On being needed and loved
Growing up, I formed most of my identity around being an athlete. Sports gave me confidence and made me feel that I was a part of something bigger than myself. Simultaneously, however, I was insecure and did not want to step on anyone's toes.
During one football practice in my sophomore year of high school, I remember being on the scout team (essentially pretending to be the opponent team for an upcoming game) and trying to block an older guy that I admired and respected. He was furious that I held him and he yelled at me saying, "Get the fuck off of me! What the fuck are you doing?"
I felt tremendous shame in that moment. I sincerely wanted to do what I was supposed to and did not mean to upset him. I felt foolish and wondered if I was hurting the team more than I was helping it.
Within any successful team there exist leaders who have an understanding of the truth: the current state of affairs. They do not care about being liked. They care about winning and will tell everyone else exactly what needs to be said. I was never that person because I never wanted to cause conflict. I was afraid to be hated; ironically, I also feared being loved, because true love requires allowing people the opportunity to hate you.
The most striking example of this phenomenon I have experienced came from my college strength coach, a man marked with a profound intolerance for mediocrity. His ability to walk into a room and smell it lazing about was extraordinary. He was a perpetually lit match and underperformance was gasoline, the result igniting an explosion of anger and contempt.
He was harsh but he was honest. He often yelled. He told us we were disgusting and disgraceful. But underpinning all of that was the reality that he knew what we were capable of. He knew it and would not let us not know it either.
At the end of four years, our strength coach had become the most beloved figure among us. For our senior dinner, where all the graduating players were required to give a speech, the vast majority of my teammates thanked our strength coach specifically, expressing how influential he was in their lives. They extolled how he laid the foundation for the team to be successful and how he made them better individually than they ever thought they could be. We truly loved him at the end of the journey, but in the beginning, he was feared because he seemed cruel. It took years for us to understand the potential that he saw all along, and to realize that his fiery disposition was steeped in love.
A year has passed and I am now a junior year in high school and my football team is in the middle of the second half of the state quarter-finals. We had lost the state championship the year before and we were haunted by that defeat. Being so close to victory motivated everyone to complete dedication and focus. I play defensive end and the opposing team is in the red zone, about to score.
Their running back charges forward behind his offensive line and everyone tangles into one amorphous blob. I get caught underneath the pile and twist my ankle. After the play, the bodies climb off of me and I limp away. At that moment, my teammate, who yelled at me the previous year, grabs me and says, "You can't go out, we need you."
I had never heard those words in that order before. He needs me? The team needs—me? My existence is not something that you simply deal with? In that moment, I would have rather died than let him down or anyone else on my team for that matter. And, in a way, that idea shapes my current understanding of what love is.
We went on to win the game and eventually the state championship but that memory sticks out. What does it mean to need someone? I need others more than how the conveniences of modern life make it seem. I may remove myself from society like Thoreau or build both literal and figurative fortresses of money, shelter, giant American pickup trucks1, etc. to separate myself from life's dangers, but I cannot escape the need to love and be loved.
I want to be better about telling the people in my life how much I care for them, how much they inspire me and, ultimately, how much I love them. I want to speak the truth, horrifying as it may be (they may hate me as a result), and figure out our differences and stick together despite them because that is love's foundation: making it together through the challenges, building trust and resilience. At the end of the journey, real love remains.
10:43 David Foster Wallace on Responsibility and Maturity