IDENTITIES: WHO AM I?
WHEN THE BODY WON'T DO WHAT THE ATHLETE'S MIND IS TELLING IT TO
(The "unChristian" language used in the following post is only for effect. To get my emotions across better. I don't like using that language in everyday life. I just can't emphasize situations on "paper" like I could in person. I'm truly very sorry if anyone is offended. It's always a dilemma for me, trying to figure out if the effect is worth hurting God's feelings, or if they hurt His feelings or yours...I'm still talking about it with Him. I honestly mean no harm.)
Sometimes, I hate that I used to be an athlete because that's often ALL anyone remembers about me. And if people only remember, see, and know who I was, they will never be able to see and know who I am and who I am striving to be.
Sometimes, I hate that I used to be an athlete because that's often ALL anyone remembers about me. And if people only remember, see, and know who I was, they will never be able to see and know who I am and who I am striving to be.
If you only remember and see that I was an athlete, you will always perceive me or see me as healthy and strong and full of ambition and fight. While the truth is, I am sick, and weak, and often lazy with grief and hopelessness. Not because I have become lazy, but because when you are that grief stricken with any loss and that hopeless after suffering that loss, that grief and hopelessness looks like ordinary laziness. But it is not. It is unbearable. And there is nothing at the time you can do about it.
It is this weight on your chest, your being, and your soul, and you do not feel like it can be lifted. It leaves you in bed staring at the ceiling begging God to help You do...something, anything. But instead...you just keep lying there staring into the shadows that create the corners of the room thinking about everything and nothing all at once. It is a living hell. And it makes you feel like the laziest person ever. And others even think you are actually being lazy, but you aren't. You are grieving. That is what grieving looks like. And they need to stop trying to figure it out and start shutting up their judgmental thoughts and words and just start wrapping their love around you. Hold you in their arms in the silence and darkness in the corner with all the shadows.
Stills Disease has beaten the fight out of me. My muscles have atrophied and are inflamed and weak. That ambition--that never be satisfied lie of sport--no longer exists. Instead, the littlest of things are huge miracles to me. The littlest things not only satisfy me, they overwhelm me to tears.
You get up out of bed every single day and think it's no big deal. In fact, you don't even think about it at all. And you think that is normal. It's not for a lot of people. For us, it is a miracle. I lie in bed screaming at my body in my mind to do it: "Just get up already! Roll over and get up! Get up! GET UP!!!" And nothing happens. The pain. The fatigue. My entire body is screaming back "No! I cant!" So I hit the snooze for the fourth time and roll over and pray I will be able to force my body to do the impossible. It is a war with myself every single morning, or rather, by the time I am done hitting the snooze seven times, the afternoon.
You think getting out of the house and going to work is a hassle. I would LOVE to be able to get out of the house for something other than a doctor's appointment. Because often I never do.
I go weeks on end having never left my house. It drives me insane. But there is often absolutely nothing I can do about it. So when I get out of the house, and my dad takes me on a drive toward nature, I cry. I am listening to a great playlist and I'm seeing the world with the Person who created it, and I'm seeing it with the dad my Father in heaven has chosen I share that moment with. I stare out the passenger side window with a smile similar to a dogs' when they get to go on a drive with their head out the window. It is pure contentment and joy. It is pure freedom: something I fight to feel everyday, but can't. Something rare in my life. And when it comes, I can barely believe it. I'm so used to feeling sad, and achy, and confined. When on the road in open space it feels like my soul can finally breathe for the first time in forever, and breathe in God Himself. It fills me up....it's perfect. I fight back sobbing because then I wouldn't be able to see the world He created with Him...that wouldn't make you cry, would it?
Now, can I complain about all of this for very long? No. I can't. And I beg myself not to. It is because I am sick that I know that things healthy people think are ordinary, are actually quite extraordinary and deserved to be seen as such; and God deserves a Thank You for each and every one of them. And it's because I am sick that I can say thank you for the "small" things you all think are ordinary, but I know to be some of His greatest miracles every day. Every time I cry the overwhelmingly happy tears, I now know I'm crying over something people take for granted every single day. And I know that is one of the most beautiful things Stills Disease has ever done for me. But I am dying to know what having been an athlete is doing for me now. And I have no idea most of time.
Logically, you would think I would be able to stand much more pain than those who weren't, and I suppose sometimes that is true. But every time I think about it, I realize that honestly, the reason I am stronger, I know has nothing to do with being an athlete anymore.
It's been eight years since I competed. Eight years where I've relied on nothing and no one but God. He is my strength. Not sports. Not working out in the weight room. Not practicing on the field or on a tee. Or by having teammates pick me up. (Right now I have one teammate picking me up: L---.) My tattoos don't say "Go. Fight. Win." They don't say...I can't even think of any thing else an athlete's tattoo would say! That's how far gone I am from being an athlete. Do I still love sports? Yeah! I do. But no where near as much as I did.
