“That’s what I am fucking talking about!” Alysa Liu yelled into the camera, with a smile that reminded me of Truman’s from The Truman Show, a kind that is invincible.
She had just completed her free skate program at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, the program that won her the gold medal. I watched it in its entirety, and couldn’t help but notice the overflowing joyfulness to her skating, the dance of a sunflower fairy.
It hadn’t always been like this.
The story started with a prodigy kid born-and-raised in California, put on the ice by her immigrant father. At 14, she was beating adults, winning back-to-back national championships. At 16, she was already representing the US at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
It seemed like the perfect trajectory for any wonder-kid athlete, except two months later, she retired. Skating had consumed her entire life. And she needed to find herself outside of skating.
“I couldn’t know myself if I only ever did one thing,” she said. She threw her skates into the closet. For the first time in her life, she finally lived a normal teenager’s life, picking up hobbies, going to college, connecting with friends and family and, for the first time, she wasn’t skating.
In that emptiness, she grew into herself, and came back with a smiley piercing and halo rings bleached into her hair because “you know how trees have rings for their age? I thought, every year I’m gonna add a new halo around my hair.” She found herself to be a creative person who loved fashion and choreography and music, and the artistic self-expression coupled with storytelling. With the courage to throw away skating, which was all she had, she tore everything down to build her life back up the right way. In the end, she found herself wanting to skate again.
The thing she was searching for was there all along, hidden under all the accumulation that was never hers.
So 18 months after she retired, she came back. This time, she was going to do it all on her own terms. She would pick her own music, design her own program, decide on the outfits. She would skate when she wanted to, and nobody was going to tell her what to do. Skating went from something that was more of her father’s project to something entirely hers. The medium through which she expressed herself. Her art. Her self-expression.
And you can really tell the difference with her skating. At 16-years-old, she was a shell, skating for everyone and everything around her. Her strides were tense and controlled. Her jumps looked heavy, her movement stagnant, noticeably choreographed and memorized through repeated practice. Alysa had skated to fulfill expectations and goals set by someone else.
In the time away, she learned to be free. In Alysa’s own words, “I connect with everything but I’m not attached to anything.” Here, Alysa embodied the Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment. Most people think non-attachment means not caring. Detachment. Numbness. The stoic who feels nothing. But what she was saying was the exact opposite. She connects with everything. She feels it all. She is fully in the music, fully in the performance, and fully with the crowd. She isn’t clinging to anything. The moment happens; she experiences it, and then she lets it go.
And that is probably the biggest difference between her and her younger self. Previously, she was attached to scores, to expectations, to her bargain with her father and the skating community. Attachment was what made skating suffocating, the inability to let any of it just be without it meaning something about her worth. That which deprived her of joy.
Another quote from comeback Alysa completes the picture. “What I like to share about myself is my story, my art and my creative process. Messing up doesn’t take away from that. It is still something, it’s still a story. A bad story is still a story, and I think that’s beautiful. There’s no way to lose.” Now, she skates to tell her story, and that story is already complete the moment she steps on the ice. The story that she was there, on the ice, expressing something.
When your sole purpose is to be, there really is no way to lose.
The joyful non-attachment carried through unshakably into every part of her program. She could not stop smiling. Watching her somehow reminded me of what John Green once said, that hope is the right response to the human condition [1].
An addition to the quote would be that hope and joy are the right responses to the human condition. Strip away everything until joy is the only thing left. Joy in finding yourself after tearing it all down and leaving everything behind. Joy in immersing yourself completely in your art and in the moment. Joy in expressing yourself in the freest way possible. Joy wins precisely because it isn’t trying to win. When you do life on your own terms and find joy from within doing what you love, that joy radiates outwards.
Contagious, unfettered, pure joy. Joy that connects. Joy that expresses. Joy that wins.
How lucky are we to witness the beautiful blessed moments of someone’s euphoria.
Notes
[1] Full quote from John Green from his 2025 interview with NPR
I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition.
And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on an almost daily basis.
So much of my brain tells me that there’s no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters. People are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world.
And that despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story. It explains everything. Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks. What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world.
It just happens to not be true.
And so I have to remind myself of that almost every day. I have to relearn that lesson that there is cause for hope. I keep in my wallet a little note that says, “The year you graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of 5. Last year, fewer than 5 million did.”
And I keep that because I want to remind myself that this is the truth, an inalienable truth, that we can make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. And so there is cause for hope. There is always reason for hope because we have this incredible capacity to collaborate together, to make the world better together.