#DeGenderSports: Kay | It was emotionally hard coming off that river that day

The challenge I'm facing right now is I'm starting to lose so much strength, that it's really impacting my ability to paddle. That's messing with my head.

I've been a very advanced extreme paddler, who had the capacity to just go all day long. Not having that now, is really messing me up, and I actually got injured this summer because of that.

I did two runs on an easier river, and took about three hours for each one. Then I went to another really hard river in the afternoon, crashed my boat and had to buy a new kayak for about $1,600, which I didn't have.

I've got some photographs of huge bruises on my body from those crashes, and the other side is that those crashes are also huge ego-crushers -- I have this idea of who I am, and suddenly I'm thinking, "Oh, maybe I'm not as good as I always thought I was."

This is totally different from being trans. This is just like, "Wait, what happened? Why am I not doing so well? Why did it go all wrong?"

It was emotionally hard coming off that river that day. Fortunately, there's two women who were on the river with me, and they just came up and gave me a hug. It was so nice. The guys I normally paddle with are great friends, but they're not doing that. They're not coming up and giving me a hug.

So I loved that moment. I just needed that because I was just emotionally devastated after breaking the boat, getting hurt, losing my gear, doing this in front of like 30 friends, so they all saw the failure. It was hard.

That was scary because I was in an extreme environment, pushing myself to do a river that's kind of hard, that I hadn't done in a while.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued tomorrow]