Dear Injured Athlete,
Being injured is not your fault.
And being injured definitely isn't easy. That statement even seems too trivial to describe the hardship getting injured is. When a sport is all you've ever had to define your self worth, not being able to play anymore is devastating. It leaves you bare and broken, and wondering how all those years of hard work got you here. How everything you've done just got you a torn meniscus or a decimated nerve-ending and an empty space in your heart you're not sure will ever go away. There's so much blame, probably on yourself, for not being good enough or careful enough. You feel worthless, tainted even, that you failed the team and that your body failed the team.
I think that worthlessness comes from a fear of failure that's installed in a lot of athletes' minds. Not being able to play your sport seems like the worst failure of all. Everyday, a thousand little scenarios run through my head about what I could have done different so I wouldn't have gotten hurt. I think about how it ended, why it ended, and why I couldn't fix it. The thing is, even with all this thinking, I can never make any sense of softball's absence in my life. I try to make it a tangible feeling. I try to figure out when it happened, where it happened, why it happened, but I always come up empty. The lack of answers always leaves me with myself as the single constant in all of this. It is my fault, my injury says. It is my body, it is my fault and I have failed.
I'm here to tell you, injured athlete, that you cannot control something that is absolutely uncontrollable. You could take every precaution in the world and still end up with an injury somehow. And if you did take every precaution in the world, it definitely wouldn't have felt like you were alive while you were playing. I equate losing your ability to play a sport you love to losing a lover. Something that used to make you feel special, important, loved, and needed, is gone. Wiped completely from your reality and future. That pain is so much to bare. Don't hurt yourself anymore than you have to. Don't feel like a failure over something you can't control. More importantly, don't let anyone else make you feel like a failure over something you can't control.
This pain is yours to confront, yours to face, and yours to define. And it will get better with time. Nothing might ever really replace the sport in your heart, but you can and will find new passions, new desires and new dreams. Your sports dream might be over, but the world is vast and filled with opportunity. Don't waste it thinking about what could have been forever. Face forward, face the sun, face someone you love, face anywhere but down and move towards it. That is how you will find solace, and that is how you will move on.
