Womens weekend positivity... what's a really happy memory?

Visiting Corfu in Greece! 😃 I live in a colder country so I instantly felt the heat hit me the moment I walked out of the plane... I visited this place aptly named Emerald Island and it was so, so wonderful to visit. I can't remember what beach this was but I rented some paddleboats and caught some fishes. The night life is fantastic too. I lost track of how many geckos I saw. There was a cafe on Messonghi beach and I loved jumping off of the pier there and diving into the water after eating lunch. I stayed in a place that was on the mountainside and I never needed an alarm, because the roosters would wake me up!

Such friendly people too!

Mid 2014 I rented a small villa near Varna with my partner, this was when there was all the sanctions taking effect on Russia. This was when many places producing fruit that weren't getting exported were just selling it for cheap.

It has been one of my most vivid memories, good food, coffee, hiking, swimming, with an veeeery slight ominous sense of looming dread under the surface.

I'm trans and shortly after I came out to my Mom I asked her what baby girl names she had picked out for me when she was expecting. During her pregnancy her doctors had told her she was going to have a girl, and turns out they were right! So I wanted to choose a name for myself from the options she had come up with at the time. So I got to pick a name that I loved, and she still got to name her daughter. It's one of my happiest memories!

In 2007 I started roller derby, up until that point I'd being doing figure skating on ice (badly) and didn't fit in at all because while I was pretty fucking graceful I didn't want to be all sparkly spandex. The dress code was very rigid.

At that time roller derby was very punk rock, we made our own outfits and getting bruises was a badge of honour. I fitted in well, and made good friends, we had fun, and the experience was about empowerment and having fun rather than winning.

Sometime around 2010 it started to change, there were power struggles over committee places, some teams split in two over petty crap, uniforms were professionally made so we could be "seen as real athelites" and some teams started to exploit the rules or even outright cheat in order to win.

I stopped playing, and my friend group drifted away because I'm naturally introverted ... but for that bit of time I fitted in and was truly happy.

I still have some of the kit I made myself, and lots of happy memories and photos ... sometimes I throw on a pair of quad skates and go for a roll around, and I can still do some of the graceful moves in the style of ice skating :-)