Free Frozen Teardrop by Lucinda Ruh Page A

necessarily repeating, but doing everything the same way over and over, was not my thing. I changed everyday what and how I did things. That was my freedom. I was winning all the competitions I entered. I was an A student.
    As everything seemed to progress on the outside everything was falling apart on the inside. I was becoming shy and embarrassed. I was becoming afraid of people, of authority, and circumstances. I was most afraid not to please my mother, to fail. I was afraid that with all she was putting into me I wasn’t living up to her expectations. Conversations started to become only about skating and I do not remember talking to my mother much about anything else. My mother had all the responsibility on her shoulders since there was no other support. Therefore she became very strict with me about my skating and I was so afraid to make mistakes. I wanted so badly to make my mother proud of me.
    â€œSorry” is a very common word in Japan and used so frequently in their language that you find yourself and everyone around you apologizing for everything. “Sorry” became every second word I voiced and felt. I was sorry for coming into a room, sorry for disturbing anyone, sorry for my existence. Sorry for eating or breathing too loudly. Sorry for this, sorry for that. I started to feel I was a nuisance to everybody.
    At school, however, I felt accepted since it was filled with foreigners, but my real life was not there. My life was on the ice and there no matter how much I tried to fit in and act like the other Japanese kids, to eat like them, and even to pick up the language and speak like them, I was thrown to the side. I would get the last lessons of the day or no lesson at all if there was no more time. I would get laughed at for what I was wearing when it was different from theirs. I was told to go home where I came from. They said I had no right as an outsider to take away time from the Japanese coach. They laughed at my long eyelashes so much that I started picking them out until I had no more left. I would never be accepted as a Japanese person but to me at that time as a little kid I didn’t look at outside appearances, so I didn’t understand. I just felt hurt by the situation and I couldn’t speak out because I didn’t know how, so I expressed it with my skating.
    I was supposed to be a happy child, not sad. I was supposed to be the sunshine of my mother’s life. I could not show her my weakness. All I wanted was to have friends and be one of them but that to my great disappointment would never happen. The more success I had on the ice the worse the bullying got. And so it all began. Without realizing it, my teardrops froze and my life took a dangerous turn and to become frozen over time.

4
Tokyo Alien Girl
    (TOKYO)
    A Barbie or an Alien?
    W hat is age? Is it identified by a number, or the amount of wisdom, or depth of understanding a person has? Is it how you look or how you act or just the number you tell people? Can’t a person be older or younger than his age? Don’t we grow sometimes in one dimension or in one direction and not the other? Don’t we stay childish in some areas and mature in other realms, and in the end doesn’t the life in your years count more than the years in your life?
    I feel respecting someone else comes first and foremost after respecting yourself, but certainly has nothing to do with age. All humans should respect each other. But in Japan age is the most sacred attribute a person can attain and anyone even a day older than you is to be respected and is to be bowed to. It is not by their wisdom or by their actions that they demand respect but by their time of birth, their time of appearance on this earth, as if that gives them the right to look down upon all others after them. You are not to cross someone older than you. This is huge in their culture and therefore the suicide rate is extremely high due to the bullying inflicted by