How Is Alysa Liu So Happy Under Olympic Pressure?

The Season of “Giving Something Up”

Every Saturday morning, a Brady Bunch grid of faces pops up on my laptop for our women’s Zoom recovery meeting—a mix of recovery, emotional growth, and “tell the truth about your life” space. I pick a theme, throw three questions onto a virtual backdrop, and we spend an hour telling the truth about our lives.

This week, the calendar handed me an easy theme: Lent.

If you grew up Catholic, you know the drill. We “give something up.” Chocolate. Cookies. Online shopping. The late‑night snacking that mysteriously shrinks our jeans. Somewhere between the ashes on Wednesday and the lilies at Easter, we hope to emerge both holier and a half‑size smaller.

I wish I could say I’m above that. I am not. I have absolutely chosen my Lenten “sacrifice” with one eye on the scale and one eye on the cross.

So I framed our meeting with a familiar kind of question:

What am I ready to release this season?

I thought we’d talk about sugar, online shopping, and screen time.

We didn’t.

Within minutes, the room turned.We weren’t talking about releasing behaviors anymore.We were talking about releasing narratives.

From Habits to Stories

Instead of, “I should stop eating this,” or, “I should scroll less,” the questions got sharper, closer to the bone:

• What story am I living under?

• What pressure does that story create in my body?

• Who would I be without it?

  
  

Someone mentioned a skater. Then another. Then my chat filled with the same two words:

Alysa Liu.

I may not be able to tell a triple from a quadruple without Johnny Weir whispering in my ear, but this young woman—this new Olympic gold medalist—has been everywhere the past week, and I understand why.

Yes, she won. Yes, she landed the jumps. But that’s not what caught me.

It was her face.

Watching Alysa Liu Walk Free

When the cameras followed Alysa down the hallway toward the ice, she did not look like someone headed to her execution. She looked like someone on the way to the best party of her life. Loose shoulders. Easy smile. Hips moving like music lived inside her.

On the ice, her joy was almost disorienting. She attacked the hardest elements with this light, playful energy—as if failure were an option, but not a threat to her worth. Afterward, she talked about sharing her story and her art, how even messing up is still “a story,” and how that makes her feel like there’s “no way to lose.”

Meanwhile, many of the other skaters—brilliant, disciplined, heartbreakingly talented—wore the expression I’ve always associated with high stakes: tight jaw, blank mask, eyes locked straight ahead. The body language of people quietly bracing for impact.​

I’m not criticizing them. For most of my life, I believed that was the cost of excellence — grit your teeth, suffer, push, get there. You certainly don’t look like you’re having fun.

I see the same expression on the joggers I pass on the side of the road while I drive to Pilates—yes, I see the irony. Determined, focused, very committed to the plan. Not exactly radiating, “I’m thrilled to be alive right now.”

I used to think that was just how serious people lived.

Until her.

Because what I saw in Alysa Liu was not just talent.It was freedom.

The absence of a particular kind of inner violence — the voice that hisses, don’t mess this up, don’t fail, don’t be human. She skated as if that voice had lost its power over her, and the joy that poured through the screen was what happens when you no longer believe your life is hanging on a single performance.

That “I am not being held hostage by my own head” energy. The kind of freedom that looks ordinary from the outside and revolutionary from the inside.

And sitting there, I realized: that is what recovery has been about for me.

Not just putting down the drink. Not just “better coping skills.”

Learning how to live without that inner guillotine.

The Prison I Called My Mind

People often ask, “What happened? How did you become an alcoholic?” I can point to a moment.

Twenty years ago, in what was supposed to be a place of healing, a therapist crossed a line so profoundly that my life derailed. I was in more pain than I knew what to do with, and I reached for the easiest relief I could find: a bottle. What followed was a long, messy descent—one that didn’t stop until six years ago, when I finally crawled into recovery.

For a long time, that was my story. The trauma. The derailment. The drinking.

All of it is true. But it’s not the whole truth.

If I’m being honest—honest, open, willing—the “ism” in my alcoholism started long before the wine ever hit my bloodstream. Long before that therapist. Long before anyone could slap the word addiction onto my life.

In my teens and young adulthood, I lived with chronic depression and anxiety so woven into my days that I thought they were simply my personality. I had sleep disturbances that robbed me of rest for years. I woke up tired and went to bed wired.​

On the outside, I looked fine: functional, competent, “together.” On the inside, I was living in a cell built from stories I didn’t know I was telling myself:

Something is wrong with me.I have to fix it.I am too much.I am not enough.If people see the real me, they will leave.

Those weren’t sentences I said out loud; they were the atmosphere I breathed. And like most atmospheres, you don’t notice them until you leave.

So when I say I recovered, I don’t just mean from alcohol.

