Back to Reality

Whew! What a whirlwind... it's been a year since I started my journey as an athlete with the US national collegiate netball team. Looking back at the year, I have truly been blessed with incredible teammates, diligent coaches, and a great organization to play with.

My blog following my African adventure with netball fell off the map during the last few days of the trip, so I've decided to use this 1st year milestone to share my reflections.

My life was pretty segregated a year ago: my pre-collegiate life with RSD/CRPS was boxed neatly away from my current experiences working with the Y and as a college student with a new start. My Y team didn't know about my injured past and personally, my "new start self" struggled to acknowledge that those five years affected who I was, and am, today. 

With my role on the team, I suddenly found myself in the convergence of separate lives and the dissonance that subsequently followed. My Y became my home base for training in addition to being my workplace; my position as a newly national athlete became a celebration of the person I am today in light of the huge obstacles of the past.

It was like watching a child at camp try to weave three strands of thread together in an attempt to make a friendship bracelet for the first time. The strands can strengthen each other when twisted in the right sequence but what happens, more often than not, is a mess of tangled knots and frustration.

For the years and years I struggled with RSD/CRPS, I wanted to be like everyone else. From my perspective, their lives seemed to be braided together beautifully with ease while I wanted to be able to walk, to be on the basketball team, and to stress about math tests instead of medical tests. I've discovered and embraced that I'm not like everyone else; I am not cutout from a cookie cutter.

I was sure when I ran my marathon that I didn't want my RSD/CRPS to define the accomplishment of running a marathon. I wanted to be like the rest of the 40,000 athletes I ran with that day: awesome because of crossing the finish line of 26.2 miles, not because of the distance I had to travel to get to the starting line.

Today, I can embrace the extra miles I put in before my marathon and position as a captain on the national netball team. Not everyone I meet will get to know the fullness of how I got to the starting line before I meet them, but I am incredibly thankful for this recent development the ability to stand tall when the opportunity to share my story arises. 

With this new milestone, I've learned how to tie together the strands of the past by acknowledging the importance of each piece and love the whole thing. More often than "knot", I find that it's a beautiful mess with limitless potential.

Thank you for pouring out your support, especially over the past year! I will continue to blog and share milestone moments because something is always happening in this mess of mine that may help you untangle yours. ~