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.