Photo credit: Tyler Duncan
Name: Raison D’êtremental
Number: 1984
Travel Team: Brawlers
Home Team: Moonshine Moxies
Years skating: 1
This season, HKRD has made a splash in the TikTok world, and it’s all thanks to Raison D’êtremental, affectionately known as Mental. Get to all about her in this month’s skater article!
You were nominated by Roller Bear, who wants to know how you were able to come back to roller derby after being hurt early on and never giving up.
Oh, that’s a good question. There are a few things in my life like this, where it’s required quite a bit of bounceback, and I’ve had this question in different capacities. I honestly just feel like—and I say this as a joke, but I mean it seriously too—you have to be a little bit dumb. You have to be just a little bit willing to just turn off that part of yourself that’s like, “But what if?” Because I’m from a very long and strong and proud line of worriers, and I kind of just learned in my early 20s through some rough experiences that living in the moment was going to be my struggle, but also going to be really important to me.
I’ve only been skating a year, but it quickly became so important to me. It’s really kind of the first thing that I’ve done, because I have a 15 year old, and an almost 12 year old, and a 9 year old, and so, this is the first thing that I’ve done that was for me, and so it just felt really important to me to get back and try again and not let the fear win. So as far as coming back to roller derby and back to this big team: with such a great dynamic, which has been such a huge part of that too, I don’t think I could have bounced back the same way without the team being there and being welcomed. All of that to say, team stuff and trying to be just in the moment and following passions and being a little bit dumb.
How did you first learn about Hard Knox?
My husband’s always said that I would be good at roller derby. He would be at Tyson [Park] with Chicks in Bowls in between the seasons, and he would always strike up conversations with them, and be like, “Oh, I bet my wife would be so good at this.” And I was just like, yeah, sure, but I don’t roller skate so I couldn’t be good at it. So tangentially I always knew about it, but once I bought roller skates I fell completely in love with it. I found all the socials and on instagram saw that they were having a meeting in the summer. Once the roller skating love happened, I was like, “I wanna try this.” I don’t know if I would have been brave enough without Jessica, who was in town for the first meeting and I was not (I was in Hawaii). I had convinced her to buy roller skates too a couple of months before. I was like, “They’re having a meeting, will you go for me and tell me what they say?” Which is so like, it worked out very well for me, because I’m a tiny bit of a coward.
You said you didn’t have much skating experience. Does your husband skate?
So my husband and I, we are too old to be doing what we’re doing. He just turned in his PhD dissertation this weekend, so he had another career in real estate for like a decade. He was doing this real estate thing, and he got his dream job in real estate. We moved to Portland, Oregon, we moved to downtown Portland and were doing all the stuff, and then he hated it! And he was in so the wrong place, and we kind of reached this crossroads where it was like, “Okay, I can keep doing this and banging my head against this wall, or we can just take a flying leap this other direction.” So that’s what we did.
He went back to school, finished his bachelor’s in a year, taking like 24 credits a semester. He came here and did his master’s/PhD program. We had never stepped foot in the state of Tennessee before we moved here. So right before we moved from Idaho where he’d finished school (that’s where we were residents, he could finish it cheaply since he’d already started it), he was walking through a mall and saw an old like 80s style skateboard in a window of the brand new skateboard shop in the mall and was like, “Oh, I have to buy that.” He bought it that day, we did not have money to buy that. So that’s the thing that kept him sane during all that bachelor’s degree and master’s program and grad school. And I made fun of him! I was very supportive, I made sure he had time, I helped him get to the skatepark and stuff, but I made fun of him so hard in his Peter Pan, never gonna grow up time.
There’s an affectionate making fun of!
It was affectionate! He knows that. I mean, like he would go out of town, and I would take pictures of me in bed with the skateboard like, “It’s fine, I’m fine, I have the best part of you.” And it was just such a weird thing—he actually broke his right ankle two years before I did. But yeah, made fun of him constantly. Cut to a year ago, last month, I had a friend on twitter, somebody I’d never met before but we were in a mutual fandom. She posted a picture of these really cute Impala skates and was like, “I just bought these for me, wish me luck, godspeed, I’m gonna break my back!” And I felt like, those are so cute, and I’d seen roller skates before, but I bought some that day. They were a different design but some Impalas that day, and I bought all the gear and I was like, “I’m gonna be a roller skater, I’m gonna figure this out.” I was 36.
So the same dumb thing happened to me five years later that happened to my husband, and he doesn’t make fun of me, and I’m like, “You’re missing an opportunity” because I ruthlessly made fun of him! He has to be saving it, and he deserves to make fun of me very much. But yeah, it was literally just love at first sight. It was a lightning bolt kind of moment.