In sports you can see your opponent. You can see who you need to beat. You know what is expected of you. You have prepared for it. Endlessly. There are rules to what is happening. There is this adrenaline rush like nothing else you will ever experience in life. It pulses through your blood and your brain and your body. It fills you up and drives you forward. You have the fight or flight response raging like electricity inside and you have made your instinct to fight. It's an unbelievable feeling you will never forget. Unfortunately, it also is never replicated in real life when you are ill.
When ill, sick, disabled, you know you have to fight. You know your opponent. You know what is expected, but you are not prepared for it. No one is. No one ever will be. And there are no rules. Not a single one. And that unkown scares you more than you ever wish it would. And you can't see this opponent in front of you. The opponent lives inside of you. How do you fight what is inside? What isn't visible or tangible? You don't feel an ounce of adrenaline in your blood. You feel weakness in your blood, in your body. How can your body be expected to fight itself, especially when it is weak? How can something weak, fight itself which is weak?! How?! How?!?!
Your body is screaming at you that "You can't!" every single moment of every day when you are sick. As an athlete that word is never even allowed to be spoken, let alone thought. It doesn't exist to an athlete. Well, it exists in my world now, and it has for almost eight years. Not a single athlete says "I can't." But I think it every single day. My body is telling me it can't every single day, and there are serious consequences when I don't listen to it.
When you are an athlete and your body stops being able to do what your brain is telling it to do, you know you are done. And I have been done for years. So tell me, how is having been an athlete helping me now? How can it help me now?
Don't you think I've tapped into every last bloody ounce of it in me? That I try every moment of every day to recreate in my mind the feeling of competition! The feeling of being able to tap into energy I don't have! Tapping into fight I don't have. Tapping into a will to win somewhere surging inside dying to break out of me! But it's not there you guys! Not anymore! I can't find it! I can't tap it! I can't recreate it anywhere near what it was! It only exists on the field when you are healthy enough to cultivate it inside. And I'm not. Not anymore...
And whatever is left at the bottom of the well, don't you know I am still trying to use every last drop I stumble upon whenever I can? But surely, I am telling you, I am begging you to believe, there is barely any--IF ANY--left.
When your body is being beaten into believing it is nothing. It is weak. It is losing. It can't win. Your fight or flight is gone: You can't fight. And you don't even have the energy to flight. You just lie there. That is all you can do. That's it. Nothing less. Nothing more. Maybe you cry. Maybe you pop another pain pill. But mostly, you are left lying or sitting there wondering what the hell happened. When did my life become nothing but this? And so you sit. And you lie. And you think...
And you think. And you think. And you think. And soon, oh so very soon, you are drowning in the thoughts. They are attacking you. Killing you. Suffocating you. Scaring the hell out of you. And they won't stop. You just keep thinking and thinking and thinking because you can no longer DO: Anything. But think. About all you have lost, and have left to lose.
I wish I could! I do! I would do almost anything to get that driving force back! To get that energy back. That electricity back. That fight back. But life, real life, not sports, it beats it out of you. Real life chisels away at your hope and fight every day and we aren't even aware of it. And one day, if you are like me, you wake up and it's gone, and you didn't even know it. And I'm left wishing I felt like an athlete does in the middle of competition while just living life. But that's it, don't you see?! An athlete is an athlete when they are competing at sports. And a human is just a human when living life. You can't be an athlete at life! And you can't be a human who plays sports! It just doesn't work that way! As much as we wish it did, it just doesn't. They got their names because of what they can or can't do. You're an athlete because you play sports. You are a human because you are living. You are a writer because you write. You are sick because you are sick. You are disabled because you are no longer able...
I honestly can't think of anything right now, tonight, about having been an athlete that is helping me now. And I don't get it. Especially because I'm Christian. Why can we fight to win a game or match or whatever, but we can't fight the Devil and his schemes like that? Why doesn't it feel the same? Why doesn't fighting for the Kingdom of Heaven feel anything like fighting to win a game for yourself or your team? What in the world does it matter if you can hit a ball out of a ballpark? It doesn't. Or at least it shouldn't. And I say that having loved softball and baseball more than God for most of my life. And I say that loving baseball and softball now. I would go nuts with withdrawals if they were no longer televised! And that is sooooo sad. The Devil is so crafty! We care more about putting a ball through a hoop, swimming quickly, balancing on a beam, hitting a ball out of a park, kicking a ball into a goal WAY more than anything God knows we should and need to care about. We barely care at all, if ever, about this war between the principalities of darkness and The Kingdom of Heaven, but my word, if the game is on we NEED to watch it! And our team NEEDS to win!
And sports, yeah, they taught me a lot of life lessons about work ethic and sportsmanship and selflessness etc but other than that, they have not helped at all with life after sports. And when you are a competitive athlete, all you are is your sport. When life comes and takes it away, and it will sooner rather than later, after all you've put your body through, you will be lost in a world of hell and suffering because you will have no idea who you are outside of that sport. Your whole world gets wrapped up in it and when that world is gone it will be one of the biggest heartaches and withdrawals of your life!
Everyone tells you there will come a day when you won't be ale to play anymore, but not a soul tells you what it will be like or how to prepare for it, or how to just barely survive it!
We make our sub story our story all the time, every single one of us, and when we hit that funk, that wall of what am I supposed to do now, why am I not living happily ever after, why is there still all this conflict in my life, it...will be...a living hell. I can promise you that.
