MARIYAH GERBER: BEYOND THE ICE

From competitive figure skating and Disney on Ice to motherhood, advocacy and a new vision for television, Mariyah Gerber is learning that the most powerful dreams are sometimes the ones we allow to evolve.

Words By Angel Neal | Disrupshion Magazine

Photo credit: Amanda Riley Photo

For most of her childhood, Mariyah Gerber knew exactly what success was supposed to look like. It looked like ice beneath her skates, years of training behind her and, somewhere in the distance, the Olympic rings. Gerber began figure skating at five years old after her grandmother enrolled her in lessons, expecting it to simply be another childhood activity. It wasn't. When the rising cost of skating eventually meant choosing between dance and the ice, Gerber remembers standing at the top of the stairs and settling the decision the way only a child could: eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Ice skating won. The choice would shape the next two decades of her life. Gerber competed for 12 years, carrying an Olympic dream that, at the time, felt like the only possible destination. At 17, however, her grandmother presented another possibility: an audition for Disney on Ice, which was searching for performers to portray Princess Tiana. Suddenly, the world beyond competition became visible.

“I was like, wow, okay, there’s more to ice skating than an Olympic dream,” Gerber recalls.

What she initially imagined would be one year with Disney became five, followed by another five years performing with other touring productions. The girl who once saw skating as a singular road to the Olympics instead found herself traveling the world, building a career and eventually meeting the man who would become her husband. Today, Gerber's life looks markedly different. She's a mother of two, a lifestyle creator, an advocate and a woman preparing to take her storytelling ambitions beyond social media and into television.

Yet the ice has never really left her.

There may be no better metaphor for Gerber's journey than one of the first lessons figure skating taught her: falling is inevitable.

“You fall every single day. I don’t care how good you get,” she says. “I think it really taught me how to fall down and get back up.”

That resilience became especially important as Gerber learned to navigate a sport where she rarely saw herself reflected. Growing up in figure skating meant entering rinks where the coaches, advertisements, posters and imagery surrounding the sport offered little racial diversity. Gerber says those visual messages can quietly tell a young athlete whether or not a space was designed with them in mind.

“You really get this inkling of like, okay, maybe this sport is not for me,” she explains.

Her grandmother became an essential countervoice, constantly affirming Gerber's beauty and reminding her not to allow a judging system, or the color of her skin, to determine her worth. Still, confidence did not make her immune to the psychological effects of existing in an environment where appearance itself was being evaluated.“I definitely went through years and have had to do therapy to really get over what it’s like to be in a predominantly white sport and really go through my own journey of self-love and finding myself again,” Gerber says. “It’s taken years.” She can now hold two truths at once: figure skating gave her something beautiful, and parts of the culture surrounding it left wounds she would only fully understand as an adult.

“It’s such a beautiful sport, and I learned so much,” she says. “But I do think when you are in a sport like that, there is a lot that you go through mentally, not feeling pretty enough, not feeling like you’re being picked, really being judged.”

That experience now informs what Gerber wants younger skaters to understand.

Her advice is deceptively simple: put the blinders on. “Know that you are worthy and you deserve to be in this space, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise,” she says. “However you want to wear your hair, whatever kind of makeup you want to wear, whatever kind of tights you want to wear, do not look around and let other people make you feel like you don’t deserve to be in this sport, because you most definitely do.” Gerber's professional career gave her another education entirely. Disney on Ice may appear seamless from the audience, but Gerber remembers a world behind the curtain where broken skate laces, malfunctioning costume zippers and last-minute emergencies existed alongside the magic.

“Behind the curtain is a whole other ball game,” she says. “You might see 10 skaters on the ice and 100 people backstage making that happen.”

It taught her something about performance, and, eventually, social media. What the audience sees is often only a fraction of the reality required to create it. “As soon as you step in front of that curtain, the audience has no idea,” she says. “It’s like two different worlds are happening at the exact same time.” When COVID brought touring to a halt, another world began opening. Gerber had not documented much of her life while touring, something she now wishes she had done. Once she began exploring social media, however, the performer accustomed to communicating through movement had to learn to communicate through her own voice.

“I think through content, it has truly helped me grow as a person and also really find my voice,” she says.That growth hasn't always been comfortable.

“There were a lot of things I was afraid to say, a lot of things I was afraid to be,” Gerber admits. “There were a lot of times where I was conforming and not truly being myself.”

Content creation gave her something skating never could: the ability to watch herself evolve in real time. She could look back at older videos, examine what she said and ask herself whether it actually represented the woman she was becoming. “Yeah, no, Mariyah, you weren’t being authentic or you weren’t being your true self here. How do we fix it?” she recalls asking herself. “I think it’s just cool to be able to see your growth in real time.”

Perhaps no chapter has reshaped Gerber's understanding of ambition more than motherhood. Initially, she believed becoming a mother meant her own professional aspirations should move to the background. “When I first became a mom, I was like, I just need to be at home with my kids fully,” she says. “I didn’t think that I could have a career, really.” Her thinking evolved. Gerber began looking at her own mother, who raised her while working as a single parent, differently. She also began considering what her sons would learn not simply from what she told them, but from what they watched her do.

