“People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
In playing off my Shakespearean opening from last column, and in acknowledgement of my decision to make this column Part 2 of that column’s prologue, I wanted to branch off of the famous English playwright and segue into one of the works from a man whom I believe is among the greatest American writers ever: John Steinbeck. You can agree to disagree with me on that, but Steinbeck’s innate sense of social perception and his understanding of human psychology that is ever-present in his literary works and developed characters have always impressed and fascinated me. The Winter of Our Discontent (the title is from the opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III) is one of my favorite Steinbeck novels and it’s the above quote that I would like to begin this column.
Fear.
The emotion everyone has (whether you admit it or not) and the particular feeling that I think everyone should attempt to individually define and understand for themselves.
What’s my biggest fear? I used to always, unfailingly respond to this question simply and assertively: Failure. I used to genuinely believe that failing, falling short, and not being considered “good enough,” were the things that scared me the most in life. It kept me up at night, it motivated me, it forced me out of my comfort zone. I was and always used to be TERRIFIED of failure. If you ask me that same question now, my answer is a bit more complicated. Yes, I still have an aversion to the word and the feeling of being considered a failure, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that failure is not what I am truly scared of. Hell, I fail every single day of my life. Part of being my own biggest critic is my natural tendency to view most of everything I do as being a failure. Failure has taught me some of the greatest and most important lessons of my life. Failure has made me better, stronger and wiser. I owe a lot to failure. I’m not scared of it, but here is what I am scared of: not fulfilling my potential.
Potential.
That word is thrown around a lot, isn’t it? It’s used excessively by mathematicians and scientists, writers and orators, motivators and teachers, politicians and coaches. Everyone seems to love the word “potential” because the word in itself denotes vagueness and ambiguity. It’s just an easy word to throw around to describe capabilities that are presently intangible and largely unpredictable. People can try to estimate or define or understand potential, but the truth is when you’re talking about individuals, human potential is essentially subjective to the people themselves. I think for the most part (with a few exceptions), potential is self-limiting, self-defined and self-fulfilled. And that is exactly why I fear it.
I want to know that at the end of my life, I did everything I possibly could to be the best person, athlete, giver, lover, teacher, worker, friend and family member that I could possibly be. I want to fulfill every part of the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of my life and know that I lived a life that mattered — a life that made a true impact. That is the standard that I have set for my existence, and I’m terrified of falling short of that.
Why am I mentioning this now? Because in the past year I became my worst fear. I was living a life of wasted potential.
Things didn’t get easier after that defining summer headlining into my junior year of college. In fact, they got harder. I tried to manage things the best I could, and soccer helped me cope with all the instability and uncertainty that was happening in my life off the field, but I think I should have realized I was just putting off my eventual breakdown. Usually, when life-altering changes and conditions occur in your life, you want to know why — How and when did this all happen? I am no different. I wanted to know that, too. While I understand that cataclysmic events generally don’t happen out of nowhere (there are usually warning signs or bad habits or poor decisions leading to drastic alterations in your daily life), I think my downward spiral and the time that marked the start of everything building up and breaking me down was officially put into motion on November 2, 2012 — the day my collegiate soccer career ended.
When a condition or a problem becomes too great,
humans have the protection of not thinking about it.
My senior season at Fairfield meant everything to me. For reasons that are far too lengthy to address in this column, being able to help lead the team that had become my family to a conference championship and an NCAA tournament berth was everything I had been dreaming about since the summer before my freshman year of college. As hard as my teammates and I worked and as much as we cared, unfortunately we fell short of our goals and lost in our conference semifinals. Not only that, I didn’t even get a chance to finish the last game of my collegiate career as I was knocked out of the game just before halftime with one of the worst concussions of my career and a bleeding head that later needed a dozen stitches.
It’s funny, when I look back on that game (I’m still freaked out about how little I actually remember of it), I really wouldn’t have done anything differently if I was given the chance to do it all over again. I still would have gone up for that header and I still would have been confident that I was going to win it and come out of it fine, just as I had hundreds of times before. Honestly, I think that injury was just inevitable for me. But there is something I would do over if I could. If I knew then what I know now, I would have acknowledged that sinking, heartbreaking, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as I sat on the bench in the second half and watched my team fall short of winning the game, and I would have tried to make myself view the present setback as an opportunity and as a catalyst for coming back stronger and pursuing my professional career with a revitalized vigor and determination, rather than letting it almost ruin me. I would have realized that this was the ending of my collegiate career, but not the end of my entire soccer career. I would have told myself that the reason it hurt so badly is because I cared so much and was so passionate about the game of soccer and I would have forced myself to realize that those feelings are important and that they mean something. Most of all, I would warn myself of what’s to come in the near future if I didn’t believe in all of that.
