Margaret Navarro

I started training in gymnastics when I was eight years old to become a college athlete. The biggest choices of my life were made to pursue this dream of mine. I switched to online education in the sixth grade to commit forty hours a week for training. Everything was on track.
Until the day I woke up homeless. Where would we stay? How was I going to be able to continue gymnastics?
After scrambling for options, I managed to find three families who offered me places to stay in rotation. My brother moved in with one of his friends, and my parents moved in with family. My family, my support system, was now over seventy-five miles apart in different counties, and I was just fifteen years old. But it was a necessary sacrifice to keep training. Nothing was going to stop me from being a college gymnast.
Then my body gave out. Years of many broken bones and pulled ligaments, tears in my groin and lasting hip issues, added up, and I was facing more severe injuries the longer I trained. Nearly a decade after my commitment to gymnastics, I was forced to give up my dream for the sake of my health. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, giving up that part of my soul.
When I stopped gymnastics, I wasn’t only overwhelmed—I was lost. I was used to training for five to nine hours a day and then…nothing. I had all this free time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. While I continued my education, I did so from home. My closest friends were occupied with gymnastics, my second set of parents was busy training their gymnasts, and my family was still separated in different homes. Isolated and floundering, I just stayed on the couch and did nothing. I had no motivation to do anything. I struggled with this feeling for about a year.
I realized that I still needed to be involved in gymnastics. I needed my second family back, so I asked the owner of the gym for a job. If I couldn’t train, I could at least be around those that loved the sport. Thinking I would be working with recreational classes and kids, I was excited when the owner called me back and said that I would be working on a team. At the age of sixteen, I was working with kids between the ages of three and ten, mentoring the up-and-coming competitors—maybe even the next college gymnast.
While these upsets in my life were not what I had planned, they were what I needed. Listening to my body and learning my limits let my body completely heal and, for the first time in years, be free of pain. Having time to heal helped me grow emotionally, as it gave me distance from gymnastics. Though I returned to it as a teacher, I was able to shift my priorities from gym to my academic interests in Russian and criminal justice. Gymnastics may have been my life for a long time, but leaving it opened up whole new worlds for my future. For that, I can’t thank it enough.