Who are you after you lose a piece of your identity? Who am I without the one thing that used to occupy all my thoughts and my free time? Who am I without a team and a coach? I have spent the past year trying to answer these questions. During my first year of college, I played volleyball at a small Division Three school where I woke up early for 6 a.m. practices and spent my weekends traveling to games. My afternoons were filled by lift sessions with the strength coach and hours laying around in the athletic training room. I spent every minute with teammates, and I fixated on each word my coach said to me. All of the years before college looked very similar to this, dedicating all of high school to practicing this sport. Then, when I transferred, as much as I tried to deny it at the time, I made a conscious decision to stop playing over the summer. Despite knowing I was out of practice, not making it on the club volleyball team still burned, and I began a long fight with myself to figure out who I was outside of the sport that had previously engulfed my life.
Athletics provided structure to my life, and the busy schedule made me a master at time management. The constant requirement to work with others made me fall in love with anything that required teamwork. Many of my close friends doubled as my teammates. It seemed like athletics would provide the path to success and validation. Volleyball made up my adolescence, and I used everything it gave me to craft my personality. Then, all of a sudden, I had the chance to recreate myself; I was 19 years old, and I was no longer a student-athlete.
The further away I get from being a student-athlete, the more I question my experience. It was not healthy to let one thing consume my thoughts so entirely, to let one thing dictate all the other decisions I made in my life such as where I went to school and what friends I chose.
Why did I really need to walk around with a backpack with my last name printed on it? Why was I so attached to a jersey, a number and a court? Maybe it was because I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. Although, if that is the case, then why has being in a club or part of a college community not been fulfilling enough? I have tried to replace the physical aspect with other exercises, but it’s not even close to being as addictive as playing volleyball was.
However, as much as I seemed to miss the sport, I also was making little effort to continue playing after I left. I played a few games, and each time, I would leave feeling worse than before. I would be so hard on myself, and I could hear my coach’s voice from the previous year listing the ways in which I was an inadequate player, which had meant to me that I was an inadequate person. I hated life without volleyball, but I also couldn’t continue a life with volleyball, so what now? To be honest, it seemed like there was nothing I could do; replacing volleyball with something else was just a band-aid fix, but I tried nonetheless. I put all my effort into my schoolwork, mostly because it was something I could control. In the spring, I declared an English minor, and I devoted more of my time to reading and writing, which still could not fill the void.
I made new friends at school, the best of which actually is a student-athlete. This somehow makes me feel better and worse at the same time. I simultaneously live vicariously through her and am insanely jealous. Being so close with her makes me feel like I am still an athlete, but occasionally there are acute reminders that I am so far from that life.
The more I have struggled to validate myself outside of the sport, the more I have realized how much I let my fear rule my life. Maybe the reason I can’t let go of the student-athlete identity is because it is a safe identity. Hiding behind volleyball has meant that most people would like me and I would like me, and I would have a built-in structure to my life. Now, I spend everyday trying to discover who I am without volleyball. What I’ve found is that I still have friends, and I still have structure. In fact, the only person who has been unkind to me about not being an athlete is myself.
As I look back at the past year and reflect on my life without the sport, I feel lost. I find myself evaluating who I am not rather than acknowledging and building upon who I am. This sounds silly to me now because following who I am is how I fell in love with volleyball in the first place. I beat myself up in disappointment that I couldn’t give my childhood self what she had dreamed of; I couldn’t be a college athlete.
When I take a closer look I realize that although I did have the jersey, the backpack and the title, being a college athlete was not nearly as fulfilling as the years of practice and training I had put in to get to that spot. Instead of trying to carry around this identity that no longer fits me, letting myself discover life beyond volleyball could provide even more community, structure and fulfillment than my life in pursuit of college athletics ever did. The first step to this journey is quieting the voice of that old coach telling me my personal value is worthless if my athletic performance fails. Instead, I must empower my own voice. If I would only redirect my gaze ahead instead of behind me, I would see that the life around me is already abundant with the fulfillment of friendship, ambition and education that I have been so frantically searching for; I simply must reach out and embrace it.