My Relationship to Counterculture
By: Will O'Hara
Tags: Counterculture, Integrity, Personal Essay, Basketball

Jack Kerouac with Gian Peretti in Italy, 1966. From the magazine “Ciao Amici.” Image is in the Public Domain.

“You’re gonna suck the marrow out of life, man.”

I chuckled uncomfortably. What a remarkable thing to say about a person. I had recently read Walden, so I understood the prose Eva was referencing. I took her words as the highest compliment. She saw me as a person who would follow through on his ambitions, and that was big. Still, though, her remark caught me by surprise. I had never seen myself in this light, and it was incredibly empowering to know that this woman — a teacher who I had the utmost respect for — understood the life I was striving to live.

I had just read my Urban memoir, a story meant to capture what New York meant to us. Others had come up to me and expressed their enjoyment of my piece, but this comment, in particular, stuck with me.

What compelled her to say that?

Looking back on the content of my writing, it made sense.

“Go out there and try to change the narrative,” was what I told my classmates.

It seemed fitting of my time at CityTerm: I wasn’t afraid to speak my mind, even if it meant going against the grain.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to holding my tongue. For someone who craves individuality and opposes self-censorship — someone who prefers writing whatever comes to mind in their tattered Five Star notebook to navigating the kafkaesque social politics of high school, someone who would rather work alone than in a group — it honestly surprises me how much I enjoy basketball.

For those who are not familiar with basketball — or any other team sports — a prerequisite is that you put the team over the individual. By definition, it requires sacrificing one’s integrity in favor of the desires of the coach and the team. Sure, there can be star players, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Playing basketball in high school, I was forced to learn how to operate within a system, which meant holding my tongue. I had to learn that, even if I thought I should be doing something different, I was doing my job if I contributed to the team’s success. That meant unlearning my ideas of what it meant to have integrity. Although this has been hard, my integrity has benefitted the team during games as well. When no one else will take a shot and the ball falls to me, more often than not it has paid off for me to shoot it without fear of what my coaches or teammates will think.

Merriam-Webster defines counterculture as “a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to the prevailing social norm.” But what makes someone truly countercultural? Throughout all the books I’ve read, the common thread seems to be the idea of living on one’s own terms; of doing what one believes to be right or true regardless of the opinions of others. Perhaps why I have always been so drawn to movements like the beats or the hippies is because I see a little bit of myself in them. They said and did what they believed was right, and some of them even died for it. Of course, this mindset is not all good, and it can certainly lead to self-indulgence if interpreted wrong: Kerouac died of alcoholism, Burroughs shot up heroin every day until he died of old age, and it’s a miracle Iggy Pop is still alive. But in this day and age, where social media causes almost everything to be manufactured and disingenuous, I think everyone needs a little counterculture in their life. I am still finding my balance, and I hope to help others find theirs in the future. But for now, I’m just trying to follow my inner moonlight.