1. This is not a hobby.

Roller derby is not like a kickball league you join with your coworkers on a lark one summer. Roller derby is a way of life. You go to practice three or more nights a week, and on the nights that you’re not practicing, you’re cross-training, hitting an open skate, devouring derby blogs and videos or talking about derby with your teammates. “I can’t, I have derby” becomes an excuse you’re sick of repeating and your friends and family are sick of hearing. You start to drive like you skate. You start dating an announcer/referee/coach/fellow skater and discover how nice it is to be with someone who gets it. You leave your team’s schedule cards with your tips at restaurants and demand to know why random strangers haven’t been to a game yet. You can’t understand why everyone isn’t as into this as you are.

2. More people will know you by your derby name than your real name.

Your teammates become your new best friends, and if you’ve given yourself an alias, most of them won’t know your real name until they find you on Facebook. Even then, they still call you by your derby name, even if you happen to work with them and they address you in a meeting filled with a bunch of non-derby people. You create a new email address with your derby name that you can use for derby-related matters, record a new voice mail message explaining that you’re otherwise known as [insert derby name here] and create a Facebook fan page in the hopes that people other than your mom will “like” you. And whether you like it or not, your teammates shorten your name so it’s easier to yell during practice or in an airport when your team is traveling to an away game. (Pro tip: Never yell “Bomb!” in an airport.)

3. You do not have enough drawers or closet space.

You spend more money on things you can wear to practices and games than things you can wear to work. Your drawers start to overflow with leggings, booty shorts, T-shirts from that tournament in Fort Wayne, jerseys with your team’s terrible old logo and countless athletic socks, only half of which have mates. You break down and invest in a derby dresser. Your laundry room is perpetually strewn with pads and sports bras that never seem to dry completely. Ill-fitting old skates and sticker-covered helmets remain parked in your hall closet because what if some rookie or junior skater needs them someday? You start reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and decide that yes, dammit, all of this stuff does bring you joy.

4. You will be photographed more than any other time in your life, except maybe childhood.

You start getting rostered for games and are so focused on the action that you hardly notice the ninja-like photographers who quietly stake out spots in the center of the track or crouch on the outside with giant zoom lenses. After each game, you find links on Flickr and Facebook and anxiously start swiping through them to see whether they caught your sweet apex jump, face plant or both. You cringe when you see that you’re standing straight up in the pack in one shot and that your eyes are closed in another. You finally find what will be your new Facebook profile photo (until the next game). You upload your favorite photos to Facebook and get 50 notifications when your mom likes every single one.

Originally published at Suzie B. Catastrophe’s blog. Scald Eagle photo by John Wijsman.

Unless you’re somebody like Scald Eagle (above), you will probably never look as badass as you think you did in that moment. It doesn’t matter. Thank your photographers and credit them. Download all the photos and print out your favorites (with their permission). They are priceless proof that you did this thing.

5. You have friends everywhere.

You take all your gear with you on business trips and vacations in case Water City Roller Derby has a practice you can crash, and then you Instagram a selfie with the new members of your extended derby family. You go to your boyfriend’s cousin’s wedding, sit at a table with her friends from college and discover that one of them plays roller derby in Duluth. Your neighbor from 10 years ago randomly messages you for advice on gear for her niece who wants to join a junior team in Denver. You realize that you are a part of something much, much bigger than yourself.

6. You will get tired of explaining the same things over and over.

Yes, we have a team here. No, it’s not like in the ’70s with the elbowing and the fighting. Yes, there are rules. No, there’s no ball. No, I’m not afraid that I’ll get hurt, although I realize that I might. No, we don’t get paid. Yes, we pay to play. Why yes, I am, in fact, a badass. Thanks!

7. It will scar you for life.

Your skin becomes sprinkled with bruises, wheel imprints and Velcro burns from somebody else’s pads. You often don’t notice until you’re in the shower or until a stranger gives you a look of concern and you hastily explain. Your big toenail turns black and eventually falls off. At least one part of your body hurts all the time. After you fall on your finger at practice and it swells up and turns purple, a teammate convinces you to go to urgent care, where you are annoyed to discover that it’s broken. You immediately message your head ref to make sure you can still play with a splint. Your travel team wins a tournament in Florida and your teammates convince you to help celebrate by getting your team’s initials tattooed on the inside of your lower lip, gang-style. You forget about it until you go to dentist and the hygienist says, “What is that?” You start a Pinterest board of derby-inspired tattoos and start saving up for a sleeve.

8. This is still a young sport. Painfully young.

You study up on derby by watching Rollergirls and Whip It and realize that nobody is skating in short skirts and fishnets anymore. You tune into a tournament livestream and see some team from Europe executing some crazy new rules-bending strategy. You head over to Twitter to check #talk2wftda and join a passionate debate about whether they’re going to ruin the sport. You stumble upon a video of your team from seven years ago and find it totally unwatchable. Somebody posts a blog proposing a radical rule change, you leave a comment and then you spend the next several days refreshing the post to see if anybody commented on your comment. The rule change actually happens, everybody freaks out and then everybody calms down. A few years later, you have trouble remembering exactly what all the fuss was about.

9. Anybody can be a part of this.

You go to your first practice and are surprised by the the wide range of ages, body types and backgrounds. You watch in awe when a tiny blocker takes out someone literally twice her size, and when a tall, stocky jammer pirouettes through the pack untouched. You discover that there are not only hundreds of women’s teams, but also men’s teams, junior teams, coed teams and all-gender teams worldwide. You find out that behind each of those teams, there are volunteer crews of people who are tracking stats, refereeing, announcing and photographing it all. You wonder how you got so lucky.

10. This is not going away.

If you’re new to derby or if you quit years ago, you might not be convinced of this yet. But I am.

At Cincinnati Junior Rollergirls practices, I see 10-year-olds nailing moves and strategies in the span of a few practices that took my teammates and me months to master. I realize that nobody grew up playing this sport until this generation of kids, and that they will make it better than anyone can currently comprehend. They are part of a revolution and they don’t even know it.

Their parents drive hours to a skating rink in a small town in small-town Indiana at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning so their kids can skate in circles and hit each other. Other parents sign up to become referees and non-skating officials themselves, volunteering for such glamorous jobs as keeping time in the penalty box. This isn’t going away. These families won’t let it.

A high school-aged skater once told me how derby helps her manage her anger issues that sometimes land her into trouble at school. “I need this,” she said.

I totally get it. For different reasons, so did I.

Now, I want something else out of all of this. I want these girls to learn that they have the strength to knock each other down and the grace to help each other back up again.

And someday, I want to read their stories too.