I recovered from the prison I called my mind.

It took time. It took help. It took a spiritual program that talks about emotional sobriety—the ability to live with our feelings instead of being ruled by them—and a lot of patience for myself when my brain insisted on old stories.

Two years into sobriety, my depression began to lift. The anxiety eased. I started to sleep. Slowly, the prison bars came into view—and once I could see them, I could finally start to walk toward the door.​

From “How Did You Get Sober?” to “How Are You Okay?”

The questions people ask me now are different than they were in my first shaky year.

Back then, everyone wanted the drinking story. How bad did it get? What was your rock bottom?

What made you stop?

Now, six years in, the questions sound more like:

How are you staying sane with Barry’s stage four diagnosis?How are you sleeping?How are you not spinning out right now?

They’re not really asking about alcohol anymore. They’re noticing something quieter and more radical: that I am able to feel real fear, real grief, and still remain present. That I don’t bolt from my own life when it gets hard.​

To be clear: I still feel it. The nights are still long sometimes. The unknown is still enormous. I am not some enlightened robot who floats through oncology appointments on a cloud.

But I am no longer living under the same story. I no longer believe that my emotions are proof that something is fundamentally wrong with me. I no longer treat my own nervous system as an enemy to be conquered.

That shift—the move from “emotion is the problem” to “the story around emotion is the problem”—is what I saw reflected in Alysa Liu’s face.

Not the details of our lives. The energy.

That “I am not being held hostage by my own head” energy.

The Stories We Fast From

Back to Lent.

In the Catholic tradition, fasting is meant to open space for deeper union with God, not just to make us suffer for forty days. Over time, the Church has expanded the idea from food to include habits and patterns that keep us numb or distracted.

Sitting in that Saturday meeting, watching women nod as we talked about Alysa, I realized: what if this year’s fast isn’t about giving up chocolate, but about stepping away from the stories that keep us locked in our heads?

Stories like:

• I am only as valuable as my performance.

• If I don’t hold it all together, everything will fall apart.

• Other people are allowed to have needs; I am allowed to have responsibilities.

• My feelings are dangerous.

This is the internal story that shapes how we see ourselves and the world. When that story is harsh, rigid, or shame‑based, it acts like a prison. It tells us where we’re allowed to go, how big we’re allowed to be, and what happens if we step out of line.

Most of us never question it. We just live inside it.

Most people don’t see the bars.Some see them and assume the door is locked.I lived most of my life that way.

Until recovery. Until I started telling the truth in rooms where other people told theirs. Until I watched women rewrite stories in real time and realized: oh. The door isn’t locked. I can walk out.

The RETURN Way™: Walking Out, One Story at a Time

At a certain point, I realized I needed a map.

I had stumbled my way from “My mind is trying to kill me” to “My mind is scared, and I can be kind to it,” but I couldn’t keep relying on luck and emergency insight. I wanted something I could return to on purpose—especially when I was triggered, exhausted, or afraid.

So I did what any writer in recovery would do: I wrote it down.

I called it The RETURN Way™.

Not because I needed a brand. Because that’s what it actually felt like: returning. Returning to myself. To reality. To a God of my understanding. To a life that wasn’t narrated by fear.

RETURN (Reveal, Explore, Trace, Rewrite and Nurture) is my step‑by‑step way of:

• Seeing the story I’m currently believing.

• Honoring what it has been trying to protect.

• Choosing a truer way to live—especially when my nervous system is screaming.

It is not about “thinking positive” or slapping affirmations over a gaping wound. If anything, it’s the opposite. It asks us to tell the truth about the story we’re in, grieve what it cost us, and then, gently, choose a different ending.

I spent decades trying to manage my emotions like they were the enemy. Recovery taught me they weren’t. The problem wasn’t that I felt too much. The problem was that I obeyed every terrified thought my mind offered me.

RETURN is how I learned to stop obeying those thoughts—and how I keep practicing that, day after day.

Three Questions for Your Own “Fast”

If you want a different kind of Lenten practice this year, you don’t have to start with a big ritual. You can start with three honest questions and a little bit of courage.

Here’s what I’m asking myself this week:

1. What story about myself am I tired of obeying?

2. How is that story trying to protect me—and what is it quietly costing me?

3. If I believed the door of this cell wasn’t locked, what is one tiny act of freedom I could take today?

Maybe it’s resting before you’ve “earned” it.Maybe it’s telling the truth to one safe person.Maybe it’s letting yourself enjoy something you’re good at without immediately listing everything you did wrong.

Whatever it is, that tiny act is a way of skating—however wobbly—on the ice of your own life with a little more freedom.

You don’t have to win Olympic gold to walk out of your mind’s prison.

You only have to notice the bars, reach for the handle, and discover the door was never locked.❤️