Two and a Half Months Post Third Op

About the last surgery… I FINALLY got videos of myself on anesthesia, part of my patellar tendon is not where it should be (but now I have an ACL), and I really can’t feel anything on the outside of my gash of a scar. My parents were willing to put me in an apartment in Baltimore in order to rehab at the Loyola facilities so that’s where I’ve been for the past month. I’ve been recovering better than I could’ve hoped for and I really don’t have anything to complain about. I miss my cat and my mom’s food but we’re making it work out here.

One Day, One Week, One Month, Two Months

But on another note, has your washer or dryer ever eaten one of your socks and when you’ve found out you lost it you’re like, ugh shit. Then you have to convince yourself that you don’t really need that sock since it’s just a sock even if it is your favorite sock because there are children in third world countries that don’t even have clean drinking water. But on very rare occasions, you sometimes find that missing sock and it feels like you’ve struck fucking gold because you were just lying to yourself the whole time that you didn’t really need that sock. In summary, that’s been my relationship with soccer for the past year and a half.

Here’s something that I wrote in November of last year, about 5 months out of my first surgery:

Thinking about the day I’ll get cleared to play. That’s about 4+ months out right now. (or so I thought lol) Not sure how I’ll feel when I’m cleared, if I’ll cry or be too happy to sleep. Today is the first day in a while I’ve recognized the emptiness inside of me. It’s like a black hole that you can’t fill with anything but miraculously fills when I play. I’ve definitely felt this hole before, just not for this long.

What the shit. Depressing, right? Well, here’s something I wrote about 2 months ago, 5 days out of my third surgery:

Some thoughts as I was hopping (literally) out of the shower. In any kind of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual hardship, embrace how much it sucks. Be humbled, thankful, and confident that God has bestowed upon you an opportunity to get better, and He believes that you can get through it. Once you’re at the bottom, there’s nowhere else to go but up, and that can be the best feeling if you let it.

Why am I sharing this? I have no idea. Maybe to prove a point to myself that there is such a thing as mental growth? Seems like an obvious statement but I’m such a narrow-visioned person that if I don’t see results the next day, I’m over it. These two paragraphs were written 10 months apart with two knee surgeries in between, so maybe I should learn to be more patient with myself.

I’ve reflected on MANY instances if this second recovery would be worth it, and it goes back to why I started this in the first place. Well, I first started soccer because I quit ballet and my dad forced me into it because I was eating like a pig at the time. My first year of travel soccer, I think I cried before almost every practice for about 3 months until I realized that crying beforehand was impairing my vision during practice. Why did I stick with it? Why didn’t I give it up? It would’ve saved me a whole lot of tears and the physical, emotional, and financial cost of three knee surgeries and plenty of other injuries and hardships. The answer is simple: because I sucked. I was so bad. But I could get better, and I loved pushing myself to be better. Isn’t that what I’m trying to do now, just trying to be better? So is it worth it? Who the fuck knows? It’s too much work trying to think about whether or not how worth this work will be.

One of the things I’ve noticed about being in a pandemic is that priorities shift. An emphasis has been placed on mental health because everyone’s mental health has been affected one way or another, changes in stress, mood swings, and emotional well-being. Being in a pandemic as an athlete is almost like being injured, except maybe even a little worse. It’s difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel if there’s any at all, you feel alone in the whole process, and the amount of uncertainty feels so stressful to cope with sometimes that you cannot sleep. I wouldn’t say I’m comfortable with these feelings, but I’m definitely familiar with them unfortunately. My biggest piece of advice would probably be to just let it suck. Fully acknowledge the suckiness of the situation and go from there. Don’t get mad at yourself for being pitiful about your circumstances when everyone else is also going through it. Be mindful of your feelings, but at the same time have confidence in your abilities to persevere through hardships because you grew up doing that in your sport.

“Even the word hopeless isn’t void of hope.” – A TV-Y7 Netflix show, how you like that?

#forthecontent #smartcookie