I got my first pair of roller skates when I was around 6 or 7 years old. They were gifted to me for Christmas by a family member who thought it might be cool if I had some. As a small child I thought I was invincible, but those feelings were fleeting when I tried to roller skate for the first time. I thought it was a genius idea to try roller skating on my sloped driveway, with no adult supervision whatsoever; you could probably imagine how that ended for me. But nothing too harmful happened, just the sheer idea of having no control over myself while walking was terrifying enough for me to put away those small purple skates and never look back.

I did have one of those, “Don’t I have this cool thing somewhere in the garage? I should learn how to actually use them now,” moments when I was 10 though. I hadn’t realized how big my feet got over the course of a few years, so to my dismay the roller skates were definitely way too tight for comfort. I had given up on my roller skating dreams until one fateful day, while I was mindlessly scrolling through the famous video-sharing app called TikTok, I finally found something worthwhile.

On my phone I scrolled and a video of a woman gliding across the concrete sidewalk next to the beach flashed on the screen, swiftly swerving past people walking and going about their day, while she twists and turns to skate backward. I was utterly amazed by the ease in which she moved and the control and confidence she possessed as she coasted through the ripples of people. I spent a good few weeks on “Roller Skating TikTok,” which is a subcommunity on Tiktok that has content centered around roller skating. I was consuming all the How-To videos and Tips & Tricks that were provided, and admiring all the roller skaters that shared their content on the app. But those days of wishfully thinking of being somewhat like them, skating through the streets with my own pair of roller skates, were about to end.

I asked for roller skates for Christmas this year, so it came full circle to when I was 7 but in this case I actually wanted them. And I thought if all those people on TikTok were able to roller skate so easily then it wouldn’t be as bad as when I was younger. But going from theory to practice was surprisingly harder than I imagined it to be. I knew in my mind what I had to do but those actions weren’t being translated to the rest of my body, this was due to that same fear I had when I was a child of being out of balance and the high possibility of hurting myself.

It took a good week or so to get into the groove of roller skating, and at times I still fumble because that fear creeps in, but it’s really about trusting your legs and trusting that you know what you’re doing. It also doesn’t hurt to come back to those roller skating TikToks to get more motivation or tips on how to skate better; they definitely helped me out a lot.