And not just if you are an athlete! Anything you wrap yourself into that much, when it's taken from you, and you realize it wasn't your whole life story, but just a tiny part of it, and there is more to live and you no longer have any idea what for...it sucks! It hurts! It will break you and humble you down to nothing! And rebuilding from that will be one of the hardest, if not the hardest thing you ever do.
NEVER, EVER put your identity in what you do, what you love, or who you love if it isn't God and Christ themselves only!!! If you do, the day will come when it's taken from you, and you will realize you do not know who you are. And if you don't know that, you won't know how to live. And if you don't know how to live, well, obviously you won't be living. And if you aren't living, you're dying, right? Right. Trust me. That one is true.
So, I am BEGGING you to not make my mistake. Living it myself was hard enough, I can't bear to watch others make it too! Please! What other reason could there be for having survived all this than to try to help you not have to endure all of this mess along with me? All of this pain.
Do not wrap your identity in being an athlete and do not let anyone else do it either. Once you are done playing competitively, being an "athlete" won't do a damn thing for you. It won't help you at all with real life. That rush, that fight, that drive doesn't exist anywhere else in real life. It can only be created on the field, in the park, on the court, in the pool, in the gym. In life, it feels like nothing. Nothing is motivating you. And that is the devil's trick.
Your identity my dear loved ones can only be found in God. But lucky for us, He has already told us who we are. We just have to embrace these identities. But first, give up every single identity that doesn't have to do with Him! He is the only identity you can have that will last forever!
You will not be an athlete forever. And if you aren't an athlete forever, when your competitive career ends, and you realize you are no one without sports because you didn't realize you needed to be--trust me; pick the eternal identity, not the temporary one! Finding a new identity every few years is too painful. It is too empty. It will never be enough!
But God's identities? They are. They are more than enough, and they will get you through this entire life AND the one to come! But "athlete"? Teacher, Doctor, Lawyer, Coach, Actor, Singer, Electrician, Carpenter, Artist, Counselor, Therapist, President, even child, brother, sister, mother and father--these identities will not last!
They will not carry you into heaven, into forever.
They will end.
They will fail you, and when they do it hurst like nothing else.
Baby lasted me about, what, 3 years?
Child lasted about 9.
Teenager/Adolescent lasted 7 years.
Athlete lasted me 10 years.
Student lasted me 19.
Healthy lasted me, well, honestly, about 15.
Athletic Trainer lasted me about 5 weeks.
Writer doesn't sustain me, it just keeps me a little more sane (I hope)....
Someday, horribly too soon, I will no longer be a Granddaughter.
Someday, I hope soon, I will no longer be a Californian.
Someday, even though I don't feel it so it shouldn't count, I will no longer be considered young.
Someday, maybe even today, you might as well consider me middle aged.
We live in Time. Time means to change, ask C. S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters chapter 8.
We are here to change. Don't let your identity be part of it: the continual change.
The living hell of finding what else I was good enough at? Don't live life that way. Live it like this; choose these identities:
Bride to Bridegroom
Sheep to Shepherd
Servant to Master
Student to Teacher
Child to Father
Saved to Savior
Human to Creator
Beloved to Love
Friend to Friend
And so many more!
I want you all--all three of you who read this :) -- to please comment all the other identities God has given us that are eternal and will never fail us or leave us abandoned, lonely, empty, lost or stuck in our stories, but will carry us into everlasting life with our God and Christ.
I love you all, and I want you to learn from my mistakes. They were big ones...
Please, never call me an athlete ever again. I've changed, and it's a pure miracle of a blessing. Stills Disease, aka Divine Intervention, has changed me. This is who I am now: I am God's, Christ's.
I first wrote a blog about my identity in 2008. That is when I first figured out I couldn't put my identity in anything but God. I couldn't search for the equivalent of athlete, student, athletic trainer because those would fail me, mislead me, waste my time on earth, and draw me even farther from God....
That was one of my last posts for years. It was as if the previous years of writing we're only there to lead me to the moment of discovering who I really am--who we are all supposed to be: God's.
We don't belong to sports, or whatever our job currently is. That is not who we are. We are His. At it was like this switch went off when I finished that post, and suddenly life was clear. Suddenly I didn't care about tomorrow, because I could see into forever. And I knew everything was going to be okay...understanding my identity only lies in God...it changed me. It fixed me. It healed me a bit too. Something inside, like my entire DNA makeup felt eternal instead of decaying and temporary. I felt lit up by God and I knew that light would never go out. I want ALL of that, for all of you. Here is that previous post:
It's nice to know not much has changed in four years. ;)
With All My Love, And With His Strength, In Him Alone,
Zoe
P.S. I truly did NOT think I had anything in me to write this tonight. It's been a long and achy day. I promise you this was written not with any leftover athlete strength, but with only His strength. This is all because of Him. I'm three and a half hours in, writing this post, and there is more to go: editing, spell check, flow, and making sure it goes up on the website. He is beyond extraordinary. Every time I write...it's never my doing; it's never my strength. It's always and only Him.
