UK: See that girl gaining clarity in the ‘white out’?

 

No one could ever doubt that the journey to this very spot was effortless. I have cried, slid ungracefully and I bitterly lost my phone in a certain powdered filled event. All on these very slopes.

I am a seasonaire.

One who has shamefully never skied on snow before landing and then living, on this very snowy and ski orientated resort.

This winter was meant to be purely about me become ‘tres perfect’ in French, spending my Gap Year surrounded by ‘les francephones’, speaking and listening with great envy as their native language flows from their practised mouths.

The motivation behind my four months in a place driven by a sport, a hobby which I have never thought to interest myself in? Is simply for that brief moment where my speech flows with a natives and conversation is struck in a dimension which had never seemed possible those few years ago, sitting in a classroom full of English students who were just as confused by the ‘subjects’ and ‘auxiliary verbs’ as I had then been.

Therefore, you can imagine my horror when I arrived and was almost immediately whisked to the local ski hire, up the bobble to a Red and then strapped in facing what can only be described as the beginning of an ice covered path, which drops frighteningly into nowhere.

Nowhere visible to the start that is to say.

That Red was the run where tears had seemed to flow with the snow scraped up into the air and down the gradient by those who knew better. The very slope where I had fallen on my front, each ski pointing up towards the top as I slid with my legs flapping before me down, gradually losing both poles and finally both skies. The only slope which I had somehow manages to ski parallel into the powder off-piste and then somehow opened my coat pockets, discharging my mobile into the white clouds which seemed to suffocate me.

Therefore, this moment, this very moment where I am surrounded my those  ‘white clouds’, which now are up around me instead of on the ground, and hurtling at an alarming speed to the bottom, you can understand why I feel that emotion of absolute pride.

Pride in myself.

Not only did I literally throw myself off the slope at the very top, into a pool of clouds which tampered with ones vision and makes it almost impossible to see, but I did it alone. Everyone else in my group has taken the day to rest and the others who’d been peering over the side with their skies angled away, have not yet followed.

However the thing which ironically ‘pushed me over the edge’, was sheer motivation to make up for the days spent cursing these beautiful mountains and to feel that accomplishment I receive when using a new word within a French conversation or by travelling alone because I know what suits me best.

This sporadic moment which makes me feel most brave?

Well I am fixed to two narrow lengths, unable to see anything but the fast moving snow beneath my   skies and I can feel the speed which I am going at by the wind which knocks harshly, but not without love, on the only exposed area of my face; the tip of my nose.

This moment would not be nearly as significant or climatic if it had not been for the troubles and bumps which I have had to encounter. It makes me yearn to yell at the uncertain beginners who stand the way I trembled and fall the way I tumbled that they can, that they WILL be able to do this too if they push all their weight forward and off the starting point.

Nothing has made me feel as free, nor brave as this moment where the sense of sight seems to have been robbed from me, and in its place, clarity has been bestowed.

I have made myself free, and that’s the bravest thing I could ever have allowed myself to be.

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