Facing Fear: My Love Letter to The Game
I was going over our new vocabulary words with my students today and one of our words was "confrontational." Many of them asked me to further explain what the word means and to use it in context, so I did.
My explanation made me think.
I don’t like confrontation, but I was recently faced with a giant, a giant that required confrontation. I used to play softball, and if you have been keeping up with some of my posts, you might be familiar with bits and pieces of my story.
If not, I will share a condensed version with you. I used to play softball. I was a fastpitch pitcher and I wanted to play in college.I worked so hard -- usually five days a week -- but my time was eventually cut short whenever I began having back trouble. Eventually, I had to stop playing after surgeries and countless therapy.
If I was ever going to save my quality of life, I had to quit the sport.
This was nearly seven years ago, but I can’t say I ever really starred that confrontation in the face -- the confrontation of my fear of quitting the game.
Fear.
That’s the giant it’s taken me seven years to stand up to. That’s the giant I’m coming to terms with.
“Fear is confrontational. To overcome fear, we have to meet it face-to-face.”
I had no idea that I still had fear lurking in my heart from seven years of battling with back pain and having to quit a sport, but as I have recently discovered, fear and I have just met face to face.
This year I took a leap of faith and got involved with coaching softball at my school, alongside the head coach and assistant coach.
When I asked the coach about helping, my heart screamed “Yes,” and my mind screamed, “Do you really think you have the guts?”
Fear.
I am not sure that I was ready for the feeling I would get when I walked back on a softball field. The last time my feet touched that orange clay, I packed up my shoes in my bag and put my glove away. For good. My days were over.
“But, what I have been realizing since helping coach is that it was never about me anyways. ”
My pain, my hurt, and my heartache in losing the game I loved were never my feelings to feel in the first place. Instead, they belonged to fear, and fear tricked me into believing that the last time I walked off the field as a player would be the last time I would be on the field at all.
The last time I would cheer for someone on my team.
The last time I would call a pitch.
The last time I would watch in suspense as our best bat sent one flying.
But fear has no place on that field. Fear has no place in my heart.
I have struggled to have any part of that game since I had to stop playing it, but only because I have only thought about the game as something that was MINE to lose. It’s not and it never was.
What was never ours is not ours to lose. What we are afraid of losing cannot hold hostage over our heart if it is not ours, to begin with.
That is the hard, yet healing, truth that I have come to reason with during my short time so far as a coach.
“I have spent so many years cowering in fear over what I felt when I had to stop playing to now realizing that my love for the game cannot be stripped away. It is not mine to hold, either, as its home is in ALL of our hearts who love the game.”
My love for softball was never lost. It has simply been rekindled in realizing that it was never about me, but about US, and about THEM -- my team -- our players.
Coaching has brought healing to my heart in ways that I could have never imagined. It has truly allowed me to see that I never lost the game because once you love it, it’s a piece of you forever.
I have met my fear face-to-face. I close my eyes and remember what it was like to walk away from the game. Then, I step onto the field, knowing now that it was never about what I thought I lost, but instead about finding healing in where I’ve been, how it disciplined me, and how it taught me to get back up on my feet and step foot in the clay. Not for me, but for US.
For those who love the game.
With love,
Brittany Jeanine