Frozen Teardrop (29 page)

I can't believe now, however, that I still continued to skate after his devastating diagnosis. For some reason this wasn't a big enough wake up call for me. After several talks my mother and I decided against surgery. Now we wanted more opinions. Whenever the news was bad we did not believe it, and when it was good we did. That was the way we went through life.

Everyone in the skating world knows my mother. They know her to be the sweetest and most honorable skating-mother ever. Just recently I bumped into an old ABC director who has known me since I was little and she told me she loves my mother. She said she was the best skating-mother she had ever known. My mother was loved in the skating world for her generosity and kindness and blunt truthfulness. Truth is written all over her. She would hug other skaters and even compliment them in front of me. I only wanted her compliments for me but I respected her honesty. Others saw our strong bond and envied it. But now the situation was different. My mother was now with me not just for support but because I could not be alone for one second. The fear was that powerful, that engulfing, that enraging. It is one hundred percent paralyzing to the body, brain, heart, and soul. To top it off I was still fainting.

Once you have lived with a fear of this magnitude that stops you from being able to do most things in your daily life you never want to talk about it. You feel other people will not understand and you do not want to be belittled. Skaters started to tease me and mock me being now twenty-two years old and still attached at the hip with my mother. And so I lived with the mockery and gossip and no one knew the truth except my mother and it was a secret so heavy to carry it would break me into pieces.

April 3, 2003, would mark a big day for me and I would be given a label for all the hard work I had endured, but as it did not bring magic to my spins it did however bring me a sense of pride and great accomplishment. It was the day I had my name printed in the Guinness Book of World Records. That day I made the first attempt to win a record for spinning on NBC's Today Show. The previous record that I would have to beat for spinning duration was sixty rotations on one foot continuously without changing feet or starting over. I had been on many morning shows throughout my skating career and it did not faze me that millions would be watching. I loved it and I did not feel any pressure since I was confident in my talent. What did scare me a little, however, was the ice condition and the fast wind that was blowing that morning. It was freezing and the ice was very uneven and choppy.

The wind was blowing me in all directions but I became world-famous as the world's longest spinner with one hundred and five rotations to only later that day at Chelsea Piers NY, beat my own record and bumped it up to one hundred and fifteen continuous rotations on one foot! It was a great success and gave me great happiness of doing something considered the best in the world. It was documented and would be a part of history forever. I wanted also do the fastest spin per second since I have been clocked at six rotations a second, but I was told at that time there was no category for this feat. I know my parents were and are very proud of me but for me nothing was ever good enough and the minute I achieved that I was on the hunt for the next thing to accomplish. It was a never ending trail to self-destruction because I would never be perfect and perfection is what I was striving for.

During that summer of 2003 I turned twenty-four years old and the clock was ticking. I had not evolved into my own person. I actually had become less independent, more dependent on my mother, back to being a child who could not fend for herself. I was panic-stricken and sick. Once again, the only way I knew how to deal with everything was to leave. 9/11 had also in many ways traumatized me and I could not bear living in the forsaken area of New York any longer. I wanted to go far, far away. In my heart I wanted to go to Mongolia and sit on top of a mountain and just do nothing. I wanted to live in my own world of meditation and just breathe and be reborn once again. But after all my parents and I had been through, for me to escape that far away sounded ridiculous. However, a tangible place like Los Angeles seemed okay to consider.

I was not afraid of fainting and dying. I was afraid of living. I was afraid to be who I was. I was not afraid of being mediocre, I was afraid of having power beyond measure. I was afraid I would erupt and destroy everything around me with my strength. I was so used to living a life of feeling powerless that I did not know what would happen if I did wake up my powers. The disgust I had for myself for not being who I truly was made me feel so angry that it scared me. I was afraid to live my own truth and I was afraid of my own body.

(LOS ANGELES, HAWAII, DUBAI)

If you continually hesitate with your next move you will stand on one leg forever.

I
n my life everything was always out of the ordinary. I was always out of my comfort zone so the only person or situation that was constant was the presence of my mother, and she knew it. She knew she had to be there or I would collapse. When would we each get our own wings and learn to fly? Somehow I had always felt so very sorry for my mother. She never was able to be the mother she really wanted to be to me after I turned nine years old. She had to become my best friend, my father, my teacher, my therapist, my everything, and ultimately the person she wanted to embody most of all she could not. By the end of the day there was no more time to be the mother. She had to fill all my expectations and fill all the big gaps. The burden of this on her shoulders must have been immense. It was almost like she had to raise me as a single mother and help me become an adult very quickly. There was no time for child's play. Elders who were my teachers and formed my life on and off ice endlessly engulfed me.

