You're listening to LifeKit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Maryl.

When Whitney Bay was growing up in Illinois,

and her mom would tell her,

go outside and play.

She knew what that meant.

Played for us was going outside climbing trees.

It was making mud pies.

It was, um, we used to like,

reenact a lot of, like, current events.

Like, Olympics, the 1996 Olympics, I believe.

The 1996 Olympics were an iconic moment for young girls.

We were obsessed with Dominique Mochiano,

Dominique Dawes, Kerry Strug,

and the four other incredible gymnasts

who won gold for the US that year.

We'd set up like this little, um, bench,

and I'd run and I like jump over it like it's a vault,

and it's literally just like a sitting bench.

So just like user imagination, and it was fun.

It really felt, I mean, of course, I wasn't real,

but it just, it felt like I was somebody.

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