OREGON FENCER’S WINNING ESSAY

Read This Oregon Fencer’s Scholarship-Winning Essay

Saber fencer Megumi Oishi won a $4,000 scholarship from Absolute Fencing. Here’s her winning essay.

Editor’s Note: Megumi Oishi started fencing in 2013. She represents PDX Fencing Club of Beaverton, Ore., and won one of four scholarships as a member of the Absolute Fencing Gear All-Academic Team. Claire Randall, co-owner of PDX Fencing, says “Her achievement of many years of dedicated practice, touched on in the article, realized her dream of getting recruited to a fencing team in a toplevel university. She was accepted at Northwestern, finished her high school with top honors, was a class valedictorian and won and medals at this year’s Summer Nationals (team women’s saber silver medal and bronze in Div 1A saber).”

Oh, god. I look hideous. I stand in front of the mirror, staring blankly at myself. It’s freshman year, and I’m painfully aware of my appearance at all times (surprise, surprise). My white sweatshirt, emblazoned with my dream college’s name on it, makes for a great top – but the white tennis skirt that I’ve kept in my closet looks awful. My legs are like tree trunks and covered with spot marks and bruises from fencing. They look short, stocky, stubby. I sigh and change out of the skirt, crumple it up and tuck it away.

The first time that I grew acutely aware of my athletic build was when I first entered high school. I was focused on getting recruited to college, and I trained every day after school and went to tournaments. I wore tank tops, skirts and shorts to school, just like everyone else.

My school friends were all very similar – tall, long-legged and generally avoided sports. They commented on how cool it was that I fenced but generally didn’t take much interest in the specifics of the sport. What they were interested in was how my body looked.

They began to comment on how “stocky” and “short” my legs were, marveled at how “manly” my shoulders looked in tank tops and laughed at how my legs were two different sizes. At first, I paid no mind to their comments, but the frequency at which they came at me started to bother me, eventually eating away at my self-confidence. Hence, the tennis skirt – they got a kick out of that one, too, and even threw in a nice gag about how my legs turned out like a man when I walked. The revelation hit me like a bus in junior year biology class. I sat, half-listening to the teacher’s evolution lecture over Zoom, when something she said caught my attention. “These animals,” she explained, “have bodies whose structures fit their function. See this cat in the diagram here? His leg bones are designed to absorb shock so that he can live the life that he is meant to live.”

There it was. Structure fits function!

Since that biology class, I have internalized the fact that my body will always be different from others because of the function that I have assigned to it.

My “thunder thighs” have transformed into strong, powerful legs that are pushing me towards my goals of being a collegiate athlete, which I was able to achieve.

My “manly” arms allow me to hit my opponents faster than ever before. Also, it occurred to me that it was strange that I wasn’t afraid to hit people with swords but terrified of wearing skirts, so that has been fixed, too. Never in my life would I have guessed that biology class would boost my body image, but structure fits function – I may have bigger arms and thighs than everyone, but then again, not everyone can sword fight.