We moved to Los Angeles, then had a short stay in Hawaii, then ended up back in Dubai with my family, all in the next few years. It is all quite a blur accompanied by gallons and gallons of tears. No matter what we did nothing seemed to alleviate my physical pain. I was loved wherever I went for my skating but tensions were rising in other areas of my life. I was visiting doctors and hospitals nonstop trying to figure out my problems. We moved from one place to the next trying to cure me. We would try one doctor's treatment for a few months and when nothing was helping we would try to find another specialist. One doctor took great advantage of my situation and his treatment bordered on sexual abuse, but I kept quiet about it. He said what he did was his technique to cure my back. I just wanted to heal, and to be at mercy of doctors is a dangerous situation to be in. I was going to so many specialists it was driving me insane. I had one for my stomach, one for my ears, one for my nose, one for my head, one for my eyes (as they were now in so much pain and very swollen), and I had doctors for various other problems.

My back was still in great pain and we continued to get more opinions. Four out of five surgeons suggested surgery but since one did not suggest it, we went along with him. This seemed easier since we did not want my life more complicated. I decided to live with the pain. That was easier than going through surgery and not knowing the outcome. I already knew the outcome of just being in pain so I was comfortable with that.

I was diagnosed with either everything under the sun or nothing at all! I was anemic, I had thyroid issues. I was hormonally imbalanced. I had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, osteoporosis, and arthritis. You name it, I had it. But then there were some doctors who said I had nothing at all, that it was all in my head. The cure to it all? Nothing, or every pill under the sun. A few doctors then and a few years later also wanted to give me medication for depression. Now, I knew in my heart I was not clinically depressed and I totally refused to take any sort of medication for it. I just believed I wasn't depressed. I knew I was sad, disappointed, exhausted, and exasperated about all that was happening to me but I knew that medication would not help me enough. I was more afraid of the side effects than the help it would give me. I wanted to cure myself the way I thought was the proper way, by feeling every emotion and every pain, because if I had gotten myself into this mess I could get myself out of it too. Regarding this, I stood up for myself completely.

Still in Los Angeles and already very skinny, I then lost another fifteen pounds. All my clothes were hanging off of me. Many days I just lay in bed and did not move. Due to my physical problems I could not go anywhere without my mother and I never drove. I was too dizzy and felt too weak and did not want to get into an accident. I felt drowsy all day, every day. I missed so much the freedom of driving that I had experienced before. When I had an audition or a party or an event, my mother would force me to go and had to wait for me in the car.

What an incredible mother! The fact that we never gave up this way of living astonishes me even more. Looking back I can't believe how we never stopped! How my mother or I never woke up one day and said, “Look, it is ridiculous to keep on pushing and struggling this way. Let's try to change this…” will always be baffling to me. It was more like we were driving a broken car through all the red lights in life. We never, ever stopped. That is just not what a Ruh would do. We were trying to fix the vehicle while driving in it a hundred miles an hour. We did not want to stop in fear that everything would collapse even more and even though life was scary and painful, if we stopped it all, life as we knew it would cease to exist. A new life was far scarier and so we ploughed ahead the only way we knew how.

Somehow during this time I kept on skating and doing shows here and there but by now I wanted to stop skating badly. I started for the first time in my life to really voice to my mother my inner feelings and my wish to stop skating entirely. As I expected, and what I had been afraid about for so long in my life, was exactly what happened. My mother erupted more than ever. She fought with me nonstop. Well, not really with me since I never fought back, but at me. My mother could not contain her anger and the hitting got worse again. I would sometimes run out onto the street and drop to my knees and cry and cry and just pray to God to bring peace to us. It was terrifying and my mother lashed out continually. It was a “dammed if I do and dammed if I don't” decision. If I had not told her my feelings, I thought I would be sick forever and eventually kill myself. And if I told her, I felt like I would be killing her. I did not know what to do and it was traumatizing for both of us.

I somehow managed, while being half awake, to skate through the shows I had obligated myself to do. I don't remember much of them, probably because at that time my life was so painful that I shut down even more. I felt I no longer had an escape route. In 2005 I was part of a big skating competition and show on Japanese television and I toured the world once more in all the prestigious shows. I should have been the happiest girl in the world. Art on Ice in Switzerland was the biggest show in Europe with more than ten thousand spectators at each show for five nights. It was an incredible production with great performers including both singers and skaters. I had done this show in 2000 and had gone back there every year since then. My former Swiss coach was the producer and he always wanted me there. I was the star.

This time I could barely practice for the shows because of my condition that no one ever knew about. For the minutes I had to be on the ice I took whatever I had left in me and skated it all out. His Art on Ice show in 2005 would be my last performance. I am grateful I did not know it at that time that it would be my last. Therefore it was not a tearful one. It was just another performance.

What my mother did not realize was that her lashing out had really had an effect on me. It wasn't the only cause of my illnesses and distress but it had greatly contributed to it. I could not master enough courage to tell my mother that she had been wrong and had hurt me badly with her actions, as I was more afraid to hurt her. I had hoped someone else could tell her or she would come to the realization on her own from all the things that happened to us, but she never did. It was a very delicate situation. I could not get out of the situation. She did not see that she had anything to do with my severe state emotionally and that I was just in a survival mode.

