Being a student-athlete inevitably means making sacrifices. You don’t get to sleep in on Saturdays, you miss social events, you can’t lounge around and watch Youtube after school… the list goes on. Most of the time, if you truly love your sport, these sacrifices don’t bother you. But, every so often, your sport may cause you to miss something significant, and you’ll feel trapped. You'll think you’re missing out on too much, and you’ll want to quit.
What's often lacking in these moments is a feeling of choice. We feel like we’re being made to do something against our will, and we get angry and want to revolt, just to prove we’re not as stuck as we seem. The trouble is that such revolts are self-sabotaging and can derail our deeper goals.
Choice keeps us honest. It frees us up to follow our deeper interests, to act according to our goals rather than our whims. A lack of choice leads to grasping for something that we don’t really care about, simply because we want a moment of control. What’s tricky is acknowledging that, in many cases, we have already chosen; our past choices are what brought us to our current predicament.
Consider a common drama between two small children. One picks up a toy and draws attention to it. Suddenly, the other child is desperate to have the toy, even though they’d already passed it over a dozen times that day. They feel like they’re being denied something valuable and vital, not because they really want the toy but simply because they can’t have it. They forget their earlier disinterest and the repeated choice they made to not pick up the toy, and they feel wronged.
If you’re feeling like that desperate child, come back to the choices that got you here. Consider why you made them, what they’re leading you both toward and away from. Sometimes all it takes to calm our nerves is reaffirming the choices we’ve already made. It reminds us that we have power over our lives.
And if, after such reflections, you find that you’re truly dissatisfied with the choices you’ve made and you want to change your path, you’ve reached a moment of clarity that’s worth celebrating. We can’t expect every choice we make to remain right for us indefinitely. Circumstances and values change over time. What serves us today may not serve us tomorrow. Being conscious of our choices, past and present, is how we facilitate our own evolution.