When Will You Be Normal Again?

I was recently asked by a professor, “When will you be normal again, Grace?” I wasn’t aware I was abnormal in that moment, but let’s consider my abnormality, for my professor’s sake. Referring to my knee, I presume, it’s actually a great question. I like questions that have complex answers, intertwined with experience and emotion, so this is a good question. It’s provoking and it had me thinking that entire day.

“What’s your timeline, Grace?”

“How’s your recovery to come back, Grace?”

“When will you be done with rehab, Grace?”

“Why can’t you be more like her, Grace?”

Wait, where the fuck did that last one come from? Oh yeah, I’m the one who asks that question. In fact, I asked myself that question so much, the sole perception of myself was through the comparison of others. My attributes were not my own; they were lesser or better than others’. It first started in pre-school. I had a friend, let’s call her Suzy, and I thought she was perfect, what a 4-year-old could perceive as perfection – tall (for a 4-year-old), skinny, blonde, light eyes, fair skin… perfect. I looked like Boo from Monsters Inc. until I was like 9. We were actually good friends, as in we would spend all our time together at the playground. Suzy and I didn’t go to the same grade school but ran into each other again in high school, and she got more perfect. While I was struggling to find pants that could miraculously fit my legs, ass, and waist, she seemed to be sliding gracefully into size 00 skinny jeans back when skinny jeans were still a thing. I wore those pants in my dreams. She models in Miami now, if that’s any indication of her beauty. She was nice too, not a total bitch, so you really had no reason to hate her besides her glowing aura that triggered choir sounds when she walked past you. From pre-school to then, I associated Suzy with normality, and I was clearly an outlier.

I might be reading too into this – I know for a fact I’m reading too into this – but I was fucking triggered by that question. It threw off my whole day. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I finally figured out why. I’ve been chasing “normal” my whole life. I don’t even know what normal is anymore. Maybe it’s being able to play soccer. Maybe it’s putting eyelid tape in your crease to get rid of your mono-lid and have bigger eyes. Maybe it’s being sure of your path in this lifetime. However, my statements on my knee injuries/surgeries and my experience with diversity and inclusion afforded me a scholarship to my dream school since I was 15. So, in my completely biased opinion, being normal is overrated and chasing normality is a waste of time. I hope anyone who’s in the same boat and reads this doesn’t waste their time with the same mistake.

For the first time in a long time, maybe even ever, I am happy being me. As beautiful as Suzy is, I no longer feel the need to try to look like her. Not being white at Loyola or fully Hispanic at home doesn’t bother me anymore. Upon these epiphanies, I learned to be grateful for what I’ve experienced with knee surgeries and sports injuries because it incentivized me to not allow this to happen to another girl like me, who just wanted to play soccer again. I wish I’ve felt this way my whole life because of how liberating this feeling is, but I would be full of shit if I said that getting to this point is easy. If someone asked me this question two years ago, I would have cried myself to sleep.

The reality is, unfortunately, as we have seen and experienced within the collegiate athletics community across the nation in the last several weeks, there are student-athletes that don’t get to this point where they are happy to be themselves, but they learn to become professional pretenders so that the outside world doesn’t see that unhappy part. It’s scarily impressive how someone can mask their internal self-destructive behavior from the people closest to them. I know someone who did this, and I’m so angry at myself for not asking her one more time if she’s ok, for not being more active in seeking professional help for her because the “adults” around her weren’t getting it done, for perhaps not telling her enough that she doesn’t need to be “normal” again to be happy. I might be too late.

I realize now that I am very fortunate to have experienced what I did with the support system that I had. It is extremely easy for me to hop on my soapbox and tell you to be grateful for your hardships when you’re still through the thick of them. I don’t know what’s going on in your life; I don’t know what support system you may or may not have; I don’t know the state of your mental health for me to be parading my mantras in front of your face. I do know that whatever you may think “normal” is, whether it’s hurdling the obstacle you have going on or what you think life was like a few years ago, it’ll never be enough. Normalcy doesn’t guarantee your happiness. Two years ago, I would have gone to my grave believing that playing soccer again will ensure my happiness, and this is me now calling myself out on my bullshit, medically retired with still 45 minutes of a college career under my belt, and no desire to play soccer again (at least for the time being).

I guess what I wanted to convey in this post is that a question with harmless intentions like the one my professor asked no longer bothers me, but I hope I was able to bring attention to how others might receive that comment with a trigger of other questions, like the ones I mentioned earlier, that push them over their tipping point, no matter how “silly” the initial question may seem. Clearly, my professor’s comment wasn’t so silly as he gets a whole blog post about him. Regardless, thank you to my professor for calling out my abnormality because it’s mine to keep.