by Lucinda Ruh
My back was still in great pain and we continued to get more opinions. Four out of five surgeons suggested surgery but since one did not suggest it, we went along with him. This seemed easier since we did not want my life more complicated. I decided to live with the pain. That was easier than going through surgery and not knowing the outcome. I already knew the outcome of just being in pain so I was comfortable with that.
I was diagnosed with either everything under the sun or nothing at all! I was anemic, I had thyroid issues. I was hormonally imbalanced. I had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, osteoporosis, and arthritis. You name it, I had it. But then there were some doctors who said I had nothing at all, that it was all in my head. The cure to it all? Nothing, or every pill under the sun. A few doctors then and a few years later also wanted to give me medication for depression. Now, I knew in my heart I was not clinically depressed and I totally refused to take any sort of medication for it. I just believed I wasn’t depressed. I knew I was sad, disappointed, exhausted, and exasperated about all that was happening to me but I knew that medication would not help me enough. I was more afraid of the side effects than the help it would give me. I wanted to cure myself the way I thought was the proper way, by feeling every emotion and every pain, because if I had gotten myself into this mess I could get myself out of it too. Regarding this, I stood up for myself completely.
Still in Los Angeles and already very skinny, I then lost another fifteen pounds. All my clothes were hanging off of me. Many days I just lay in bed and did not move. Due to my physical problems I could not go anywhere without my mother and I never drove. I was too dizzy and felt too weak and did not want to get into an accident. I felt drowsy all day, every day. I missed so much the freedom of driving that I had experienced before. When I had an audition or a party or an event, my mother would force me to go and had to wait for me in the car.
What an incredible mother! The fact that we never gave up this way of living astonishes me even more. Looking back I can’t believe how we never stopped! How my mother or I never woke up one day and said, “Look, it is ridiculous to keep on pushing and struggling this way. Let’s try to change this…” will always be baffling to me. It was more like we were driving a broken car through all the red lights in life. We never, ever stopped. That is just not what a Ruh would do. We were trying to fix the vehicle while driving in it a hundred miles an hour. We did not want to stop in fear that everything would collapse even more and even though life was scary and painful, if we stopped it all, life as we knew it would cease to exist. A new life was far scarier and so we ploughed ahead the only way we knew how.
Somehow during this time I kept on skating and doing shows here and there but by now I wanted to stop skating badly. I started for the first time in my life to really voice to my mother my inner feelings and my wish to stop skating entirely. As I expected, and what I had been afraid about for so long in my life, was exactly what happened. My mother erupted more than ever. She fought with me nonstop. Well, not really with me since I never fought back, but at me. My mother could not contain her anger and the hitting got worse again. I would sometimes run out onto the street and drop to my knees and cry and cry and just pray to God to bring peace to us. It was terrifying and my mother lashed out continually. It was a “dammed if I do and dammed if I don’t” decision. If I had not told her my feelings, I thought I would be sick forever and eventually kill myself. And if I told her, I felt like I would be killing her. I did not know what to do and it was traumatizing for both of us.
I somehow managed, while being half awake, to skate through the shows I had obligated myself to do. I don’t remember much of them, probably because at that time my life was so painful that I shut down even more. I felt I no longer had an escape route. In 2005 I was part of a big skating competition and show on Japanese television and I toured the world once more in all the prestigious shows. I should have been the happiest girl in the world. Art on Ice in Switzerland was the biggest show in Europe with more than ten thousand spectators at each show for five nights. It was an incredible production with great performers including both singers and skaters. I had done this show in 2000 and had gone back there every year since then. My former Swiss coach was the producer and he always wanted me there. I was the star.
This time I could barely practice for the shows because of my condition that no one ever knew about. For the minutes I had to be on the ice I took whatever I had left in me and skated it all out. His Art on Ice show in 2005 would be my last performance. I am grateful I did not know it at that time that it would be my last. Therefore it was not a tearful one. It was just another performance.
What my mother did not realize was that her lashing out had really had an effect on me. It wasn’t the only cause of my illnesses and distress but it had greatly contributed to it. I could not master enough courage to tell my mother that she had been wrong and had hurt me badly with her actions, as I was more afraid to hurt her. I had hoped someone else could tell her or she would come to the realization on her own from all the things that happened to us, but she never did. It was a very delicate situation. I could not get out of the situation. She did not see that she had anything to do with my severe state emotionally and that I was just in a survival mode.
She also did not see she was hurting herself in the process as well. She only saw how she had given and tried everything for me. And it was true that my mother had given up her whole life for me and had always had the right intentions. It would be some more time before this was resolved. For now I would still be hit because of my mother’s frustration about life.
I was feeling so sick that I didn’t think I would ever be able to describe the magnitude of how bad I felt. I am truly amazed I survived to tell my story. I am more amazed that I kept on going! My blood pressure was so low that I yawned all day and was barely able to move. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I was now very close to giving up skating completely. I felt finally that I now had enough reason to do it. It is not to say that I hated skating, of course. I hated though what it had done to my body and most importantly to my family. I knew I could not survive it any longer.
