reveals
the rush I get.
The genuine adrenaline rush and the serotonin, all of these things that happen when your'e
a little bit scared, um, when you are rising to something.
You're rising to this challenge is where I feel most alive.
When you're in the moment, you don't have time to judge and that is really the biggest
roadblock to exploration is to be outside of yourself looking in going, that didn't
look right or that sounded stupid or eh, that really wasn't a good job—I mean all that
little hamster wheel that goes on inside all of our heads, just shut it off.
And you have to to be present because it requires a total focus.
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It was difficult for me to be the first one because I was also the only one for a while.
I had never met another amputee until my teenage years and only grew up playing sports with
kids with flesh and bone legs, um, suddenly now having these magazine covers tell me that
I was a disabled athlete was really a provocative and disturbing element of that athletic exploration
for me and I have to take my own advice and remember—remember that it's a choice.
Y'know, that I can choose to see life as an adventure and have fun with it or I can feel
disabled and limited and all those truly staggering words and emotions that come with them.
I haven't overcome it.
I live with it.
I use it.
I've adapted.
I've been changed because of it, not in spite of it.
Which is the partner term for overcoming.
In spite of having her legs amputated Aimee Mullins has gone on to do XYZ.
And every time I see that in print I just wanna take a pen and scratch it out and write
because of.
And that's the truth.
We all have this personal struggle and journey inside which is to abandon the need to fit
in.
Abandon the need to be normal to even care whatever the hell that means, um, and to instead
choose to be extraordinary and to go for that kind of life instead.
I'm begging all of you to go out and subscribe to THNKR!
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