So you didn’t know what you were getting into. What was kind of the moment when you realized: okay, this is definitely something I want to stick with?
Honestly, the big decision moment came when I broke my ankle and had surgery. I’d never broken a bone before, I had never had a non C section surgery before. It was scary, but the scariest thought was that I wouldn’t be able to come back to it. That was the scariest thought, and that’s when I was like, “Oh, okay, this is not just some weird thing I’m doing to be outside more, to try to lose five pounds.” I felt like I spent a lot of my life doing that kind of thing, and this was something that was different. Also though, I have no chill. I love things too hard, I’m too earnest. The kids would call me “cringe,” like I’m so cringy. If I’m doing something, I’m doing it.
You’re a Leslie Knope!
That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me! I’ll take that. I’m a Leslie Knope. I’m an absolute nerd, yeah. The Tom Haverfords of the world scoff, but I’m over here like, I have to do this thing.
You have now skated in several bouts. What were those like for you? Did you have any expectations before?
I knew I would be nervous, but I tried not to think about it, not to worry about it too much I guess, and just stay in the moment. And then I have the worst, I mean, before the first scrimmage, I was like, I feel like I tried so hard to stay in the moment, but I get this crazy tunnel vision. It started that way in scrimmages, and it’s kind of gotten widened and better where I can think and feel like I’m myself instead of this oof. It was really bad in the first bout. I barely remember any of it, and I haven’t been able to watch that first bout because I feel like, not only was it a bloodbath, but I was really out of it.
I feel like it’s getting better, so the second bout, I remember a tiny more, I was much less nervous the second one. So I’m hoping, I’m really looking forward to the home bouts, to the home teams, I’ll know who I’m playing, that’s gotta make a difference. It will feel more like a scrimmage. I mean, higher pressure obviously, but I’m really looking forward to that because I need this tunnel vision to widen out because I love playing so much, but I don’t the feeling of being like, the jamnesia, what just happened, who started, where am I, what do I do? That’s gotta go away.
Photo credit: Derby Pics by Phil
And it will, in time.
That’s what everyone says, and I’m like, I’m trusting that because if it doesn’t…
I mean, I’ve even noticed like in practice, you’re much better at seeing the O [offense] and taking the O, and even if the other team is going against you, you’re seeing it and trying to do something with it.
I feel like the scrimmages are a little bit better, and I’m a little bit more able to stay in my head, but something just happens where it gets down to that pinpoint again. I know in that first bout I just pushed, you know? I could have taken, and then the second that last whistle blew, I was like, oh, take a breath, take one step back, look around, but it was like ugh. I don’t mean to be, but I’m so intense. I’ve always been that way about sports, like fouled out of every church basketball game. I’m not mean, I’ve never gotten in a fistfight, but I love sports, and I’m just too intense.
What made you want to be a jammer?
TAMI with an “Eye” Photography
Kilty told me to. I just remember this practice in December. I think again the dumbness comes into play. It was the practice or two practices before we broke for Christmas, and we were all sitting in the circle, and there weren’t that many of us at this practice, and I don’t even remember the conversation, but Kilty was like, “You’ll jam, you’ll block, you’ll block, you’ll jam, you’ll do both,” and he pointed at me and said, “You’ll jam,” and I was like, okay. It was never about being in drills like, I’m gonna do this! It was just, “Yes, sir.”
Yeah, Kilty told me to. Kilty made me do it. That’s a good reason, right?
I think so! Trusting our coaches.
Yeah, because I’ve never played before and I don’t know, I don’t have a good grip on my own skills until I hear it from somebody else. Maybe it’s that jamnesia thing again. But yeah, you don’t really know, you need the team, and you need to hype each other up and tell each other, “Try this!” or “You’re really good at this!” and I need all of that.
And it’s going a little better. I got those points in scrimmage last week, and called it off, and was like, “I did something!” There’s been so many times where the whistle’s blown, and I’ve been like, oh no, I should have done it like this.
Tell me about your name and your number. How did you come to either of those?
My number is the year I was born, 1984. I just wanted it to be simple.
But my name: my husband teaches French at UT, that’s what he’s doing his PhD in, and we have really good friends in France, we’ve been there a lot. I’ve been working on my fluency since, I’ve been obsessed with France since I was in elementary school. I checked out the same Your First 1000 Words in French picture book—I remember having to go to the library and being like, “Can you recheck this out? Again, again.” So yeah, that’s how I met my husband. He had just come back from living in France, so we bonded over that and I’d never even been at that point.
