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It’s NBA playoff time! I’m excited… and staying up wayyyyy too late to watch games.
I love sports. It’s probably my favorite recreational thing to watch on TV, and I’ll always be appreciative of what being an athlete did for me. I played high school sports in an area where athletics were both important and played at a very high level. Then I played two years of tennis in college at a small school.
As a junior in college, though, I got very sick and almost died. That led to some amputation procedures that put a long pause on any kind of athletics, even at the intramural softball level. It’s a long story that I will share about some day soon.
The constant surgeries started me on painkillers, and I began to abuse alcohol, too, and you know what that ultimately got me: a front row seat at rehab.
Throughout most of my life, I really had a profound sense of appreciation and 100 percent positive feeling about what sports did for me. There were sooooooooo many reasons to be grateful for what sports taught. I learned how to lose and try to come back, how to fight and be mentally tough, how to claw back from injuries, how to push myself, how to never quit… all the good characteristics you can probably imagine.
But when I went to rehab, it hit me that sometimes those same characteristics don’t play well in the sandbox with what I was going to need to do to get sober. As I detoxed, I still had those voices in my head.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
“Second place is first loser.”
“No mercy, sweep the leg…” oh s**t, hold on, I’m just quoting from Cobra Kai at this point.
In all seriousness, you get my point. I heard former NFL quarterback Ryan Leaf talking recently about how much sports did for him but also how hard that then makes it to fully surrender to recovery. I get that. In athlete terms, surrender is a terrible thing. It means losing. Giving up.
But that’s what I needed to do. I had to say things and admit things that the athlete part of my brain just wasn’t equipped to do. The idea of surrendering to win? Asking for help? Acknowledging fear? Those were foreign concepts, and it felt very uncomfortable to start to think that way at first.
Early in recovery, though, I also heard an MMA fighter who was asked about the idea of getting submitted in a fight. Some fighters refuse to ever tap out—they’re willing to get their leg broken or completely choked unconscious rather than admit defeat.
But this fighter was like, “Hey, if I know my arm is about to snap in half, I am tapping out. I don’t want to be in a cast and unable to fight for four months. It’s a stupid jock idea to let your pride get in the way of doing the right thing. I’d rather tap and live to fight another day.”
So I’m trying to embrace that concept, even today, with some sobriety under my belt. Live to fight another day!
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