Success is rarely as wonderful as reported:
Debi Thomas, the best African-American figure skater in history, couldn't find her figure skates. She looked around the darkened trailer, perched along a river in a town so broke even the bars have closed, and sighed. The mobile home where she lives with her fiance and his two young boys was cluttered with dishes, stacks of documents, a Christmas tree still standing weeks past the holiday.
"They're around here somewhere," she murmured three times. "I know I have a pair," she continued, before trailing off.
"Because — what did I skate in? — something. They're really tight, though, because your feet grow after you don't wear them for a long time." Her medals — from the World Figure Skating Championships, from the Olympics — were equally elusive: "They're in some bag somewhere."
Uncertainty is not a feeling Debi Thomas has often experienced in her 48 years. She was once so confident that she simultaneously studied at Stanford University and trained for the Olympics, against the advice of her coach. She was once so lauded for her lithe beauty on the ice that Time magazine put her on its cover and ABC's Wide World of Sports named her athlete of the year in 1986. She wasn't just the nation's best figure skater. She was smart — able to win a competition, stay up all night cramming, then ace a test the next morning.
She wanted it all. And for a time, she had it. After Stanford came medical school at Northwestern, then marriage to a handsome lawyer who gave her a son — who in turn became one of the country's best high school football players. Higher and higher she went.
Now, she's here. Thomas, a former orthopedic surgeon who doesn't have health insurance, declared bankruptcy in 2014 and hasn't brought in a steady paycheck in years. She's twice divorced, and her medical license, which she was in danger of losing anyhow, expired around the time she went broke. She hasn't seen her family in years. She instead inveighs against shadowy authorities in the nomenclature of conspiracy theorists — "the powers that be"; "corporate media"; "brainwashing" — and composes opinion pieces for the local newspaper that carry headlines such as "Pain, No Gain" and "Driven to Insanity."
There's a conventional narrative of how Thomas went from where she was to where she is — that of a talented figure undone by internal struggles and left penniless. That was how reality TV told it, when the Oprah Winfrey Network's Fix My Life and Inside Edition did pieces on her.
"She's got all these degrees," fiance Jamie Looney said as he watched television with Thomas inside the trailer. "She's a doctor. She's a surgeon. And she's here. I've got one year of community college. I know why I'm here. I look at her, wondering, 'Why are you not working somewhere else?' "
Such comments upset Thomas. "People are all like, 'Get a job,' " she said. "And I'm like, 'You people are fools.' I'm trying to change the world."
A woman's primary purpose is to be a helpmeet to her husband and the mother of children. Unfortunately, neither of those qualities are praised by the mainstream like "being a SCIENTIST" or "an ENTREPRENEUR" or, best of all a "HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST."
Often a woman will find great success at something non-marriage/non-making-babies related, then crash and burn when they find that success wasn't nearly as satisfying as advertised.
Remember, without women having children, the human race will literally cease to exist. In comparison with that, being the first female ASTRONAUTBALLERINALAWYERINNERCITYHANDBALLTHERAPYORGANIZER means little.
~ archived since 2018 ~
