Transitioning
By: Marcus Lattimore
Tags: Perception, Change, Growth, Courage

I was oblivious to what it would take to recreate yourself. When you’re indoctrinated into the religion of football at a young age, it consumes every part of you. The blueprint for success is handed to you. Your day is structured and your life is set in motion. Everything football becomes your new system of reality.

Ignorant to the inevitable day when you can no longer play the game you’ve learned to love, fate finally sets in and, to say the least, you’re lost. You can’t admit that, but you are. In exile; like Tom Hanks in castaway trying to figure out how to navigate this strange new world.

Completely unaware of how challenging this is about to be, your mode of operation, your daily patterns, how you’ve been programmed for the past decade and a half is still hard wired. But the mission is gone. The goal of becoming the best player at your position ceases to a halt by conditions outside of your control. What do I do? Where do I go? What questions am I supposed to be asking? I’m lost! Who am I without a football in my hand? You convince yourself you’ll be fine. My only mode of operation was that of a football player, or another way to say it, stubborn as hell. I made the critical mistake a lot of us make: intertwining what we do with who we are.

Humans need responsibilities, something to care about, something to look forward to, something fulfilling to occupy our time. Humans need purpose and that purpose was absent. There was no blueprint for the transition. We search and seek new ways to try and fill that hole. Clinging to whatever is convenient and comfortable, leaving us empty. But, we don’t give up because that’s not in our DNA. So we try new ways, unaware that our methods of searching are unproductive and aimless. Maybe it’s because we never took the time to get to know ourselves. Maybe we know we’re lost but, we’re too prideful to ask for help. We have all of this time on our hands and our attention is scattered, going in a thousand different directions. This generates even more problems and it seeps into every area of life. Frustrated and impatient, we revert back to our hardwired programming. The ways we were taught to deal with uncertainty and stress. And this is where life can become destructive. Especially if you lack self awareness and emotional regulation techniques. We are a product of what we see and what is modeled. We cope the only way we know how, and in the culture of big time athletics, we have plenty of methods to choose from. I think it’s pretty obvious that these coping strategies are not always healthy. I’ve seen these methods take the souls of people I hold high regard. And as William James famously stated,

“When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other”.

It’s an amazing experience being a part of a team. It’s conformity in the most positive way. A group of individuals collectively coming together to achieve one common goal. Naturally you become a family and develop life long relationships. You also develop acceptable forms of behavior and come to expect a certain type of behavior from fans and strangers who know of you. In the south if you play football, particularly if your team is highly visible and publicized, you can’t do much wrong. The word “no” is not popular in your world. Everybody you come in contact with is a bit more lenient and zealous because of what you do on the field. You get a lot of perks the average person doesn’t. Not to mention there are tens of thousands of people who come and watch you perform every week. This fundamentally changes your brain and how you perceive the world. You’re high off of life. Everyday. It also changes how others perceive you.

Those who know of you or see you have irrational assumptions about your character, about your life, about who you are. I’ll never forget a high school football player came up to me at the farmers market and in awe uttered “Dude, you’re a God”. The words caught me by surprise and it was the first time out of thousands of interactions that I realized how dangerous notoriety can be if you don’t know yourself. This feeds the ego and the man-made mystique. Your brain can trick you into believing that you must portray an image of perfection because of your status in society. Everybody tells you you’re great so it must be true. And believing the hype is when you really mess up. This only leads to repression of who you really are. An imperfect creature trying to do your best in this complex world.

I was oblivious as to what it took to recreate myself, and I’m still in that phase of figuring it out. But one thing I know for certain: You must let go of who you were. Lose that system of reality. Shake that way of thinking. I’ve seen how that story ends and it’s never a happy ending.

-ML