Without Words

When I lived in France my best friend was my teammate, Myriam’s three year old daughter, Leana. Her mom’s French friends would ask how we got along and played together—Leana didn’t speak English and I understood very little French. I couldn’t ask her about her friends or her school or her favorite foods. But we were buddies anyway and it was really very simple.  

Kids create their own worlds. All I had to do was step into hers and accept it as it was. She’d explain everything in rapid French and I couldn’t understand any of the rules or what she wanted so I’d just figure it out as we went along. Now we’re playing tag…now we’re hiding from something…now she just wants to sit on my lap quietly. And as we go her world starts to take shape in my head too. I don’t know the exact colors she sees or what “monsters” we’re hiding from but I start to see the outlines and I can feel what she feels.

Adults create their own worlds too. And I think sometimes about what it would be like if we all just tried to step into each other’s worlds and accept them. Not to pick things apart or demand that it makes sense within our own worldview or to get caught on what divides us but to reserve judgment and try to figure it out as we go along. If we just tried to feel what they feel. What could we learn about each other if we had the patience to try?

On my last day in France our club held a gathering for the team and fans. Leana walked right into my arms, melted into me and did not so much as lift her head for anyone for the next hour. We didn’t need words. I loved her and she loved me and we accepted each other. And most of the time isn’t that all we need?

Alignment

I found it when I was just a child
The still inside a world so wild
It feeds the calm serenity that lives behind my smile

It’s one deep breath on a busy day
It’s in the space under a wave
I hear it echo through the world with every word I say

It walks with me through the crowded street
Provides me with a constant beat
No matter where I am it lets me feel like I’m free

Whatever comes it will get me through
It resonates in all I do
It helps me learn what I believe so I can find my truth

It’s smooth inside when the road is rough
It grounds me in the things I love
Assures me when the moment comes that all I am’s enough

My eyes turn in when I want to see
It’s written there who I will be
The lines inside my soul that read-- I’m nothing if not me.

Holding the Line

When I was a kid my dad showed us the movie Gettysburg. We watched as the 20^th Maine Regiment took their position on the far left flank. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain was told that he and his troops had one goal: “Hold the line.” If the 20^th fell, the Confederate Army would be able to circle around and overwhelm the Union troops, likely winning the battle that is now widely recognized as the turning point of the Civil War.

As the Confederate troops battered the left flank and it looked like his troops would be overtaken, Chamberlain, who just two years earlier was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, ordered his troops to draw their bayonets. His men charged downhill, met the Confederates…and held the line.

Ida B Wells was an investigative journalist in Memphis in the Jim Crow era. When her friends were murdered by a white mob for operating a successful grocery store, Wells decided to expose the truth about lynching in America. She challenged the myth that the black people being lynched were rapists and criminals and instead asserted that the motives behind lynchings were largely economic and political.

Wells collected the data and proved her findings in fourteen pages of statistics in The Red Record. Even after her newspaper office was burned down and her own life was threatened, she continued speaking out and raising awareness in America and England, fundamentally changing the debate around lynching in the United States.

When man landed on the moon it was partly because of a woman sitting at her computer. Margaret Hamilton led the software team that wrote the code for the Apollo missions. Hamilton realized at one point that the software for the display system was synchronous—it would not allow one display to interrupt another. But what if there was an emergency? She wanted the software to be able to interrupt a normal display and to be able to tell the astronauts what the emergency was and what their options were in response.   

Hamilton was told it couldn’t be done. The algorithm was impossible. She stayed up all night, solved the “impossible” problem and the new software was installed. Minutes before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, alarms went off in the lunar lander and Mission Control had to make a decision whether or not to go on. Had they not known the reason behind the alarm they may have aborted but the codes on Hamilton’s display told them that there was just a switch in the wrong position. Mission Control said, “Go” and 500 million people watched a human being walk on the moon.

A professor, a journalist, a computer scientist…they are the extraordinary and ordinary people who have changed our world. It makes me wonder who it will be today. I think it’s best if we all strive to live like it could be us and therefore take heed of the examples of their conviction. They saw what was true and what was necessary and, facing naysayers, angry mobs and charging men with muskets…they held the line.

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.