If I stay up (or down, depending on your perspective) for longer than 12 seconds, that’s a good day. One that deserves a celebration on the scale of the Fourth of July fireworks. But usually, I’m done by the 10-second mark before I crash down with the same inelegance as when I kicked up. Then I do it again. And again.
When I’m not working on a handstand, I’m thinking about it. I get anxious when I don’t do it every day. I visualise what it must be like to do it in the middle of the room, far away from the safety of the wall.
Or I’m on YouTube training by groaning my way through Day Christensen’s insanely difficult Foundation Drills.
In the handstand community – yes, that’s a thing – Day is a legend. She has over 50,000 hardcore followers on Instagram. Her handstands are awesome works of art. She can enter with a tuck-jump, a standing or sitting straddle lift, or a pike lift. And she can stay upside down for a long time, which in my world is anything longer than five seconds.
It looks so easy when Day does her handstands. Except I know it’s not. I’ve been known to lie on the couch and watch her all day long, marvelling at the level of strength, control and balance that is required to do what she does.
When Day came to Singapore in mid-August to give handstand workshops, it was as if Mariah, Oprah, Beyonce and Adele had all shown up in the studio at the same time. The awesome fabulousness of the moment was almost too much to bear, especially since two of her star pupils Lee Shian and Sara were also in attendance.
To watch these women casually plant their hands on the mat and then rise lightly like champagne bubbles into the air with such control, grace and strength was to realise that despite all my best daily efforts and diligence, I was, for all intents and purposes, basically a deformed, asthmatic sub-tropical toad.
For two days, I huffed and puffed my way through Day’s drills, turning bright red while Lee Shian and Sara barely raised a light glow, not a single strand of hair ever falling out of place. By the end of it, I was no nearer to a handstand than when I’d started. Only now, I was more convinced than ever that I might also be physically dyslexic.