Almost every aspect of roller derby involves training my body to disobey its own instincts. When instability threatens a nasty fall, my body wants to get as far from the floor as possible, my spine pole-straight, my arms raised, my head and hands scrambling toward the sky. Over time, I have trained my body to ignore this automatic flailing reaction to gravity’s inevitable threat, a reaction that narrows my base and stretches my power box into an unusable, uncontrollable vertical line. Flailing endangers all of the skaters around me and virtually guarantees a nasty crash, despite the fact that my body insists that it’s the most correct and natural response to any threat of a fall. Derby stance short-circuits that sequence of precarious reactions – my body’s ill-fated Rube Goldberg of efforts to avoid hitting the ground. Instead, under the tutelage of some very patient Diesel Dollz, I have learned to adopt a derby stance whenever my wheels hit the track wood. Derby stance looks a lot like the stance assumed by athletes in most sports. Picture the defensive posture of a basketball player, whose wide feet offer an agile, stable base, whose deeply bent knees offer vertical as well as horizontal mobility, and whose upturned face and solid shoulder frame lend power to every purposeful motion. Now imagine that basketball player in skates. And shredded fishnets. And sparkly purple booty shorts. That’s derby stance.

It took months for me to master a true derby stance. The first three weeks of squat-legged skating knotted my lower back into an excruciating wall of pain, and my thighs burned and quaked so that I could barely manage my basement stairs. Everything inside of me wanted to revolt, to stand up straight and stretch my tired shoulders. Also, I am not a quiet student of suffering. I am a grunting, groaning, sweating, angry revolutionary with a scowling pair of eyebrows to balance my eight shaky wheels. Fortunately, the girls sifted through my scowls to a kernel of hard-baked determination. I would have sworn that my runaway life as a grieving mother of five had siphoned off the honeyed steel of my passion-driven heart, but there it was, on the roller derby track – all the time.

In my current role as developing skater coach, I’m often among the first to describe derby stance to our newest recruits. Sometimes, women arrive at the rink with a constellation of shattered hopes and cracked plans that leave just enough space for the force of their buried determination to begin shining out from between the broken places. They arrive angry (often with good reason), and their fight melts in a derby stance crucible, where the dross of impossible things burns off and what remains is a shiny, solid, roller-skating alloy of deliberate courage.

But sometimes, women come to roller derby tragically busted, beyond my reach. They arrive trembling and small and defiant and scared, and I know that I’ll only have one practice, two at best, to whisper courage and encouragement before the slender string of insubstantial provision snaps and they slip through the grate of derby dues and gear costs and time commitments and transportation needs and I just don’t see them anymore. On these days, I pay special attention to derby stance. Sometimes it’s all I teach. I had the honor of teaching one woman, I’ll call her Charlotte, who wore the pock-marked skin and fractured half smile of meth addiction all over her face. I think she found 50 reasons to apologize to me before she even laced up her skates. Her quivering arms were sleeves of scars interrupted at regular intervals by finger-thick bruises, and her shoulders hunched hard into a crescent curving down toward tiny, shuffling steps. The entire time she was gearing up, Charlotte assured me in the hyperbolic language of a self-lie, that she was committed to unwavering attendance and unprecedented achievement in this sport. And I wanted, for both of us,that the story she built would grow legs and run. I wanted, for both of us, that it could be true. But in the meantime (the precious, unrepeatable, inestimable meantime), I would fit her with gear, and strap her to eight wheels, and tell her that she could trust her pads. That, here, she did not have to avoid a fall. Here, we would only celebrate every time she found her skates again. And when she finally loosened her white-knuckled grip on the wall, I would teach her derby stance.

For a full hour and a half, I would skate inches from her shaky side. With her inside skate wheels nearly touching, she shuffled forward, every gesture an apology for the space that she occupied on the track and in this world. “You are not here by accident,” I whispered. “You deserve to be right where you are. You are on purpose. You were made for this, for all of this. Spread out. Widen your stance. Own the track where you stand. Don’t let anyone take it from you. Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t belong right here, right now. It matters that you’re here. You matter. Take up space!   You’re not an accident. You are not an accident.” And on, and on, and on. As she began, by inch-fraction increments, to spread her skates, and bend her knees, and lift her eyes, her shoulders, her heart frame, all of her lies suffocated – for at least an hour under the weight of His truth. “Get up!” He once told a broken man. “Who is left to condemn you?” He had asked a marked woman. “Leave her alone! Why are you bothering her?” He called to the accusers of a woman who fell down hard, His truth shielding her from the heresy of their eyes. Can it be church enough to whisper, “You are not an accident”? Can the fact that He called us out, by name, before he spoke this world into being be just enough of a reason to remind a broken woman to take up space and breathe deep, without any apology for a life woven through with a precious eternal purpose? Our instincts make us flail and fall; our natural response to life’s gravity is to shrink our stance and scramble away from the floor. Can we all retrain ourselves to overcome our intuitive instability and take up space, without any apology, broad and low and powerful because we are not, any of us, accidents.