“I want my kids to see me pursuing my dreams,” she says. “If I have dreams and I’m not pursuing them, and then I’m telling them to go out and chase everything that they’ve ever wanted to do, then I’d be contradicting myself.”

Motherhood hasn't made Gerber less ambitious. It has made her rethink the route.

Elite athletics trained her to focus on the finish line. Parenting has taught her that life rarely moves in a perfectly straight direction. “I might have to be okay with things being a little bit squiggly on the way up,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that the things that you want aren’t achievable. It just might look a little different.” That philosophy also shapes how she and her husband are raising their boys. Gerber is intentional about the language spoken inside their home, particularly after spending so much of her own formative years in an environment built around judgment. “I am constantly reaffirming for them how amazing they are, how great they are, really just building their confidence at home as much as I can,” she says. She rejects the familiar childhood saying that words can never hurt you. Her own experiences taught her otherwise. “People don’t realize how powerful words are, and how hurtful they can be, and how long they stick with people.” For Gerber, raising confident children and raising compassionate children are not separate responsibilities. Teaching her sons to value themselves must exist alongside teaching them to acknowledge and respect other people. Gerber's relationship with wellness has changed, too. For someone whose body was once trained for competition and professional performance, wellness today is less about pushing physical limits and more about protecting her internal world. “A huge part of wellness nowadays for me is mental health,” she says. Gerber openly discusses pursuing therapy, including EMDR and hypnotherapy, along with meditation, walking and becoming more mindful about the media she consumes. Motherhood, she says, can come with constant stimulation, making it easy for women to lose touch with themselves amid the noise of caring for everyone else. “I really try to pay attention to that,” she says. “Right now in this season, I’m like: mental health, mental health as much as possible.”

If Gerber's early career depended upon judges, casting directors and gatekeepers deciding whether she belonged, her current chapter is built around a radically different idea: she doesn't have to wait to be chosen. That distinction is particularly meaningful when she considers representation in skating. Gerber remains critical of the narrow image of the “ice princess” that she believes continues to dominate much of skating's representation in entertainment. She wants audiences to see different faces, different experiences and different stories attached to the sport. “Something that I love about social media is that you no longer have to wait to be chosen,” she says. “You can choose yourself and get up, get in front of a camera, set it up yourself, post it, and then hopefully reach a whole new audience.”

And audiences have noticed. Gerber says people have told her they wish they had seen someone like her skating when they were younger. Those messages have made the mission larger than her own visibility.

“I think [it’s about] really disrupting the controlled media of what ice skating should look like,” she says. “I really am trying to push beyond that barrier.”

Now she wants to push it further. Gerber is developing a television pitch centered on bringing a different demographic of skaters to a larger audience. Moving from a phone and social platform into network pitch meetings is unfamiliar territory, and she doesn't pretend otherwise. “I’ve never done this before, and it’s very intimidating because it’s a lot of steps,” she says. But intimidation has rarely stopped someone who learned at five years old that falling is simply part of learning something new. “This version of me is going to be the version of me that’s kind of stepping into her boss-girl era,” Gerber says. “Let’s go in these rooms, let’s put on a suit, let’s tell the people why this is important.” The vision isn't simply to become more visible herself. “The more visibility you have, the more you can do. The more people I can uplift, the more doors I can open for others,” she says. “As I elevate, I’m leaving room for there to be more people with different ideas to come up behind me.”There is a particular kind of grief that comes with dedicating more than a decade of your life to a dream that doesn't happen the way you imagined. Gerber doesn't minimize that. “As someone who had an Olympic dream that didn’t really come true, it’s very devastating when you spend 12 years training for something and you just really believe it with your whole heart: I’m going to go to the Olympics.” But somewhere between competition, touring, marriage, motherhood, social media and advocacy, Gerber began to understand that losing one definition of success didn't mean losing success itself.

“I think redefining what my Olympic dream is has been really a beautiful process,” she says.

The Olympic dream became touring the world. Touring led her to her husband. Another chapter brought motherhood. Another brought a social media community that grew into the millions. Now, another dream is waiting in television. Each version required letting go of the belief that she had only one opportunity to become somebody.

“I’m not defined by just one thing,” Gerber says. “I can continuously evolve. I can continuously be a different version of myself, and every single version of myself that I have become, I’m so proud of.”

Perhaps that is Mariyah Gerber's greatest disruption. Not simply challenging what a figure skater is supposed to look like, or who gets to occupy the ice, but challenging the idea that any of us must remain who we once believed we were supposed to become. Today, she describes herself simply as a woman chasing her dreams, a mother who wants her children to witness her doing so and a creator who wants the people watching her to question the limitations they've placed on themselves. “I really hope that when people think of me, they think about how incredibly limitless they are,” Gerber says. “For so long I saw myself as being in a box, and I saw success only being one thing.” She's no longer interested in the box. “I want my kids to feel limitless. I want them to feel inspired. I want them to feel like they can do anything.” For the woman who once believed the Olympics were the only destination, that may be the most fitting legacy of all: the dream didn't disappear. It got bigger.