Blocking and Tackling

My alarm clock sirens again. It’s 5:30 am and I have to get up for football practice, but as I glance over to smash the snooze button my body doesn’t respond. The soreness has matriculated to my extremities and calcified my muscles. I had been tossing and turning all night with feverish chills, and now my mind leaps to the possibility of missing practice. This can’t happen. As I take a worried gulp I realize that my throat is raw and swollen shut. I hurry to schedule the first doctor’s appointment I can, and sitting in the examination room, I rehearse the vital talking points in my head.

“It’s my senior year. I have worked my whole life for this moment. I will do whatever it takes to play.”

A nurse comes in to take a throat swab and draw my blood, and mentions that they will run a few tests. My answer will have to wait. After 24 hours of physical and emotional misery, I receive word that while I have strep throat, I tested negative for mono. I only need a couple days of rest, and then I will be back at practice ready to play.

“It could be worse,” I tell myself.

I return to practice as scheduled, on a sweltering mid August day. 90° with 94% humidity. If walking outside feels like trudging through a swamp, conditioning in the heat will be another beast. As the end of the practice nears, an audible groan lets out from my teammates, we know what’s next. 10 timed sprints, from one end line to the other and back, 240 yards total. I feel my body mustering its reserves in preparation for the workout. The same broken body that had been bed ridden the day before. The same broken body that had been put through suffering numerous times, would be put to the test again.

We take our places along the end line, and I hear the whistle blow. Mindlessly, my legs begin to churn up and down pumping like pistons, movements I have done a million times, only this time something is wrong. My heart is working twice as hard, an engine running on half its cylinders.

Moments after the first sprint, before I can find my footing, the whistle blows again and I am off. By the second sprint the heat from inside of me begins to burn through my skin. By the third sprint my legs feel like jelly and I can’t stand up straight. By the fourth sprint my lungs are empty and I can’t catch my breath. By the fifth sprint, I can feel my eyes roll to the back of my head as I demand that my brain remain conscious.

No one seems to notice any of my near death experiences, but it’s clear from the noises around me that quitting is not an option. I can hear coach Jones's voice over the chaos,

"Run you fat fuck! This is what you get for sitting on your ass all summer!”

“You are all a bunch of pussies! Be a man!”

“Not good enough! You are a disgrace to this football team!”

The clearest voice came from within me.

“Jake you fucking bitch. Quitting is not an option. What’s one more sprint?”

I stagger back to the end line...

After practice, I do my best to avoid the athletic trainer given that I am not injured and don’t want to bring any unwanted attention to myself. My chest tightens nervously as he singles me out and approaches me, bedside manner be damned.

“Hey Jake, I just got a call from the doctor’s office. It turns out the tests results were a false negative. You have mono after all.”

My mind replays every ounce of contact throughout the day, each one an opportunity for the slightest bump to rupture my bloated spleen and take my life.  

“So when can I practice?” are the only words that I can bring myself to say to my trainer.

Quitting is not an option. I had mastered my pain and hardened all the feelings I deemed weak. Self-doubt. Insecurity. Fear. Fatigue. Confusion. They were all vestiges of a softer, more fragile self. I contracted my mind to build walls surrounding my weaknesses ensuring that they never see the light of day again. I disposed of every part of myself that I hated, and with it I became the person I always dreamt of being. The sick truth of it all? I loved it. I loved the ability to be someone that I wasn’t. To be popular. To be tough. To be invincible in my own mind.

Only now have I come to realize the consequences of glorifying my self harm. By numbing myself to pain, I lost touch with the sensitivity to feelings that had made me feel alive. For years I wandered aimlessly, trying to control the feelings I couldn’t bring myself to confront. I searched desperately for coaches and mentors that could relate to my struggle of living a dual life, and found only lost souls who hadn’t yet accepted their complicity in this cycle of toxic masculinity. I became a shell of my true self, a disguise that to this day I struggle to remove.

Buddhist scholar and environmentalist Joanna Macy writes, “the refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life . . . but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.”

A journey is before me, one that I must continue to tread. I often return to the experiences that I have endured, to garner the resilience that came with them, and I know that if I built these walls, that with time I can bring them down.