"Unconventional Heartbreak" by Zhoe C

  

Taekwondo broke my heart. Unlike most people, my first love wasn’t a person, but a sport. When I was seven years old, I was walking around my local shopping center with my parents after we had just eaten lunch. We walked by this taekwondo studio and I caught a glance of kids kicking these funny looking kicking bags that looked like angry men while yelling as loud as they could. It sounds like such an obscure and silly scene, but I was hooked from that moment on. I was stuck in awe, staring through the window when the instructor came out to welcome me into the new world of taekwondo that soon became my home. My mom, who tried and tried to get me into ballet, was immediately against it but my father who did every martial art there is to offer was excited and signed me up right then and there. For the first few years I worked my way up to becoming a black belt and solely did the sport for fun. That all changed when I joined the competition team.

I always hated sparring ever since a blue belt three times my size beat my little orange belt self scared straight. But, since I was curious I decided to give it a shot and I fell in love with competing. Competing became my entire life. I developed goals and a new passion for taekwondo I didn’t even know I had. I wanted to be the best and I wanted to make it to the Olympics. I devoted seven days a week, three to five hours a day to training. I started off slow. Of course as a newby I never really got far in tournaments, but my desire to win gold only grew. With time, I started winning the smaller tournaments and it began time to start competing in the bigger, more rewarding tournaments, but with that came cutting weight.

I’ve been cutting weight since 7th grade and it is by far the aspect that was the most taxing on me mentally and physically. The weight I needed to lose started off small with one to two pounds, then it got to five, then to ten and before I knew it I had to lose 18 pounds.I dreaded losing the weight every single time. Sitting at lunch watching my friends eat without a care seems like such a small issue but would cause mental breakdowns when I got home.It wasn’t always this bad. I started cutting weight in a healthy way. I felt good, healthy, and lean. But when I hit a plateau, I would start to panic. With the panic came the starvation. I began to only eat less than 200 calories a day. After every single bite of anything I ate, I would run upstairs to weigh myself to make sure I didn’t even gain an ounce. Whenever I was forced by my parents or coaches to eat more, I would start panicking even more and convince myself I just lost all my progress. I singular strawberry or taking four bites of my food instead of three would cause me to spiral. I would do this all to the day of weigh-ins and once I made weight, came the binging. I couldn’t stop. Any food I was offered or had the chance to eat I would eat because in just the next week, I wouldn’t be able to eat again. I developed this unhealthy relationship with food that still affects me when I’m not cutting weight. With tournaments even three months apart, I’m only thinking of how much I weigh or how much I’m gaining with every meal. It’s a constant, nagging voice in my head that overwhelms me with guilt that takes months to get rid of but once it's gone, it comes right back when another tournament is announced.

On top of battling myself internally, I was battling the taekwondo organization itself. I was gaining opportunity upon opportunity but with sports comes politics and of course I was not one of the favorites, so they took all my opportunities away. I made the USA Team, was set to go to the Pan Am Games, and even worlds, but with everyone against me and the peak of covid, my passion started to die out. I faced back to back to back injuries on top of everything else and I no longer had that desire to win. It felt like the world was against me so I started thinking “why try?”.

I spent the last two years searching for that passion again and all I got were glimpses of what I used to feel. So after 11 years of giving everything I've got for the sport, I've decided to take a break from competing. Like any romantic relationship that could be great and beautiful, I unfortunately developed a toxic one with the sport I used to love. This sport has been my outlet to the harshness of life and was always my comfort place. It was the sport that introduced me to lifelong friends and great mentors who I go to for everything now, even topics not related to taekwondo. After I made that decision, I felt this overwhelming feeling of heartbreak. Even just being in the studio again hurt. It hurts to be surrounded by the success that was once taken away from me. I'm not sure where I'll be going with this sport but I will always appreciate what it has done for me. It took me a long time, but I’ve finally accepted that it’s ok to take a break from the thing that you love and take a break from the heartbreak to find yourself again. Many may not comprehend how an extracurricular activity can have such a serious effect on a person but it can and taekwondo did just that. Taekwondo gave me hope and passion. Taekwondo gave me life. Taekwondo gave me purpose. Taekwondo broke my heart.