All I wanted was for my mother and father to yank back the reins, insist that I stay with the family in order to let me heal, and to comfort me, day in and day out. I wanted us to be a family again, but in the meantime they were so busy doing everything they thought was good for me, that they ceased to really be paying attention to me. Out of pure fear, I could not be the one to say I just wanted to be with them and do nothing. Reacting from past experiences I thought that they would be just so upset that I was giving up everything for which they had worked for so hard.
I wanted them to say, “You need to rest and heal” and say “NO” to me. “NO, don’t skate, NO, don’t exercise, NO, you can’t go there, NO, you cannot work. NO, do not spin.” When they had heard about my fractured back I thought, “That’s it.” Now they will never let me skate again. But that did not happen. Since I was so fearful of my mother’s reactions, I had no voice and so I wanted them to run after me and take me back home. Whichever city I was in did not add or take away anything from me. My life was not a struggle because I was in a specific place. Had I gone to Africa or Alaska my situation would have been the same because the reasons for my troubles were never addressed.
My parents always believed in me and always will. They never in my life doubted my ability to succeed. They never made me feel like I could not be the best. Therefore my story is not a story of someone told that she couldn’t do what she wanted to achieve. My story is one where everyone supported me, said I could do it, believed in me, and when I failed didn’t understand what they and I had done wrong. There is much more pressure and higher expectations when other people know and believe so powerfully that the person is capable of anything. There is much more disappointment as well when then the person does not succeed. It felt like everyone was waiting to watch me do the impossible.
It is
a very interesting dynamic and has rung true throughout my life. I felt I was trying to succeed for others while loving to spin and my parents were trying to succeed for me so that I would be successful in life. In the end I did not know what my parents wanted or what I wanted. But the good thing is that I will forever be humbled by the great confidence they had in their daughter. I do not know how I made them feel so sure of their daughter’s potential. I know somehow I made them believe in me and their belief has made me a stronger person and made me always strive for the best. For this I will forever be grateful. I could not be where I am today without their belief in me.
No one around me or in the skating world seemed to know anything about what I had gone through. Knowing absolutely nothing about me, they were all questioning me about whether I was still performing. It totally baffled me since it was so impossible and improbable for me to be able to skate ever again, yet I realized all these people were clueless about what I had gone through. I knew that one day I wanted to recount my story for people to see the truth about me and understand my life. I wanted them to learn from me and felt it would be a disservice to myself and my fans not to express my experiences, not because of how great I am or how good my story is, but because knowing about my life could mean something to others. I want to awaken the destiny and truth in another and hopefully inspire them to understand themselves in order to succeed. I love the uniqueness in everybody and in everything. My talent and my story are unique and I want my telling of it to help others.
Almost every day I was flooded with emails and phone calls from people wanting me to skate in their shows. It was so painful for me to turn them all down and even more difficult, I think, for my mother. I was young and I had a life ahead of me. My mother was much older and I felt so guilty not being able to skate for her, just that one last time. Always that one last time. It was like when my skating coach used to say, “Do it just one more, one last time.” But that one more time was never just one more time. It was again and again and again. I felt my mother still believed so strongly that I would recover and skate again.
However, I knew inside of me that, this would never happen. I knew that the time had come when I needed to start having a life with friends, maybe a man I would love. I needed to grow my wings. I needed to become a woman. I still was a little girl in many ways. I knew if I kept on clutching tightly to my skating boots, I would miss my chance to ever learn how to walk in my own shoes, let alone learn to fly. I had always said to myself that I never wanted to skate until I was thirty. I had always seen my skating career as a short one and a launching pad for something bigger in my life that would serve me better. Skating was a lesson for me. It was a big, big lesson, one of huge proportions.
At this stage nothing was really working and all I truly wanted was to be with my mother and father and the only way that was to happen was for me to return to Dubai. There I continued with new doctors and treatments. I was feeling like a pincushion, poked and manipulated and given so much medicine. But no one was covering up the holes that were already there and it felt like now I had new ones to deal with as well. But one positive thing began that winter of 2005 in Dubai with a holistic doctor. I finally started puberty!! It was like a miracle. We couldn’t believe it. It was the very first time a treatment had actually worked and it was a sign that my body was waking up. I was twenty-six years old when it first happened and it was not until I was twenty-nine that my menstruation became regular. But at least my body had started the process.
It might surprise people that I am so open about this part of my life, but If I can help someone else I would do anything for them because I know how my parents and I had longed for this help while I was growing up. I am not ashamed about anything because I have led my life with the best of my ability. I am truthful about all else so why not talk about this part? It is only human to go through puberty and having it happen much later in my life affected me in more ways than you can imagine. I do hope that women reading my story will not feel the need to stop the natural process because of another goal, whatever that may be. Your health, body, and mind needs to come first, because I promise you I know that without them nothing else is possible in life. Please do not disregard those like I did. I did it all for my skating — to stay thin, to do the unattainable, and to be the special and invincible one. My ego had gotten the better of me and I paid the price.
