From Courts to Countertops: A Confused Root in Sports
For a long time, I was afraid to do this, because I didn’t want to fail. I knew that I could make it successful, that I had the creativity and the passion, and I knew that I’d be damn good at it. Even more than I was afraid to fail, I was afraid that it would be because of my lack of discipline. I was afraid that I would get in my own way. I grew up an athlete, playing almost any sport I could get my hands on (not my feet, though, I never would have been able to play soccer because I cannot run to save my life). My family was always very sports minded, my dad played collegiate football and coached high school baseball, my brother excelled on the courts and fields, and my mom loved to watch it all, soaking up more knowledge than most people I know about the games we loved. And I still love sports, so much so that I once thought I’d make my living managing them. Who knows, maybe I’ll return to that arena of work someday- pun intended. My point is, I do love competition and the hard work of it all, I love the beauty, grace, and sheer awe of athleticism, and I love studying sports as an institution. I could write an entire dissertation on the sociologically flawed structure of the National Football League, or why baseball is made up of just about everything that is good about being American. I love it all, and it’s a huge part of who I am. I just never, deep down and in the dark corners of my mind that house the thoughts I rarely say out loud, I never really wanted to be an athlete. I loved so much about what the sports I was involved with brought to my life; camaraderie, status, competition. But I hated practices. I hated the constant discipline that came with being an athlete. And that’s where I think I’ve gone wrong my entire life.
I try to be disciplined; I’m hard on myself and I try to be a perfectionist, but there are so many areas of my life where I let myself slip up. I diet for three weeks and I stop caring about what I eat. I exercise my butt off for 6 days a week for two weeks and then I am sedentary for a month. I tell myself I’ll write more, and I go on a typing spree, convinced I’d be a Nobel Laureate some day, and then reinvent myself six times over before returning to putting my thoughts to paper again. I am at a point now where I do believe a large part of it is my ADHD, something I have just been diagnosed with at the developmentally ripe age of 27. But I also think of it as, I can be lazy. I can convince myself that it’s ok to eat whatever I want, that life is too short to be counting calories. I tell myself it’s ok to stop moving for a while, I’ve been stressed and exhausted and this more “relaxing nature” is a part of overall well being. Once I rationalize that something is “excusable” in my head, I follow that rationale to allow myself to get out of something I don’t want to do. But I want to do this. I have never felt a fire like this, and I have never felt a reason not to do it. I have never had to rationalize why I shouldn’t, but yet, I still didn’t. Why? I asked myself this question on and off again for the better part of two years. I felt I had become a walking paradox; someone so full of ambition and praised by my friends and family for the hosting and cooking and event planning I was capable of, yet I would cringe and lose every shred of motivation when someone would tell me, “You should start your own business!”
Figuring It All Out? Hardly!
Until recently, a close friend didn’t tell me to start a business, or to change my career. She told me it was my calling, that I could make something really great out of this passion if I wanted to. My calling. You see, that’s a dangerously intoxicating phrase to me. As someone who’s been riddled with self doubt since before she could spell the word “doubt” (and probably even though she was wrong when she did because what the hell is that “b” doing in there anyways?), the idea of having a calling meant that the universe had figured it all out for me. I didn’t have to try to guess and check what I was put on this earth to do; the answer was in front of me all along. I had fallen in love with the idea of what I thought my calling was once before, and I was badly burned. As the preteen daughter of a two-time cancer survivor, I felt it was my karmic duty to go into cancer research. I was going to do everything I could to try to help find a cure because I wasn’t the little girl who had to watch her mom die in a hospital bed and have her whole life be turned upside down by a five letter word that has wreaked havoc on so many families and quite literally has destroyed good and wonderful human beings from the inside out. I wanted to cut the cycle of children who were introduced to a world of very sick people and sequestered to late nights in waiting rooms, familiar with the concept of death all too soon. So I set out into a world that I felt was my duty, what I had to do, and I was miserable doing it. I spent the first three years of college going into an insane amount of debt, riddled with that plague of self doubt and a crippling fear of failure, all because I couldn’t get my heart into what I was doing. My mind knew I was smart enough, but my heart was far from it. I felt my chest was being wrung out every time I thought of my life continuing to revolve around cancer, as it had since I was five years old. It convinced me that I carried the weight of the world on my shoulders. I was Icarus flying my waxy and feathered wings while I trudged through the life I was supposed to have. And then I let it go.
The Phone’s Ringing
I quit thinking that I knew it all, that I even had a calling to begin with. It didn’t happen overnight, but I had changed my career path entirely and thought I knew exactly where I was headed. But things kept getting in the way. A full time job offer after college working for the University I had just graduated from, instead of doubling my student debt for a graduate program in a place where I had no friends and no roots. A masters degree paid for less than four figures because of work opportunities, instead of losing income to study full time. Family illnesses that made me want to be close to home, and a man who came into my life to love me when I didn’t think I was ready or worthy of such love. I ended up feeling better about my professional career than I ever had when a job in the tech industry, far from the world of late nights in a football stadium and early mornings working tournament operations, landed in my lap. All of these things were not what I had planned. None of them were things I thought I was supposed to do, or that the universe was deciding for me. They kind of just happened. Once I let go of what I thought was my calling, a life I began to be really proud of started to shape around me.
Except for this aching in my chest, similar to the one I felt when I was that sickly stressed sophomore in college headed down the wrong career path, but this time it was only my constant self-contradiction of standing in my own way of pursuing a passion. Once I was told it could be my calling, a sort of flame lit up underneath me. I started writing, furiously. I got more creative with my thoughts in the kitchen, I felt more comfortable than I ever had. I took on huge hosting duties, like a well planned out one aesthetically pleasing Friendsgiving for 18 of my closest friends, and my mom. I researched blog posts, I created content, and I dove head first into it all. I wrote up a business plan, I created an entire empire in my head. I am still very much a work in progress, and I cannot guarantee that I won’t still get in my own way. I cannot guarantee that I’ll have the discipline to keep it all going, or that I’ll stick it out when it’s scary and it all gets a little too nitty gritty for my liking. I will fight like hell to keep my flame alive, yet I’m still not sure what’ll happen next, or how big this will become or how close to my dreams I can get. But I know one thing, I’m done standing in my own way. I’m ready to drop everything and listen. After all, the Universe is calling.
