A Love Letter to My First Coping Mechanism

When you're a small child and your parents get divorced you get a lesson in the harshness of the world. If you're lucky your parents are mature adults who understand that regardless of what has transpired their children's needs are the shared priority. Not everyone is lucky. I was not lucky. The child of divorce learns very quickly the limits of their control over their environment. They have none. If done properly, the parents will address these deficiencies head on and over compensate. When done improperly the parents ignore their children and teach them that no matter what they do they cannot change the reality around them. They learn to accept that they don't deserve the things everyone else has and they begin a downward slope of self blame and self hatred that will inevitably lead to long term, non-responsive depression or some other life altering mental illness.

The child will look for anything they can control in life. These are the origins of OCD and other forms of dysfunction related to issues of control. For me it was basketball. My love of basketball was pure and true. It was also completely unhealthy and dysfunctional. I couldn't control my parents hatred for one another but I could control if the ball went into the basket. I couldn't express my anger properly at the people who deserved, but I could take my anger out on an opponent or throw the ball at ref when I didn't like the call. The ref could t me up, but he couldn't leave me. I couldn't see my own value, but a stat line was objective.

Of course I didn't know all that then. I truly love the game, but its been hard looking back. Understanding my mental health and the reality of what i was dealing with makes my decision to quit much more understandable but it also makes it more tragic. Its a decision that was so firmly rooted in trauma and so misunderstood. It really put a red letter on me with my family and in school. The story was I started smoking pot and that made me quit basketball. That's patently absurd. There is nothing mutually exclusive between the two. The entire NBA gets high. Once again we have a situation where my reality did not resemble anything close to what my family was pretending. The reality was I did get caught smoking pot. Or rather someone else did and his parents called all of Mequon because they were crazy people who couldn't mind their own business. I went in to my coach and admitted it. I took my punishment like a man and then I heard the coach was calling me a pot head to other students. This triggered in me the sense of betrayal of authority figures I trusted and I quit. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the coach's son was behind me on the depth chart and me quitting meant more playing time for Joe. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

But there's more to the story. As I have been discussing basketball was a coping mechanism for me. It didn't bring me the type of confidence it would have for a more well adjusted kid. It didn't matter to me that I would have gotten a scholarship because it didn't matter to my dad. He didn't care. He encouraged me to "make my own decision" because basketball cost him time and money and his organizing parental strategy involved whatever cost him the least of both. Not surprisingly that was the only decision I was encouraged to make on my own. So in some ways pot did replace basketball, but not in the way everyone has blamed me for.

Luckily I still the game. It sill brings me great joy. I still have friendships and feel loved by the people I played with and against. I never should have quit. It is my biggest regret. I live with it. I know I wouldn't have made the NBA, but I could have found a career around the game. Regret is part of life. We should find lessons everywhere. This was a tough one to learn.