Starting Over Doesn't Mean Starting From Scratch

You'd spent all these years doing your life in these 15-minute increments.

This is what I do.

I get up every day and everything is designed around being a skater.

And then there's the identity side of it.

So there's the actual doing, the working out eight hours a day, the being on the ice and the feeling that that gives you and the energy and the gracefulness and the entertaining.

Like there's the actual... function of skating and then there's this identity wrapped around it when people introduce you and here's who I am and how you relate to other people.

Do you think one was harder than the other to separate from? I think it was sort of almost

I'm going to say it was a transition.

And because I was already doing skating outfits and doing a lot of sewing for myself, and I had a really weird academic school that I went to where we, in our home mech in those days, we were supposed to do things like sew an apron.

and the girls in my class, we were able to do it in an hour or less, and the teachers actually had more abilities, so they created a specialized program for us.

They taught us pattern making, fitting, how to do couture sewing techniques, and tailoring, all of those things I learned in high school.

So it's as if life was conspiring to set me up for the transition that I wasn't going to do by myself.

I have sometimes joked about the fact that I use near-death experiences, which I highly don't recommend.

I think that my life, like I wouldn't have willingly, as you can see how much I loved skating.

I mean, I still think that the sound of skates on ice.

And I still think the smell of a rink is, it's my happy place.

I still think that walking is a strange and unnatural act.

So I think that it literally, I almost had to die to let it go to do the next thing.

And life set me up in a way that I couldn't have known the moment that that accident was happening.

Now you've had More than one moment here.

Can you share a little bit more about some of these other moments that have happened in your

life? So after skating, I graduated with honors from Blanche McDonald's in Vancouver.

I won awards.

And then I went on to be a couture fashion designer, being featured in all sorts of wonderful magazines and newspapers, in Holt Renfrew, the Bay Eatons, all of the big stores.

And I went on to... have a very illustrious, successful career, traveling all over the world, doing QVC, and again, loving what I was doing, not only for myself, but having team members, having, you know, friends all over the world.