The Rocky Road Here

As I prepare to write this post, I know it’s going to be a longer one and I don’t necessarily know if it’ll be a popular one. While I aim (keyword – aim) to write an article a week, I try not to force the words. It’s unsurprisingly easier writing when you don’t have to, but I know that the lifeblood of blogs are posts. Anyway, I try and write when I’m particularly moved to say something. Today, I’m moved to share a more in-depth section of my story, one that I wish I had heard when I was in high school. I would’ve taken a deep breath and probably relaxed a little. That being said, if this post helps even one single person, it’ll have been worth it. And those are odds I can’t ignore.

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I’ve always known what my long-term goals were. My mom’s a school counselor who’s shown me that happiness and following your passions are the keys to a good life. My dad, a realist, has reminded me that financial stability helps achieve that comfortably. I am now in a place in life where I no longer fear the unknown in the same way, it more or less represents excitement of what might be. I say this from my childhood bedroom, post undergrad, lacking socialization in the middle of a pandemic. I obviously haven’t always felt this way.

I’ve been writing off the impacts of life in quarantine as a moment in time for a while now, but I think it’s time that I acknowledge that these past nine months are a more significant life event than I’d hoped for. Yet, just because COVID’s been a vastly negative event, doesn’t mean I haven’t gained major, positive character and value changes from it. So, now I introduce my journey to where I am today, through a much different lens than I might have pre-COVID. (That’s me also acknowledging the bias this will have from all of the deep thoughts quarantine has given me time for.)

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When I made the decision to continue playing club soccer in New Hampshire, I didn’t realize that soccer would transform into something less about fun and the joy of the sport, and more about a vehicle to bring you to college. Games were still about winning, but also showcasing individual skills to recruiters and gaining attention from the right schools. My favorite element of the sport – the team culture – became less important as we all pushed to get noticed. (And for what? How many of us ended our collegiate careers prematurely?)

Soccer became a job, which as you can imagine, sucked the fun right out of it. I would go to school from 8-3:30 and leave for New Hampshire around 4:00pm. Sometimes I wouldn’t get back until 10 or 11pm. Homework was something I tried to do during the car rides, but usually ended up cramming in when I got home; the last box to be checked until I could finally go to bed. Weekends weren’t better, it just meant there was more time in the day to travel for soccer. I often frequented New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. School, with it’s boring subjects and time-consuming assignments felt second tier.

I was a lucky student. Despite not applying myself and spending the study halls before classes doing homework I had forgotten about, I think I managed to scrape by with a 3.45 or something. I attribute most of that to my awesome teachers who made me want to try. Falmouth, like many other affluent towns, places the utmost of importance on college (if it’s not name brand, don’t bother) and your future career path (it had better be science-y). Students are expected to be well-rounded with high grades in all subjects, be a member of service clubs, volunteer every second they can, exceed in some extracurricular, and be a decent human being. On top of soccer, that felt completely unachievable.

It is worth mentioning that there were people who did just that, but at what cost? How happy were they? What was their quality of life? I’m almost thankful that I didn’t feel the need to give into those pressures and play the game – simply for my own mental health. Plus, it was all going to work out anyway, I just didn’t know it yet.

The pressure I did feel was to commit to college for soccer. Our club and it’s coaches wanted commitments for all of us and I had hoped to do that by my junior year. When it didn’t happen, I entered a constant state of immobilizing stress. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I kind of knew what I didn’t want. I wasn’t interested in DIII, not because it’s a lower level of soccer (Carnegie Mellon Women’s Soccer proved that), but because I wanted soccer year-round. I didn’t want a small school; I wasn’t interested in knowing everyone. And I didn’t want to stay in Maine – I was ready to see “the world” and get out of the culture here.

When I finally committed to Slippery Rock, I was on a preseason team bonding trip with Falmouth Girl’s Soccer, eating ice cream on Peaks Island. I went and sat on the curb away from everyone, talked with Jessie and told her I was in. At that very moment, a weight – that was heavier than I’d ever realized – lifted from my shoulders. It was the first step in a major transformation that I didn’t know what coming.

I want to pause here to mention something that I feel is crucial to this story. A slight tangent, so bear with me. There’s a message here!