Going through puberty is tough enough when you are a young teenager but to have to go through it in your mid-twenties is even tougher. Hormones take much longer to stabilize when your body starts to change later than the normal age for puberty. It was especially troubling when you have been brought up to believe that image is so important. I felt incredibly uncomfortable about my body and its changes, and it took me a while to fall in love with myself again. At that time I did not know how to deal with it all, and was afraid as a person in the public eye that people would now view me differently and perhaps not like me as much. Although I was so happy to have my body finally wake up, I had a fear of my body, which now felt new and foreign. It was like I had a whole new vehicle to drive.
Once more the promise my parents and I had made to each other that I would NOT move from Dubai until I was one hundred percent well would not be kept. I had the beginnings of going through puberty but my mother and I were antsy that I needed more medical care and even more antsy about our delusional perception that I was not doing anything. I was resting, reading, relaxing and healing and my mother and I were not used to it. I had never done that in my life!
Since I wasn’t being treated for everything else that I was going through we thought I needed the more specialized care of a doctor in America. I had pushed my body into being dormant for twenty-five years without giving it a minute to breathe so I knew in addition to specialized care I also needed to give it more time and space. But we were as usual more interested in doing more and more and more. We were on a ball going downhill so fast we could not stop it.
When an opportunity for me to teach in a new ice rink in Wayne New Jersey came up my mother sprang at the opportunity. I did not. I cried inside. At that time, the very last thing I wanted to do was teach and especially did not want to move away just for that reason. I wanted to stay with my family, and not go back to America. I did not see the point in moving once more to a place because of an ice rink. Why did this opportunity come up? Was it a test to see if we had the strength and courage to dismiss it and let my body heal without being on the ice? If so, we failed miserably. My mother insisted I needed to make a living. She said that after all the money my parents had spent on me why was I so selfish to say no to making money in the sport I knew best? That would be outrageous.
I could not win with my mother and did not have enough energy to fight back. I got more distraught seeing her so upset. I could not understand her wanting me to teach and even still wanting me to perform when I was so unwell. This decision to move to Wayne, New Jersey was my mother’s. If we were moving back to the States, in order to go to a hospital for my needs where I could be treated, I would have agreed, but not an ice rink. Once more all the things in life that I was now trying to leave completely behind so that I could heal would once more be continued and again I would fall back and be frozen in time.
I remember the evening before our flight to New Jersey. It will be etched in the painting of my life forever. My mother knew I did not want to go and she could not contain her frustration with me. Why was I always making it so difficult for her? She lashed out at me and had one of her serious fits of hitting me, screaming, and utterly going crazy.
In the commotion of it all I called my holistic doctor to see if she could calm my mother down. She was not able to do this, but told me sternly that my mother and I should not go since she felt we were not ready to embark on a new adventure. We did not listen. I don’t know what use it was having other people trying to help us since my mother never listened when it came to herself. She was the puppeteer, the captain of the ship. I looked at her
and for a moment everything went in slow motion and all was silent. I just watched her body and lips move, and all I could see was sadness, desperation, anger, fear, love, and despair inside of this beautiful, majestic, and strong woman who had absolutely no more hope, dreams, or will left in her in life. It was the dance of terror.
It rang true to me when my mother would say, “I am going to die soon anyway.” Those words hurt me more than my mother will ever know. To feel that I was the cause of all her despair was something I could not live with. Even my father could not stop her behavior. My heart sank and bled. I did not care if it bled to death. I wanted to die for my mother. I did not know what else to do. I have no idea how we boarded the flight, but we did, and once more went on the way to times of more terror awaiting us. We had all lost our minds, heart, and soul, and for what? I, Lucinda, had become invisible.
17
Doctors Galore
(WAYNE, LOS ANGELES)
Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less,in human beings of whom they know nothing.
Voltaire
Living within a lie while knowing the truth, yet having no way to live the truth, is the most painful and destructive situation that can be given to you or that you can take upon yourself. The one thing I loved most could kill me. The one thing I lived, breathed, and had strived for every single day of my life, day in and day out, had been my spins. Now I felt God had given me a gift but in return had taken everything else from me. How could I truly comprehend anything anymore unless I was Lucinda with and without the gift? There had been always so much more to me than my spinning but I had never been allowed to show it.
Emotions are not deadly things and yet I feared them. Emotions are merely part of your body and mind telling you what your heart and soul is feeling. But since I had to live so long being emotionless, especially when being a part of the Japanese culture, I did not know anything about my feelings. Sometimes I think the surroundings of a person’s childhood can be even more influential than their own DNA and I feel I had morphed into some of the characteristics of a Japanese person on the inside rather than being who I truly was. I needed to understand my emotions. What I came to understand is that letting go of and releasing emotions can help one’s sadness and one’s own suffering, but if you turn your emotions back on yourself they can become the source of madness. I had learned to stuff all my emotions deep within me and therefore I had become mad. There was no way around it. I had created my own suffering.
