Toughness has always required that I deny reality. I thought I had to push away pain and pretend that it was not real. While physically struggling in my rehabilitation after an accident during my first year of college that left me hospitalized for two weeks, unable to walk on my own for a month, a teammate attempted to motivate me by sharing, “you’re only tired if you think you’re tired.” 

That mentality and practice of denying the reality that I was exhausted, confused and experiencing constant pain due to injuries pushed me through three more years of college soccer. I was viewed as tough for fighting through the pain. Yet in doing so I constantly had to numb or distract myself from the actual physical reality of chronic pain. I sat in an ice bath or the ocean every day after practice, I buried any feeling that resembled sadness or fear and I transmitted my anger while on the soccer field as a way of avoiding feeling consciously upset. 

Fast forward two decades and I’m still reckoning with this pattern of denial, avoidance and distraction.

One day while walking with a mentor, as some rain sputtered and splattered, I recounted the details of a recent interaction that had left me with many questions. I spoke about the fears that had surfaced after this interaction and I strained to derive some coherent meaning from what I had experienced. I wanted this mentor to offer sage advice, which she did. Yet in that interaction I realized I wasn’t actually looking for wisdom or guidance that might lead me to and through life’s greatest mysteries. I was looking for clarity, for answers. I wanted this mentor to tell me what I should do next, how I should respond. I longed for her to strip away the mystery of what I had experienced to alleviate my anxiety and comfort me with some certainty. 

She was not interested in offering easy solutions, answers or certainty. Instead, she laughed, not with some patronizing, just-wait-until-you’re-older-and-wiser sort of tone, she laughed with wonder at the mystery of human interactions as she invited me into curiosity, into mystery and into slowing down. I wanted to stop feeling anxious and uncertain and she invited me into the anxiety and the uncertainties.