Meeting Mirai Nagasu - Olympic Figure Skater

I used to be a little girl living in Southern California, dreaming of being a figure skater after watching Michelle Kwan, Sasha Cohen, and Kristi Yamaguchi in the Olympics. Mirai Nagasu achieved the Olympic dream and serves as an inspiration to a new generation of young people. Despite her many successes, she talked super candidly about failure and anxiety. Here are three things I wanted to share about her speech.

#1. Everyone thinks it's impossible until someone does it, so go forth and be a trailblazer. Mirai Nagasu was the first American to land a Triple Axel in the Olympics, and now more people are landing Triple Axels and even more people can aspire to land the Triple Axel. Although Mirai was lucky to have other Asian American Female Figure Skaters to look up to as she was growing up, she encourages everyone in the audience to go forth and achieve goals that perhaps their minority group has not historically achieved because they may be an inspiration for many others to come.

Cochran Apartments Reunion with Jomer

#2. When you are on the cusp of greatness, it's natural to feel fear. This is what Mirai's coach told her before she went to skate during the Olympics event that she medalled in. Figure skating is a sport that doesn't get a ton of media attention outside of the Olympics. The rapid increase in publicity with the added emotions of being at the Olympics, which comes once every four years, made her feel extra anxious and nervous. At one point during the event, instead of dwelling on the fear, she let muscle memory take over and landed the triple axel perfectly. 

She spoke very openly about anxiety, which made her very relatable and normalizes feeling anxious. There's anxiety and then there's anxiety about the fact that you are anxious. If this awesome Olympic athlete can feel overwhelmed, it's normal for me to feel that as well, especially if I'm doing something outside my comfort zone. No one is alone in feeling overwhelmed. 

She let us touch her medal

#3. Encourage Others More. She spoke candidly about how much other people's verbal affirmation meant to her. She wants to continue to be that source of encouragement to others. We can often be our own worst enemy with our negative self-talk. Coming from a Japanese immigrant family, she really appreciated the discipline that she learned from her parents and their tough love parenting, but she wished she got more "soft-love" and verbal encouragement too. It's a tricky balance and every individual has a different style of communication, but I think verbal encouragement is something that we could definitely use more of in our culture. In the words of Albus Dumbledore, "Words are [...] our most inexhaustible source of magic."

I would like to thank the Asian American and Asian Resource Center at Purdue for hosting events like this. The AAARC has truly been a home to me since they opened in 2015.