Emily Brydon: super fast racer, amazing friend, inspirational woman. She is an awesome role model and a great example of determination. This letter that she wrote to her younger self is the inspiration behind our blog series “what I know now that I wish I knew then.”
Thank you to Emily for sharing this with us and hope that it touches others as much as it did us.
*Excerpt from “If I’d Known Then- Women in their 20s and 30s write letters to their younger selves” Edited by Ellyn Spragins*
Emily Brydon
Olympic Skier
“Bury that temptation to conform to society as soon as possible”
Emily Brydon, a Canadian Olympic skier, grew up in a beautiful cocoon of a childhood. Her mother and father built their log home themselves on ten acres in Fernie, a ski resort in British Colombia. She was an only child who spent a lot of time with her parents and their friends. Money was short. The family didn’t have a television, and her mother made Emily’s clothing until she was in eighth grade. Enveloped in her parents self-sufficiency, however, Emily didn’t notice a lack.
“Mine was always the birthday party to come to because my mother made them so fun, with scavenger hunts, treasure hunts, games and goodie bags. She’s a really good baker, and I always had the baking to give to her” recalls Emily.
She spent a lot of time playing outside, often with her father. He passed on his love of skiing and sports to Emily. By the time she was in high school, she was well on her way to her ultimate height of six feet and had become a serious competitive skier, training and competing all over the world. She was in the popular group at school, but she felt her status was shaky-always needing to be shored up.
On a powder-coated mountain, however, she felt perfectly at ease. “It feels like total freedom. It allows me to express myself. I’m such a driven person, it’s an avenue for me to use that drive,” she says.
Emily’s talents were amply displayed in 2005 at the Pontiac GMC Canadian Alpine Championships where she was a gold medallist in the Downhill, Super-G, Slalom and Combined disciplines. The last time those awards had been won by a single competitor was almost forty years earlier. More recently, she was ranked ninth in the Super-G and also ninth in Combined in the world.
Jetting from one beautiful mountain to another all over the world, in order to do exactly what she wants, makes her feel privileged-and a bit guilty at times. So in 2006 she established the Emily Brydon Youth Foundation, which is designed to offer financial support to kids who want to pursue interests in arts or athletics or who want to further their education
Though she was intensely dedicated to her career at a young age, there was a period when she doubted her direction and questioned whether she should continue. Then, her father died of cancer in 1998 when she was 18 years old. It was a turning point on many levels. One outcome was that she might have to stop skiing without the financial support her father provided. A local family who was friendly with Emily’s family and whose kids participated in ski racing stepped in, offering their support. That’s when Emily decided to truly do what was right for her and commit herself to the sport-in part as a way of honouring her father. Here Emily, twenty-seven, writes to her younger self between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, when she questioned her skiing career.
Dear Emily,
This back-and-forth on your ski-racing career is confusing you. Clearly you’re dedicated and a hard worker, but you’re wondering if it’s really right for you.
It is.
You have no way of recognising this now, so let me spell it out. You doubt yourself because you’re encountering tremendous resistance from your environment. You’re trying to speed down a mountain with a giant parachute ballooning out behind you.
Look at your social life. You’re in the popular group because you have such an exotic life, zipping off to other states and different countries for the winter then popping back. But you miss so much of what your friends experience that you’re constantly playing catch up. Getting back into the social system is really stressful.
Then there are the teachers, who are making your life miserable. They seem to resent your absences, even though you work harder that other kids and you are an A student. One of your teachers told you dismissively that he doesn’t have time for you in class now. Teachers seem willing to accommodate the schedules of ambitious male hockey players-but an ambitious female athlete goes against the norm. Society is so strict about what teenagers should do and how to become the perfect career woman.
You and your parents will have to fight the school system for months to allow you to move to Whistler and do your schoolwork there. For you, the fight will be to prove to the school that women in sports are legitimate and should be respected and supported. Your frustration over the administration’s inability to see outside the box will make you feel so angry.
These headwinds will get you down. You spend a lot of time justifying your devotion to your sport. But the worst part of all this, Emily, is the flak you are creating for yourself. You are a people-pleaser. You know what you believe in, but you’re afraid to voice it because you don’t fully trust yourself and you want to fit in.
Bury that temptation to conform to society, as soon as possible!
Do you know what that means? Trust yourself. When you face big decisions in life, it’s perfectly fine to ask others what they think. But when it comes down to actually doing it, you are way better off following your gut.
What if your gut is silent? Wait. Wait until you hear your intuition. It’s almost always correct.
xxoo
Emily
Emily Brydon RIPPING at a young age!