One summer when I was fifteen, I decided I was going to master two things:

Rollerblading backwards and wiggling my ears (not simultaneously. I had limits.)

Rollerblading backwards terrified me. I was convinced I’d fall and crack my head open on the garage floor.

As for my ears? Nothing. Not even a twitch.

But it was summer break. I was bored. And if I’m being honest, I probably wanted to impress other teenagers who thought weird tricks were cool.

So I practiced.

I skated backwards in circles until I stopped feeling afraid.

I stood in front of the mirror trying to move muscles I wasn’t even sure existed. At first nothing happened. Then, little by little, I noticed tiny shifts in my scalp. Eventually I figured out which muscles actually moved my ears.

By the end of the summer, I could do both! 

Looking back, what fascinates me isn’t that I learned two fairly useless skills. It’s that my body learned something my mind had already decided wasn’t possible.

Back then I thought I was trying to impress other teenagers.

Turns out the only person I ended up impressing was forty-something-year-old me.