Against Inertia: The Birth of The Creature Feature

I didn't become The Creature Feature.
I stopped editing myself long enough for her to show up.
People think she's an alter ego. A character. Something I invented because I skate roller derby and willingly spend my free time challenging gravity with a seemingly excessive amount of enthusiasm. That's fair, I understand why it looks that way, but it feels completely disconnected from my truth.
She was not invented or curated, not a stylized version of some half-truth. She was inevitable, like she'd been there the whole time, patiently waiting for me to stop negotiating with myself and carve out enough room for her to exist.

I've been thinking about inertia lately, not in the sciency way; the human one. The human tendency to keep moving in the direction we've always moved... because at some point it kept us alive. For a long time, my inertia was survival. I became exceptionally good at it. Responsible. Capable. Adaptable. Hyperaware. The one who could carry things. The one who anticipated everyone else's needs before they had to ask (sound familiar?????) Survival is an incredible skill until it becomes the only direction you know how to move. Then it becomes a cage.

People hear that I started skating in my 40s and immediately decide this must be a story about reclaiming my youth. Absolutely f-word not. I don't want to be eighteen again, I have no need for smoother skin, smaller jeans, or less gray (PLOT TWIST I LOVE MY GRAYS!). I'm interested in something far more compelling. What happens when you've already done all the things you were supposed to do?

I've raised children and built a career I genuinely love. I'm a therapist. I spend my days helping people find their way back to themselves after life has knocked them sideways. Then I go home, lace up a pair of roller skates, and throw myself down a very hard, VERY concrete ramp. Which makes perfect sense to me.
Therapist brain dancing with Creature energy.

Science and silliness co-existing.
Polyvagal theory and Locust wings
Clinical formulation and rhinestones.
Those things don't compete. They're collaborators. Because I understand something about nervous systems from both sides now. I didn't learn regulation from textbooks alone. I learned what happens when a person has to survive. Because surviving domestic violence didn't just teach me fear. It taught me how to disappear while still looking like I was there. You don't disappear overnight. You disappear in inches and in breaths: a compromise, a swallowed opinion, an apology you didn't owe. One version of yourself quietly packed away because she was just a little too loud, a little too weird, a little too much. Until one day I realized something that terrified me more than anything I'd survived. If I kept shrinking...there wouldn't be enough of ME left to find.

I wasn't afraid of disappearing. I was disappearing because I was afraid. That realization landed on me with all the subtlety of concrete. Heavy and hard and oh-so perfectly unforgiving.
And then there were these ridiculous little neon wheels.
That's the thing about skating.

Sometimes healing arrives looking absurd: a woman in her forties putting bright neon wheels on her feet and deciding to learn something new.
Those wheels connected me back to my body.
Back to gravity.
Back to the undeniable fact that I was still here.
Concrete is honest. It does not care about your past, your accomplishments, your plans, or how well you have learned to appear fine.
You either show up or you don't.
You fall or you don't.
You get back up or you don't.
And I did.

I don't negotiate anymore. I hold fear now because I know exactly what it is capable of. Because this is where The Creature Feature begins. This is her starting line.
Fear. The exact place most people turn around is where I choose to start. It whispers to me
"You can't do this."
Every single time, I yell back:
Watch me.
Not because I know I'm going to land it. Because I want to know what happens if I try. Turns out my curiosity is stronger than fear.

I skate park
I'm not there to prove I belong.
I'm there because I belong.
The skatepark is where my ME gets set free, where my feral part lives.
A rage that spent years with nowhere to go. The part that was managed and softened, made appropriate. The skatepark gave her somewhere to live. The Creature Feature gets absolutely wrecked and laughs and tries the scary thing anyway… and yeah, she probably worries the local PD just a little.
But then she gets back up. I get back up.
Somewhere along the way, the line between her and me started to disappear. I adore her. Or maybe I adore me… Or maybe we are becoming the same person?

Skating gave me something I didn't realize I needed: a place to practice being fully myself. A place where falling wasn't failure, fear wasn't a stop sign, and taking up space required no explanation. The skatepark didn't make me fearless. It made me willing—to try, to fail, and to be seen.
I've spent enough of my life making myself digestible. Appropriate. Easy to understand. Small enough to fit inside someone else's expectations. I'm done becoming less.
Now I choose more.
More curiosity than certainty.
More ridiculous attempts
More of the parts of myself I used to edit out.
I want to know how much more ME there is before I'm done.
Maybe that's why The Creature Feature was inevitable.
She was born the day I stopped believing survival was the only way to live. And to my surprise, everything I'd edited out was still there.

It was waiting… for room. After years of organizing my life around what was necessary, I am making room for what is joyful.
The kind of room where derby and the skatepark can exist alongside monster movies, giant flower hats, a bright green helmet, and all the absurd, joyful, wonderfully unnecessary things that make life feel like mine again.
It taught me that I could choose something different.
I could organize my life around being fully alive.
I'm not trying to figure out who The Creature Feature is anymore. I'm creating the conditions for her to keep becoming.
That's the experiment now.
Not survival.
Expansion.

An obstinate refusal to negotiate with inevitables.
A commitment to becoming more instead of less. I'm carving out a space that is so unmistakably ME. The louder I become, the more room appears.