For the last year I’ve been taking the fight directly to the nerve damage in my spine, yelling at it, screaming at it, telling it that under no circumstances is it going to beat me. I keep saying to it, myself, and sometimes God, I’m gonna win. I’m gonna win damnit! Win! I also say some other things not fit to print.
Kicking up the fight against my chronic nerve pain has meant making a concerted effort to stretch the muscles in my back, no matter how badly it hurts and no matter how badly it temporarily worsens the pain. As the nerves are stretched and over-stimulated beyond their capabilities, jolts of electricity shoot through me and the pain increases tenfold, but within a day the pain starts to subside. After a few more days, when my body resets itself for the next round of stretches, I get to start from a slightly lower pain point than before because new nerves have grown into the spaces I created. It’s torturous but it moves the needle forward. Certainly, the “no pain, no gain” mantra comes to mind a lot during these exercises. “Winning”, however, does not.
No Clear Path
In fact, it’s a little hard to tell what’s happening with my insides. Sometimes I can tell that the pains are coming from new nerve growth and sometimes I’m not so sure I didn’t do something to exacerbate the damage. The only thing I know is that I have MCAS, aka mast cell disease, which caused an allergic reaction that fried my entire nervous system, and that healing will take time. How much, no one can say. The doctor who diagnosed me said it could take two years before the nerves heal and we blew by that mark a few months ago. If I combine the two years since my diagnosis with the time this trouble all started, we’re talking four years and one month where I’ve been getting electrocuted from the inside, every single day. Good grief.
But I’ve come so far from the dark days. Those days where it seemed my last days were imminent. And during those days, the only thing that got me through was not the belief that I will ever beat this thing — that I will ultimately “win” — but my faith that somehow it will eventually get better. Faith that the same improbable chance that brought me here in the first place can help see me through yet again. Because why not? What else can you do? My condition is such that there isn’t any medicine that can really help me and there’s almost none that I can take without suffering an allergic reaction and more nerve damage. So when modern medicine can’t help you, what else can you lean on but faith?
Questionable Faith
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lose my faith along the way. And I’m not talking about my belief in God or anything like that. But in the early days of my battle, I did lose faith that it would get better. When doctors told me I was “screwed” or that “it was in my head,” and offered me no solutions for my yellowing eyes, arrhythmias, and spasms, my faith spiraled away from me. Ironically, only when I completely lost faith in the medical community did I regain faith in myself and start the long road back to recovery.
Faith in oneself is not an easy skill to master and seems to be getting harder by the day. I worry for my children and their peers, because in today’s digital age they see so much online that erodes their confidence. There is always someone on YouTube doing something “better” than they could ever imagine, and it makes them question how they could ever measure up. Everyone knows about the body shaming issues all of this social media presents for kids, but there’s a victory shaming thing going on as well. Every now and then I hear one of my kids or their friends say that they may forego doing something because they don’t think they will be great at it, so it’s probably not worth it to try. Whatever happened to doing something simply because you like it?
Heading Towards a Better Place
Despite the helicopter parents’ efforts to make sure everyone got a trophy, something weird is going on. Maybe it’s the heightened focus on club sports or the never-ending assault of social media images showing our kids other people’s awesomeness, but something is definitely telling our kids to give up on stuff unless they think they can be among the best at it. Perhaps by trying to eliminate winners in youth sports we made kids decide that the only thing worth doing is winning at all costs, and if that’s not possible, they should drop it and pursue other activities. Is that too much of a stretch? I mean it kinda makes sense. Kids are going to rebel and reject any stupid construct parents create for them.
Anyway, my point in bringing all this up is that the path to victory is not through the “I will and must win” attitude, but from having the faith that wherever you are at, whether it’s health related, sports related, academic related, love related, or anything-in-life related, you can end up in a better place than you are in now. That you can do things beyond other’s expectations and even the expectations of yourself. The “I will win” attitude can help a lot in spits and bursts, but that’s only in the moment. That’s the short game and only benefits you if you already have a solid faith in yourself.
The long game is built upon faith. Faith that you have what it takes to keep going, and that you can move the needle towards a better outcome, win or lose, whether that’s for the love of the game, love of your art, or perhaps more simply, just for the love of life.
Defining Faith
Faith is what takes a team of rookies that has losing season after losing season, to finally winning it all. It’s what keeps you working for that scholarship, or pursuing your “reach” college, or that dream job, even when you know the odds are against you. Faith is what keeps you working for the maybes and the what-ifs, all of which you have no way to predict. Faith is what keeps you marching towards the victory you don’t know if you’ll ever win. But on the day you do win, should you be so lucky, it’s your faith that’s rewarded. That’s where the euphoria from victory comes from. You’re not celebrating your talent or your good fortune when you win. You’re celebrating what your faith made you believe you might be able to do.
The Gift of Losing
Growing up I was on a lot of losing teams. I was on some winning teams too, but a lot of losing teams. But despite the losses, I kept playing for the love of the sport and because of my faith that someday we could maybe turn things around. And wouldn’t you know, eventually we did. Sometimes it took a year, sometimes three, but I spent a lot of time on teams that got their butts kicked for a while before winning it all. Or at least before having a winning season. I learned a lot about faith during those years.
My kids are not blessed with the same good luck as me; they’ve only been on winning teams. None of them are even 14 yet and most have them have already won two state soccer championships, won baseball championships, played on a bunch of All-Star teams, and I don’t think any of them have experienced a single losing season. Not once. Isn’t that terrible? With all of this winning, how will they develop their faith in themselves? Winning threatens their resolve when trying out for a sport they may be new to, or when participating in something down the road where they will have to start from the bottom.
What Happened?
My wife and I are to blame for a lot of this, I suppose. We both coached our kids — her in soccer and me in baseball — all so that they could have great experiences that hopefully included a lot of wins. My wife had been on a lot of successful teams growing up and knew the confidence that one can derive from that. My mission was more about making sure my kids didn’t experience all of the same misery I endured. I also didn’t want them stuck with some lunatic drunk for a coach. Not that this happens much anymore, but childhood trauma is real.
There was some value to my childhood experiences, though, and just to make sure I imparted some of the lessons I learned growing up on the young, I may have let a couple losses “happen” in the early parts of the season in order to help develop their faith. Because faith in oneself, regardless of the outcome, is the only victory that lasts, and can only ever be won by learning how to handle loss. Hopefully, those losses will help a few of those kids down the road, and my ability to shave points in Little League wasn’t a total unethical waste.
Faith Grows in Opposition to Resistance
A little childhood misery ain’t such a bad thing. Being battle tested and continuing on, if only for the possibility of changing things tomorrow, is where life really happens. The battles of today are what prepare you for the bigger battles of tomorrow. In truth, I don’t think without some of the health issues I dealt with growing up, I would have had the internal faith I’ve needed to face my current predicament.
When I was a kid, I spent countless nights fighting to breathe, as childhood asthma gave me nightly attacks that would sometimes last for two or three hours. No amount of medicine could really help then either, and I had to train my body to quiet itself down as I sat up in bed, grabbing at my chest, hoping to expand my airways. Those were long nights. But somehow — I don’t know how — after about four years, the attacks started to go away, and I haven’t had an attack since my 20s. So, here’s hoping that now is like then, and I’m about to get through another four-year battle. Faithfully, I might just make it.