Instead, I just let it hurt and I let the pain linger and I felt sorry for myself and all of a sudden, I was just lost. I was injured, defeated and I had convinced myself that I no longer had a dream.
I would like to say this disillusionment only lasted a few weeks or a few months, but I was in a pretty dark place for a pretty long time. Despite the feeling of being stuck in quicksand and feeling like every day I was getting farther away from the person I wanted to be, there were glimmers of light and flashes of hope in the darkness: Coaching my premier-level U-11 girls team with my Fairfield coach, Sean Driscoll, and his wife, Heather Driscoll (two people I consider to be my mentors and like family), helped me stay close to soccer and fulfill my passion for coaching and growing the game. My close friends were constant sources of support and helped me stay on track and graduate. My family, going through immense hardships of their own at home, still managed to be there for me and checked in frequently. After a brief tryout, the Boston Breakers invited me to their preseason and gave me the opportunity to vie for a roster spot for the upcoming NWSL season.
But nothing really made me happy and I felt like I was living a life that left me scared to face the beginning of every new day. I was trying to give as much as I could to the people around me (especially my struggling family back home) — money, support, time, advice — but nothing ever felt good enough. I felt that no matter what I did, I wasn’t fulfilling the potential of being the best version of myself that I could and wanted to be. It was tough. It was frustrating. It was draining. I hit rock bottom once, then twice, then five more times. The reality was, I had given everything I could (which was never enough), and at the end of the day I had to face what was left of myself — a person I hated — an out of shape, depressed, dreamless insomniac.
Then something amazing happened. I rediscovered my outlet and revitalized my passion — I found the joy in playing soccer again.
To be alive at all is to have scars.
You know on airplanes when you’re about to take off and the flight attendants start explaining what to do if your biggest fear becomes realized and you start plunging 40,000 feet to your imminent death? Well they’ve tried to make these “preflight safety information demonstrations” comical and entertaining over the years, but the message is always the same. If your life is in danger, you better make damn sure you follow these rules to give yourself the best possible chance of survival. One of these rules never made sense to me for the longest time until I realized that my ignorance and refusal to follow this rule (metaphorically speaking) was causing the demise of my own life. The rule is this:
“In case cabin air pressure should change, a panel above your seat will open, revealing oxygen masks. Reach up and pull the mask toward you and place it over your nose and mouth. Strap it over your head and tighten it. Breathe normally. Please ensure to adjust your own mask before assisting others.”
Wait. What was that last part? Help yourself before you help your loved ones or the people around you? How selfish is that? Now, I’m not self-righteous and I’m no Mother Theresa, but I never understood the reasoning behind those instructions and it always frustrated me to advise people to do that.
It took a while, but now I get it. I get it because in a metaphorical way, I lived it. I was living every day in a pressurized, chaotic environment that was sucking all the air and life from me, and I didn’t have an oxygen mask to sustain me. I was struggling for air and purpose and meaning and happiness because I was literally spending all of my energy trying to help and save other people. What I didn’t realize was that to be of any help to anyone else or realize any of the potential within myself that I wanted to fulfill, I needed to save myself first. Before I could change anything that was going on around me, I needed to change what was going on within me. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t helping others to the best of my ability because I was struggling so much just trying to breathe myself. So I had to find my air again, and I had to ensure that this lifeline was completely in place so I could move beyond my fear and start fulfilling my potential and living my life again. At this point in my life, I realized that my oxygen was soccer.
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]nce I had my oxygen back, fulfilling my potential became everything I was striving for again rather than everything I felt I was falling short of and subsequently fearing and avoiding. I found myself beginning to dream again. And the dream started with two opportunities that saved my life:
- My invitation to rejoin the New England Mutiny for the summer WPSL season.
- The opportunity to use that experience to prepare for my invitation to play professionally in Sweden.
Thanks for reading the second part of this long-winded prologue, and I look forward to picking up next time with a discussion on the importance of taking advantage of the opportunities that you’re given and finding ways to start actualizing the potential within you.
Breathe. Battle. Believe.
L. Reilly