In my junior year, my teammate and close friend, Lexi and I went on a joint visit to Trinity College in Hartford. It was the first of many stops for my mom and I (and the same trip when I realized I probably shouldn’t study physical therapy). Anyway, Lexi and I are halfheartedly going through the motions at this school, neither of us are super engaged, and we were especially bored during the campus tour run by admissions because the coach had already walked us around. I will always remember those two tour guides with their bubbly attitudes and long ponytails telling us that we can’t expect to be different people when we get to college. They told us we weren’t going to workout more, study harder, or like different things. We were still going to be us. Expect to be the same.

Fast-forward to my freshman year at Slippery Rock. I’m excelling at school for the first time in a long time. I finished my first semester with a 4.0 and finished second semester the same way. I kind of blew myself away. Those two girls and their message (which was basically repeated at every college tour I attended) had me convinced that I was forever a kid that didn’t care that much about school. That was so wrong.

I had straight A’s until my junior year (IYKYK), finished with a GPA just below a 4.0 (3.966), applied myself, contributed in class, sat in the front row, had great relationships with my professors, joined clubs and challenged myself in addition to being a DII student-athlete. I did everything that I was supposed to do in high school, in college. The difference was, I did it because I wanted to, not because I was supposed to. I was still me but now I was an academically better version of me. I finally believed in my own brain and wasn’t intimated by the ridiculous lengths people went to in high school to prove how good their brains were.

I learned more about my home once I left it. It’s really hard to grasp the bigger picture when you’re in the thick of it. I realized that the ridiculous standards that kids are held to in Falmouth, Maine don’t exist everywhere else. Once I was able to evaluate what I wanted versus what others expected of me, I excelled. If you’re someone who got trapped in that toxic frame of mind in high school, I’d love to hear your story.

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So, now I’m here. There’s still much that I left out, but that journey’s been nagging me for a while. I didn’t want my success in college to be attributed to that pre-set path, because it wasn’t. It was a stressful, frustrating, self-doubting road that I got through simply by putting one foot in front of the other a lot of the time. I’m proud of the work that I put in to get to this point.

I think that one of the most important traits people our age can have is resiliency. Freshman year of college, we were standing on Egli Field doing a walkthrough before our game later that day. My coach, Jessie, asked if anyone knew what resilient meant. There was silence and I piped in from the back of the circle that “it’s the ability to bounce back.” Jessie laughed and told everyone that yes, that was basically the dictionary definition. Little did they know, I’d been hyper-aware of it since eighth grade.

It was in Mrs. Knight’s health class that we were told to grab our books from the back of the room one day, that I found it. On the margin of the righthand page, there was a blurb about resiliency that gave me the definition I would tell my team five years later. It was an ability that strengthened your mental toughness and apparently fourteen-year-old me thought that was pretty cool. Today, that blurb has helped me change my mindset when things were out of my control.

I’m a planner. I love routines and schedules and appointments. When I graduated, I was supposed to have six months to work and save money before I started my master’s program at Boston College. (If you’re thinking, “hey, isn’t that one of those name brand schools?” Yes, yes it is. I hate it, but I’m still stuck in the game, too.) Obviously that’s looked a lot different, but not necessarily for the worse. I’m bouncing back, rolling with the punches and working at being okay with not having a concrete plan for a while.

I’ve since deferred my enrollment to BC until 2022 because I want to be able to attend class in person (I don’t know if you realized this, but there’s this Coronavirus thing…) and have since picked up an online master’s program to do in the meantime. I have no idea what I want to do when I “grow up” (when do we become grown up?). Right now, I’m focusing on what I’m interested in since after all, one of my long-term goals is to do something I love.

COVID has definitely thrown me off course but the time it’s given me to design my life and reflect on what I’ve done has been so beneficial. Hopefully we won’t have another period of time like this during our lifetimes (I probably just jinxed it), so we need to learn what we can about ourselves before it’s over. If you’re entering that time of life when you’re looking into colleges or preparing to head to college (or even in college!), know that you have the ability to redefine yourself. The beautiful thing about going to college, especially when it’s far away, is the blank slate. As long as you’re willing to put in the work, you can be anything or anyone you want to be. So, what’s stopping you?

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I can’t in good conscience write this without mentioning and thanking some of my beloved mentors who were pivotal to my success at Slippery Rock.

Jessie Griggs (you weren’t Giegucz yet, okay), Mark Sappington, Dr. Breitenstein, Dr. Walker, Dr. Stull, Aksel Casson and Dr. Michaels

I’m so grateful for all of the assistance, guidance, and conversations over the past four years that without a doubt made me a better person and student.