So anyway, I liked wordplay, portmanteaus, alter meanings that are very punny. So we were just brainstorming one day, and I was like, what am I into? Tacos, France, I don’t know. So we brainstormed that. Raison d’être is your reason for being, and detrimental is to cause harm, so I thought that would be good. I’ve had to explain it a hundred times, and I always feel like apologizing when I do. The nickname “mental” works too because I feel like, and I know everybody feels this way too, but I feel like getting out of my head is the biggest hurdle with all of this, or getting into my head in the right way, both of those things.
You are in charge of our TikToks, and you do a great job with it. How did you stumble into that role?
Kilty told me to do it.
A theme of today!
I love Beyoncé, and there was that “Drop It” challenge going around TikTok, and I was like, this would be so fun to do on skates, I need the whole team to do it, I need it to happen. So I posted it to my Instagram, like I need everyone to get on board, I really want to watch you all squat on skates. So then I think at the next board meeting they floated the idea of starting a TikTok, and someone was like get Mental to do it, and when Kilty told me, I said, “okay Kilty.”
Slam’s always like, “I don’t know how you do it!” And I’m like, I don’t know how you do the Facebook and Instagram part because I feel like that takes much more thought and intention, like she writes these thoughtful things. I just yeet stuff on TikTok and it doesn’t matter, and I’ll do another one the next day, and it’s just for fun. I really enjoy doing it.
I think you really show off the playful side of our team, like we get to look fun in all these creative ways and just be a team.
Yeah! And that feels important to me because, how lucky I feel that our team has such a good dynamic. I hope everyone feels that way. I hope everybody comes to practice and feels comfortable and feels that camaraderie and stuff. I really don’t do things by halves, so I’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve known you for two weeks and I love you so much, I love you all, I trust you with my life, welcome!”
So how do you spend your time outside of roller derby?
I homeschool my three kids. I’ve got the best kids in the world, they’re seriously really cool people. They’ve got some learning disabilities, kids with dyslexia, ADD, ADHD. We started homeschooling the year after we moved to Tennessee, so six years ago. I homeschool my kids, and we do a lot of stuff together. We all go out and skate. My middle child roller skates. They all used to ice skate, so they’re all great on wheels too.
We have a dog named Ben and he’s 100 pounds of derp, and I love him. We adopted him from Young Williams during the pandemic, and it was very much like, the kids had been talking about it for a long time, and we were like, “No, we’re not dog people,” and then all of a sudden, we had a dog. It was like a blackout and then we have a dog, and we love him, we’re all just very attached to this dog.
I really like to cook and bake. My husband got three summer jobs the last two years, so I hadn’t gotten to do it last year and I’m not doing it this year, but I’ve entered a bunch of baking competitions and have done a lot of cooking classes and things. I really like to do that, and so I started this kids cooking camp where for a week and a time, kids would come in the summer and we would just spend all day cooking and eating the things we made, and it was super super fun, and it took both me and my husband because he would manage all of the back end of everything. I miss doing that, I really enjoy cooking, baking, and working with kids. I teach my kids at their coop, I teach cooking and English because that’s what my degree is in, English literature. I read way too much. I think I read 150 books last year, which is too many books. So my goal is actually to scale back to 100 this year, and I think I’m six ahead of schedule.
What has roller derby taught you about yourself?
Roller derby has taught me, or reminded me, that I’m worth taking up space. I really struggle with this, the idea of taking up space. I don’t want to step on toes, I’m a recovering people pleaser, and by “recovering,” I mean, sometimes I think about it and I try to stop, and then, “No, I’ll just keep going.” So yeah, roller derby reminds me that I’m really worth investing into myself and that I’m tougher than I think I am and that I am maybe more passionate than I thought I was, which is maybe not the best move, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the pandemic, or all of the homeschooling and all of the moving around and stuff, but things have been hard, and it’s been great. It’s been a way for my family, we’re very close, we’re very insular, we’ve had to move a bunch. But this has reminded me that there’s so much more, that I really love doing things in this community, I really love being part of a team and group, and that it’s safe and good to expand our own little bubble.
Who would you like to nominate for next month, and what do you want to ask them?
I want to nominate Business, and I want to know what brought you back to roller derby.
Thank you for a great conversation, Mental! If you haven’t seen any of the TikToks mentioned, make sure you follow Hard Knox on all of our social media so you can get in on the fun! Until next time, be like Mental and be willing to be just a little bit dumb (affectionate).
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