The Worst Comeback Story Ever

I have a problem with ACL success stories, maybe because I haven’t had mine yet. It is very easy to forget the pain when you have already crossed the finish line because elation and relief trump fear and misery. We tend to suppress negative feelings because we are human. Perhaps tearing your ACL and undergoing reconstructive surgery isn’t as big a deal as I’m making it out to be. Maybe my story of suffering is exponentially more dramatic than most. But I know for a fact that it is much easier to highlight the success of a comeback rather than the little failures and unaccomplished challenges throughout, however small and minute they may seem. It’s like every other success story out there: I thank God, my family, and my support system for being there for me when I couldn’t be there for myself, but we don’t talk about those times we were by ourselves. And I think that’s where the real success story lies.

Since my first ACL tear, I have been searching for closure because all my hard work feels like it hasn’t been enough. To me, success is closure; success means you’ve crossed the finish line, but people are always talking about the journey, not the destination. The journey is imperative to your success, right? Okay, let’s talk about the mother effin’ journey then. Let’s talk about the performance anxiety, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and your life becoming a timetable when you’re injured as a high-level athlete. Sure, people talk about it; people talk about how they overcame it. Why don’t people talk about it when they’re in it? When they’re in the suckiest position possible, why don’t they want to talk about it? They’ll only talk about it with their therapist or close friends behind closed doors. It’s the same perfectly understandable reason I don’t want to talk about it: you’re vulnerable, AF. But I can no longer patiently wait to share my “success story” because I’ve been waiting around for almost 3 years. So here is my story of sucking, while I’m still in it.

Speaking from experience, I have a prime time of roughly 6 days post-op where I begin to regret my life decisions, like why the fuck did I just get ACL surgery when I won’t be playing soccer anymore? I genuinely thought I made a huge mistake getting this surgery. As nervous as I was before my previous three surgeries, enthusiasm surged through my body because I truly believed that ACL surgery was my solution to becoming whole again. But I thought I found myself in the last 5 months I lived without that 8 mm ligament. I was living the ideal housewife life that Ali Wong so vividly engrained in my head: wake up at 9, go to CorePower Yoga, eat an avocado toast for breakfast with an iced coffee, work from home if I felt like it, watch Netflix to kill time and have Trader Joe’s frozen stir-fry for dinner with a side of Prosecco (or Prosecco with a side of stir-fry). I didn’t need soccer to feel whole again… or so I thought. Last semester seems so manageable now that I’m past it, but then I found this:

“What is it like to be on an athletic team when you yourself cannot participate in athletic activities? It’s ass. In more ways than one, I suffered at the end of my last soccer season ever. I may be going through my third ACL injury, but just because I’ve been through this twice before doesn’t make the third time around any easier. It’s like losing the first two rounds of a fight and you know you’re about to lose the third, and there’s nothing you can do except sit there and expect the final punch; all your swinging isn’t doing jack. To summarize the last 5 weeks of my college soccer “career”, I was consistently reminded that I can no longer play soccer as much as my heart wants to, because I was asked by the coaching staff to do favors that would not have been asked of a healthy player, I stood on a field for about 2 hours almost every day watching people do a thing that broke my heart, and I think I made my knee hurt more than it should have been from the mental stress I put myself through. I felt ostracized, constantly wrapped up in my own thoughts, and more alone than I had been in almost two years.”

I only wrote this last paragraph at the end of November, and within two months, I already forgot how negatively my thoughts had manifested themselves. I was clearly wrong; this is not what being whole sounds like. However, I am convinced that the recognition of these moments, our lowest points, are successes in themselves. As a society, we praise people for overcoming hardship, naturally, but we don’t praise the hardship itself. The struggle is truly admirable. From someone who has been perpetually struggling for the last 3 years, my advice is to keep embracing the suck.

I don’t regret the decisions I made that placed me in the position I’m in today, but I’m sad and I’m tired. I’ve been rehabbing from knee surgery for almost three quarters of my college career. I developed extremely unhealthy body image issues and blamed my body for its inability to stay healthy. In turn, I equated my health to my weight and my weight to my beauty and my beauty to others’ acceptance of me. I was forced to find an identity outside of sports that I wasn’t sure existed. I argued with and simultaneously cried to my parents, unconsciously blaming them for letting this happen to me and then feeling guilty for even thinking that to begin with. No one shares these kinds of failures when they’re talking about their “comeback story”. If they did, I would have found them by now. It’s contradictory in a sense; your failures and vulnerability are what you are least proud of but likely the greatest contributors to your success.

I don’t know who empowered me to write a blog about what fosters success when I am not necessarily successful myself, but I do know that your struggle is unique to you, and you should not dismiss it simply because you have yet to overcome it. In my journey to feeling whole again, I’ve learned that much. I don’t want people to struggle as I did after my first ACL surgery, constantly comparing myself to others’ progress I saw on Instagram of all places and turning my life into metrics and time frames. I love celebrating people’s successes, but I think we should all learn to cherish our downfalls because that’s how we grow. And to answer my existential question of why I willingly put myself through more surgery, rehab, scars, and tears, I guess it’s a combination of things. I want my ACL success story. I want more than Ali Wong’s ideal housewife life. I want my boyfriend to take me ice skating and hiking and all the other things we haven’t been able to do in the year I’ve known him. In a decade, I want to play tag with my kids and not worry about my knee giving out. I don’t want to be scared anymore, and if I have to struggle to get to that point, then so be it.