For most of my life, athletics felt like “my thing”. “The field” was a place where I was drawn because it gave me a feeling of belonging, of purpose, like this was something that I was supposed to be doing because it came naturally. There were 2 sides to that coin. 1. The internal validation that most sports came naturally to me and granted me confidence that I was good at something 2. The external validation that I got from my participation, aptitude and in most cases my achievement.
This second part started to loom large from very young age for me. Both of my siblings were quite a bit older than me which meant I ended up playing with them or their teammates’ younger siblings during their games. Alas, I seemed to always be competing against kids that were older than me. I’m not gonna bullshit you and say that I was beating them. I wasn’t 8 or 9 out of 10 times. I either got slaughtered or I looked like the 7-year-old playing with 14 year olds. But 1 or 2 times out of those 10, I did something that a 7-year-old was not expected to do when competing against boys and girls twice her age. Those moments of glory and praise and “standing apart” had me hooked. The moments like the one when I tackled Will Fenoglio, the 7th grade star athlete, in the open field during “tackle the man” in the unlit field next to the Varsity Football game were the types of moments that I can remember vividly.
Those moments of glory and attention and uniqueness motivated me. I’m pretty sure I craved them after a while because the mundane ordinariness in the “in between” moments felt only like they existed to link me to the next moment of glory.
By my early 20’s, the moments of glory and attention through athletics were happening on a bigger stage than the unlit fields and now with national notoriety. The magnitude of gratification on that stage swelled and with that swing, the in-between moments seemed even more mundane. My expectations for achievement and my fear of failure swelled in direct proportion to that magnitude. Little did I know that this path was leading to a dark alley. Eventually, my athletic career ended. I didn’t naturally fall into anything, so no longer was I a natural at something.
I was searched for another talent, another identity post athletics yet remained in pursuit of those moments of glory and validation. In short, I was seeking results, but wasn’t able to appropriately gauge how much work and discomfort would be needed to get there because of the privilege of my natural athletic talent. That privilege had allowed me to move farther faster than others in athletics. I didn’t see and wasn’t prepared for the work that it would take to reach my outsized expectations without a natural talent. It was fucking uncomfortable and disappointing and ordinary and felt useless after a time.
It wasn’t until I lost my will to flail in pursuit of those results in 2013, about 10 years since my retirement from competitive athletics, that I began to grasp how flawed my expectations were. In my life after athletics, I was dressing for games and looking for personal victories, but wasn’t willing to practice with humble purpose and faith in the process. I was fixated on the glory and the validation, the goods, but couldn’t cope with the discomfort that came with the day-to-day “being a beginner” work or the paralyzing fear of failing after having achieved so much in other area. While I had overcome high physical and mental hurdles as an athlete, I crumbled facing the emotional gauntlet of day to day life as “being ordinary”.
Looking back, it seem that overcoming those hurdles in the past was simply a byproduct of a pursuit of a shared goal with my teammates. When I demonstrated resilience in sport, I didn’t struggle emotionally. I didn’t need tools. I just needed physical toughness. I just handled the physical discomfort and the emotional disappointment, but could move on because there was always a next time and there was a team to share the burden of loss. I persevered because getting over or through or around my hurdles also wasn’t about me. It was about bringing my value to contribute to our shared goal. Without a team and a shared goal, I was stuck in my shit blaming myself for and ruminating about “not winning”. I was stuck in my oversized expectations.
Now on a daily basis, I try to let go of my expectations around what my life is supposed to look like and I practice humility, vulnerability and connection with myself, others and something bigger than myself. And gratefully as a result of that practice, I feel confident in my fortitude to handle adversity. In other words, I feel real life resilience.
The past year or so notable athletes like, Michael Phelps - the greatest Olympian of all time, Abby Wambach - the G.O.A.T. of Women's Soccer and Ryan Leaf - a high profile #1 draft pick and dubiously the biggest NFL bust of all time, have courageously shared their stories of recovery and resilience. Each have deeply resonated with me since they too seemed to have experienced that journey of being a natural, “coming down” from or hitting bottoms after those emotional highs of athletic achievement, and then self-medicating to numb the discomfort and disappointment. Their rough patches similarly appeared to correlate to times when they were uncoupling from their sport or career and metaphorically from something bigger than themselves and as a result presumably lost hope or struggled to be resilient.
Now after about 4.5 years of my journey and hearing the journeys and recoveries of these other former athletes, I’m inspired to connect and collect stories of other athletes and their journeys to develop real life resilience and nurture their lives outside the arena.
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