One Step

The other day I was in the grocery store deciding which salad mix to buy when all of a sudden sharp pain spiked through my lower leg. My breath hitched for a second and my step faltered the tiniest bit before I caught it. I made my way from the produce section to dairy with a slight limp but felt resigned more than worried. Though the massive spike happens less frequently now that I train less, it still doesn’t come as a surprise. This is just a part of my life.  

As of today, I’ve been in pain for 20 years.  

I don’t think about it that much—about how long it’s been. Because I prefer to focus on other things and because when I do think about it, it gets a little harder to breathe. Today, though, 20 years after I woke up with a mysterious shooting pain that would change my life forever, I had to stop for a minute and let myself feel all of it.  

I don’t remember 5 years passing. I was still a kid, only 14, and really just beginning to figure it out. At 10 years I was stepping onto a court in Omaha to play for Stanford in the National Championship. I felt sad for the child that I was who didn’t know how much of my life this would affect and yet immensely grateful for the ability to walk, to play volleyball and to live out impossible dreams. At 15 years I was in Anaheim, training with the National Team. I had pushed my body so far so many times and ended up so much further than anyone thought I could go. Yet I sat on a couch in my apartment and felt wracking sobs come up through a well of frustration that I didn’t even know was there. Frustration over the sense of helplessness, the feeling of fighting battle after battle without ever being able to win the war.  

And now? Now I’m mostly tired. Just...tired.

Someone asked me once, how I’ve done it for this long. How do you handle being in pain for 20 years straight? The honest answer is: you don’t.  

My freshman year of high school there was a conditioning drill we did, less than affectionately referred to as the Circle of Death. We would run around the basketball court for an unspecified amount of time, intermixed with other exercises at the coaches’ discretion. Running was the hardest and most painful thing for me and up until that point, I hadn’t run for more than 5 minutes at a time. I worried about it the whole night before and came to the gym that day determined to try but also very scared.  

We started running. I made it to about 10 minutes and knew I wouldn’t make it through the rest. A figurative knife had just been shoved into my shin. I was done. I told myself I would hold out for one more minute and then tell our coach I needed to stop. I got through the minute. Then one more. The pain got worse. I told myself one more lap. Just one lap. Then one more. We had passed fifteen minutes. I couldn’t do one more lap. I focused on getting to the next corner of the basketball court. Just one more corner. We passed twenty minutes. All I could think was one more step. Just take one more step. And one more. And one more. Then the whistle blew.  

You can’t survive 20 years of pain. Just like I couldn’t make it through 20 plus minutes of the Circle of Death. But I never had to. All I’ve ever had to do was make it through today—through one game, one set of squats, one dinner, one walk from the produce section to dairy. Sometimes I am invincible and I have the strength and the energy to take on anything. Sometimes I can't see past this moment. But I can always take one more step.  

Tired or not, I'm going to keep taking it. 

To The Men

I am the product of a life surrounded by strong women. They have been my teammates, my coaches, my friends, my family and my role models. I could not be who I am today without their steady and undeniable force. I am, however, also the product of a life full of strong men.

There’s my father, who is strong enough to let me decide exactly who I want to be. Who never made me feel like I had to be sweet while my brother was smart or that I had to stay clean while my brother sweat.

There’s my brother, who is strong enough to be kind to everyone he has ever met. Who has marched right beside me to say that my rights are equal to his.

There are the men who have been my friends, who are strong enough to celebrate me for my strengths just as I celebrate them for theirs. Who have never made me feel like I need to make myself smaller in deference to their egos.

There are the men who taught me, who were strong enough to have open discussions. Who let me ask questions without feeling like I was questioning them and encouraged me to have my own opinions so that, together, we could learn.

There are the men I work with, who are strong enough to genuinely listen when I speak. Who may have been working in this space since I was a child but who always give my experience and my insights equal weight.

There are the men I’ve shared training rooms and weight rooms with, who are strong enough to see my commitment as equal to their own. Who, even as the world outside often devalues women’s sports, recognize that we all put in the same work.

There are all these men…who have taught me without making me feel inferior, who have challenged the way I think without making me question the value of my own opinion, who have supported me without wanting anything in return and who have loved me without ever making me feel unsafe.

I am not writing this because men should be praised for being decent human beings but because these are the men I want to invite in. We have hit a boiling point. Women are ready to fight and if you don’t think they have good reason to then you just haven’t been paying attention. But--and this is important—this is not a battle of women against men and it never has been.

This is a fight against weak men. Weak men who abuse others to make themselves feel powerful and who uphold systems that are unequal because they can’t stand on their own merits. This is a fight for equality, for dignity, for safety and for what the future of our society is going to look like.

Men--when you walk into a room where decisions are being made and you only see faces that look like yours, that is not equality. When you hear demeaning comments or questionable jokes that go unchallenged, that is not dignity. When you see a man in a position of authority pursuing a woman whose job depends on keeping him happy, that is not safety. And when you see a woman shrink into herself when she is beside a man, that is not strength.

Because to me, this is strength at its core—the ability to stand with another person and let them shine out, to let them be fully and wholly who they are, without feeling like that somehow diminishes your ability to do the same. 

We are ready to shine and we are fighting for a future society that allows all of us to do so. Come stand alongside us. If you’re strong enough…

If you want to understand more about what you can do, here are some places to start: 
Time's Up + donate to the Legal Defense Fund
What decent men can do
How men can prevent harassment and abuse
share this awesome PSA with Donald Glover

A New Dream

I wrote this at the end of 2017 as I was transitioning out of volleyball as my primary career and trying to figure out where to go next. I decided to post it now for all of the athletes graduating who might be going on to new and different things. As for me, some of this still applies but I have, at least, found my next step. To learn more about what I'm working on, you can go to shift7.com

I was never one of those kids who knew exactly what they wanted to be when they grew up. I didn’t have clear strengths and weaknesses in high school or know what I would study going into college. But there are two things that I’ve always known in my life. The first was that I was going to play volleyball. The second was that I was going to do something other than play volleyball.

           

The volleyball part came first, naturally, because there’s a time limit on an athletic career. And because that dream was clear. The first time I ever saw the National Team play was in 2000 at the Sydney Olympics. We watched every match that was televised. I remember the moment that something inside me clicked and I thought, “I want to do THAT.” I wanted to wear red, white and blue, represent my country and, more than anything else, I wanted to play volleyball at the highest level of the game. Eleven years later, after achieving other dreams—of winning state championships, playing in college, going to Stanford— I walked into the National Team gym. And for five years I got to live my dreams.

           

Then I decided to walk away. I could make a living playing volleyball right now. I could still be training in the USA gym. But I know, I’ve always known, that I have other things to do. Plus my biggest dream wasn’t making that team or winning medals or going to the Olympics; it was finding out how good I could be. Could I step on the court with the best in the world and play this game at the absolute highest level? And I found out I could. So I was ready for a new dream.

Read the rest here