The Lessons I Only Learned By Getting Burned

My auntie was our dance teacher growing up. She had a real background in dance, Polynesian dance especially, and for years that meant everything but fire. No flame at all until I was twelve.

At twelve she flew in a trainer from the islands just to start working with me. That's when it got serious. Not a hobby anymore, a discipline somebody was investing real money and real distance into.

I trained with no fire from twelve to fifteen. My mom's rule was I had to wait until sixteen before I lit anything up for the first time. I don't think I listened. I was fifteen.

I broke the rule because waiting felt unbearable, not because I thought I knew better than my mom. Most fifteen year olds don't actually think that. They just want the thing now, and a year felt like forever.

It's very controlled now. Safe, deliberate, a genuinely safe use of fire. It wasn't always like that. When I was younger I was kind of crazy with it. I've come up through all the burns, all the lessons, all the things I couldn't have learned any other way except the hard way.

Nobody hands you the version of fire discipline you eventually earn. You get burned first, more than once, no matter how good your trainer is or how many hours you drilled without a flame. Everything before that is just theory.

I don't recommend it, breaking a mother's rule a year early because you can't stand the waiting anymore. I also can't pretend it didn't teach me something the waiting never would have. There's a version of learning that only shows up after something has already gone wrong on your skin.

Twenty six years later I run a controlled, safe operation. I still think about the fifteen year old who couldn't wait one more year. Some of what he learned that way, I never could have taught him. He had to go find out himself.