Endure.. in Enduring Grow Strong
LIFE: A game called Planescape Torment. One of my favorites. In it, you play as an immortal amnesiac who loses his memory every time he dies. The tattooed Frankenstein-like fellow wakes up on a mortuary slab and tries his hardest to figure out who he is, while “aided” by a talking skull. In any case, The Nameless One lived countless lives, and levels up uttering the title of this blog post. This is where we begin.
Whenever I give someone advice about writing, I always say that you start with a title in mind, but never the actual title. That comes after everything else, after thoughts are fully-formed and cemented on “paper”, after numerous out-loud re-reads.
After the challenge of what the hell you were trying to say in the first place. After fighting through it and figuring out what it actually is. Today is different…
Today I know. I know exactly what the title is going to be, and I know why.
I find myself thinking about perseverance a lot these days, mostly because of a Phoenix I now increasingly find myself sharing things with. A courageous person, a wonderful soul. It also occupies my mind a lot because Bill Russell died. A measuring stick for every basketball player, he too, persevered.
Endure… in enduring grow strong. Rebuild yourself when life knocks you down… or become basketball’s greatest ever winner in a city that hates your guts, even if the guts themselves are the same color as those of the haters.
I’ve rarely known great people who didn’t know hardship. And, while I wouldn’t exactly call myself great, every difficult thing that I lived through, has built me and paid dividends. To better empathize, we must experience. Hardship changes you, you don’t seek it, but how you reconcile with it and fight through it, is what newly, but not fully, defines you.
In my case— going from wanting for not, to not having. Falling from a steady upper-middle class horse, to a peg-legged donkey.
Growing up, I got all the toys. I was a shitbird. Not exactly spoiled rotten, but relatively unchallenged. Fast forward a bit. Teenage years were pretty wild. School was out, and I remember regularly waking up on my parents’ patio at 16:30, sunglasses on, just before my mom came home, exhausted from work. Chores? My only chore was making up excuses and YOLO-ing with friends the very same evening. Copy paste summer.
Now don’t get me wrong, my mom WOULD NEVER find me hungover on the patio, but being a smart cookie that she was, she knew that I did fuck all, all day, and how those summer evenings were spent. I did great at school and that was enough. They remain great parents, who I’m very much thankful for letting me be a disco kid, letting me have my fun and still managing to raise me well (delicate balance, that), but there were clearly things I needed to learn about responsibility and pulling my own weight. Especially in those days.
Fast forward a bit more — bam! Recession. My life’s biggest teacher. Money = vaporized. Debt. Suffice it to say things changed and suddenly, around college, I found myself handing out newspapers, working night shifts with printing presses, threatening shady employers to pay me the money I was due or I steal computer equipment. Fun stuff. Fast forward. Now I’m working 3 jobs, while writing sports columns at night — partially to get paid, partially to keep me sane because you can’t actually party or do much else without a dollar (or kuna for that matter) in your pocket.
So I channeled everything I had into my writing.
Everything.
This smooth rhythm led to sleep paralysis — which is easily solvable (in my case) by getting your REM’s act together. All good on that front, thanks for asking. Hustle culture my ass, this was all hands on deck culture.
I still don’t know how my parents paid for Internet in those days, what black magic conjured up paid Internet bills… but I know I can never fully express how much that meant, because hockey writing wasn’t just a livelihood, it was pretty much all there was to do. All I could do.
Writing did pay as much (or as little) as you’d expect, but all money was good money. Most of all though, I NEEDED the outlet. The truth is, I still don’t know if I actually like hockey or was it just something I clung to. I still don’t know if I like writing or I just need to.
Long story short, things got better. They got better because they got better, but the new me made them better, too. Turns out, obsessive work leads to better financial results (Hey Kobe…) but then you need to move the needle back, without losing the good qualities you acquired from hardship. And not let it scar you. That’s the difficult part, but doable — I endured, built a solid work ethic. In time, I also re-learned to buy things and not feel guilty about it. So, yeah, doable.
But I often ask myself, what kind of person would I be, if I didn’t have to persevere? If I didn’t build my work ethic because I was forced to, if working hard didn’t forcibly embed itself into my then-lackluster DNA?
Then, I take another look at that privileged prick on the patio, whose paternal and maternal role models provided vivid examples of hard work on a daily, while I casually observed through half-baked sunglasses, and think — I fucking hate that kid.
In the end, that’s not the right question, now is it? The right question would be: “What do you think about this guy? The endurer. And then, the adjuster, the balancer.” He never sought to endure (nor would he like a repeat). But let me tell you, he also wouldn’t want to live without the things gained.