She also did not see she was hurting herself in the process as well. She only saw how she had given and tried everything for me. And it was true that my mother had given up her whole life for me and had always had the right intentions. It would be some more time before this was resolved. For now I would still be hit because of my mother's frustration about life.

I was feeling so sick that I didn't think I would ever be able to describe the magnitude of how bad I felt. I am truly amazed I survived to tell my story. I am more amazed that I kept on going! My blood pressure was so low that I yawned all day and was barely able to move. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I was now very close to giving up skating completely. I felt finally that I now had enough reason to do it. It is not to say that I hated skating, of course. I hated though what it had done to my body and most importantly to my family. I knew I could not survive it any longer.

All I wanted was for my mother and father to yank back the reins, insist that I stay with the family in order to let me heal, and to comfort me, day in and day out. I wanted us to be a family again, but in the meantime they were so busy doing everything they thought was good for me, that they ceased to really be paying attention to me. Out of pure fear, I could not be the one to say I just wanted to be with them and do nothing. Reacting from past experiences I thought that they would be just so upset that I was giving up everything for which they had worked for so hard.

I wanted them to say, “You need to rest and heal” and say “NO” to me. “NO, don't skate, NO, don't exercise, NO, you can't go there, NO, you cannot work. NO, do not spin.” When they had heard about my fractured back I thought, “That's it.” Now they will never let me skate again. But that did not happen. Since I was so fearful of my mother's reactions, I had no voice and so I wanted them to run after me and take me back home. Whichever city I was in did not add or take away anything from me. My life was not a struggle because I was in a specific place. Had I gone to Africa or Alaska my situation would have been the same because the reasons for my troubles were never addressed.

My parents always believed in me and always will. They never in my life doubted my ability to succeed. They never made me feel like I could not be the best. Therefore my story is not a story of someone told that she couldn't do what she wanted to achieve. My story is one where everyone supported me, said I could do it, believed in me, and when I failed didn't understand what they and I had done wrong. There is much more pressure and higher expectations when other people know and believe so powerfully that the person is capable of anything. There is much more disappointment as well when then the person does not succeed. It felt like everyone was waiting to watch me do the impossible.

It is a very interesting dynamic and has rung true throughout my life. I felt I was trying to succeed for others while loving to spin and my parents were trying to succeed for me so that I would be successful in life. In the end I did not know what my parents wanted or what I wanted. But the good thing is that I will forever be humbled by the great confidence they had in their daughter. I do not know how I made them feel so sure of their daughter's potential. I know somehow I made them believe in me and their belief has made me a stronger person and made me always strive for the best. For this I will forever be grateful. I could not be where I am today without their belief in me.

No one around me or in the skating world seemed to know anything about what I had gone through. Knowing absolutely nothing about me, they were all questioning me about whether I was still performing. It totally baffled me since it was so impossible and improbable for me to be able to skate ever again, yet I realized all these people were clueless about what I had gone through. I knew that one day I wanted to recount my story for people to see the truth about me and understand my life. I wanted them to learn from me and felt it would be a disservice to myself and my fans not to express my experiences, not because of how great I am or how good my story is, but because knowing about my life could mean something to others. I want to awaken the destiny and truth in another and hopefully inspire them to understand themselves in order to succeed. I love the uniqueness in everybody and in everything. My talent and my story are unique and I want my telling of it to help others.

Almost every day I was flooded with emails and phone calls from people wanting me to skate in their shows. It was so painful for me to turn them all down and even more difficult, I think, for my mother. I was young and I had a life ahead of me. My mother was much older and I felt so guilty not being able to skate for her, just that one last time. Always that one last time. It was like when my skating coach used to say, “Do it just one more, one last time.” But that one more time was never just one more time. It was again and again and again. I felt my mother still believed so strongly that I would recover and skate again.

However, I knew inside of me that, this would never happen. I knew that the time had come when I needed to start having a life with friends, maybe a man I would love. I needed to grow my wings. I needed to become a woman. I still was a little girl in many ways. I knew if I kept on clutching tightly to my skating boots, I would miss my chance to ever learn how to walk in my own shoes, let alone learn to fly. I had always said to myself that I never wanted to skate until I was thirty. I had always seen my skating career as a short one and a launching pad for something bigger in my life that would serve me better. Skating was a lesson for me. It was a big, big lesson, one of huge proportions.

At this stage nothing was really working and all I truly wanted was to be with my mother and father and the only way that was to happen was for me to return to Dubai. There I continued with new doctors and treatments. I was feeling like a pincushion, poked and manipulated and given so much medicine. But no one was covering up the holes that were already there and it felt like now I had new ones to deal with as well. But one positive thing began that winter of 2005 in Dubai with a holistic doctor. I finally started puberty!! It was like a miracle. We couldn't believe it. It was the very first time a treatment had actually worked and it was a sign that my body was waking up. I was twenty-six years old when it first happened and it was not until I was twenty-nine that my menstruation became regular. But at least my body had started the process.