The Art of Rubbing Some Dirt In It

sucking it up will liberate you

Trenches on the Somme by Mary Riter Hamilton, 1919

Just days before my senior night, marking the end of my high school basketball career, I tore my ACL. 

The pop! was so loud I could hear it above the roar of the gym. I knew it the moment I hit the floor: Season over. Poof. Gone. Just like that.

Basketball was my dream since I could walk in a straight line. To have something that intrinsic snatched from me felt wildly unjust. But, I had a full ride to play D1 in college — this injury marked the end of one journey and the start of a better one. 

Or so I thought.

Days before I left for college, I needed a second surgery. A ball of scar tissue had built up below my kneecap so thick that I couldn’t straighten my leg. “A cyclops lesion,” the doctor said it casually, like he was recalling his favorite 80’s horror flick.

This is just a setback, I thought with determination. The year after that, I broke my foot. Season over, just like that. The knife of this loss was dulled by my persistent pulse of hope: My time is coming. I threw myself into physical therapy with a vengeance. When junior year rolled around, I was buzzing with energy and excitement. This is the year. 

One day during practice,  I stepped forward with my good knee to feed a bounce pass to a post player.

Pop!

You know that feeling when water runs so hot it feels cold? In that moment, I was made of that feeling. It was a pain so demanding it became numbness. My trainer rushed over to me. What happened?

I couldn’t find the words to tell him that the pop! was not my knee, but the sputtering exhale of a little girl’s living, breathing dream dying off.

I don’t know, I said.

One more knee surgery to see if I was salvageable. I wasn’t.

Basketball career — over. Poof. Gone. Just like that.

Enter: my rather large identity crisis

Who was I if not an athlete? 

At first, I retreated inward, despising what I found there: raw failure. A girl who didn’t know who she was beneath a label. I drank too much at parties, thinking I could make up for all I had lost by being the fun, nothing-can-keep-her-down! kind of girl. I pretended like it didn’t mean the entire world to me, because if I didn’t, it would swallow me whole. 

Ironically, it was the pity of others that drug me from the dregs of my own. Although well-intentioned, the comments made me sick to my stomach:

I feel so bad for you! I can’t believe this happened to you! This is so unfair. You got dealt the worst hand. You just can’t catch a break, can ya?

Truthfully, it was insulting. I wanted to scream when I heard those things. Couldn’t they see that my story was not an accident? That I was more than a dream I had failed to fulfill? The thing is, I couldn’t tell them that without first believing it myself. With difficulty, I turned these observations on myself and experienced a paradigm shift in my own life.

Coddling myself was causing deep harm. Believing I was a failure was making me one. Thinking I was entitled to something I clearly was not entitled to was only making me bitter. Falling to my knees (ouch) and allowing the hardness of life to crash over me like a wave was consuming me.

So, I stood. I faced it head on, all the anger and disappointment and self-loathing and confusion and sadness and pride. In a way, it was like I had to get into the trenches with myself.

I had to face all the questions I didn’t have answers to:

Who am I, really? What makes me important? What’s my purpose? How am I valuable? Am I valuable?

I was trying to become a person I enjoyed the company of, someone I was proud of, someone who handled difficult things gracefully, with a smile on her face. For me, I found the answers to these questions by sinking deep into my faith and leaning back into the arms of my Creator. But perhaps that is another essay. 

Point is, getting into the trenches with myself helped me emerge tough, steady, gritty as dirt – the woman I knew I was beneath those layers of self-pity.

Sucking it up isn’t as scary as it sounds. It liberated me from the very grave my self-pity had dug.

Pain is inevitable in this life, but how much you suffer is up to you

You are not a luck of the draw. Your story is not reduced to a series of things that just happen to you. And you always, always have a choice. So, grit your teeth. Dig your heels in. Let your struggle mold you. And suck it up.

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