Becoming Restoried Reflections
#13 | Something More For Us
Would we feel threatened if we met the other half of ourselves — not another person, but the actual other half of ourselves? Though they exist, we’ve never met them face to face — partly because doing so is impossible, but perhaps because we tend to avoid situations where we’d need to confront how uncomfortable they make us, challenging everything we know to be true.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve unpacked a wonderful story, The Half Girl, which I’ll share snippets of for context throughout this blog post. Here’s the beginning:
A young girl is born with only the right half of her body. As she grows up in her village, she feels different playing with children who, to her, appear whole. With time, she feels that perhaps she doesn’t and can’t belong in her village. On the cusp of young adulthood, she sets out in search of someone like her. On the day she leaves her village, unsure of her destination, she notices that no one has come to see her off. Grief, confusion, and heartbreak braid together within her.
When I first mapped this story onto my life (as we do), the village adopted the form of a basketball court. I was stunned and didn’t initially share this with our Becoming Restoried group.
Logistically, I walked away from formal competition in March 2020 (of course, influenced by the pandemic onset). But I’d walked away mentally, emotionally, and spiritually long before that, in February 2017.
After numbly climbing onto the ambulance’s trolley bed — mid-season of my freshman year on Stanford University’s Women’s Basketball Team — I was strapped down with thick buckles. My sensory memories are clogged and blurry, but I do remember the kind EMTs who rode with me to the hospital. At the time, as the ambulance drove across the border of university property, I didn’t recognize this as my departure from basketball (as I’d known it). In a padded, dull hospital room, I was only allowed to eat with a spoon. Cops escorted me on each washroom visit. I was deeply suicidal.
Until this day, in my mind, basketball was synonymous with performance, competition, and escape. While in the hospital, my teammates and coaches came to offer support, presence, and thoughtfulness, but no one watched me leave this version of basketball behind that day. This is the first time I’ve admitted this (and I say admitted because I’ve known the truth for years, even though I competed between 2017 and 2020).
I was and wasn’t ready. Basketball was my balm and salve for pain and grief that I didn’t yet have words for. It gave me so much — experience, love, friendships, mentors, travel, connections, and financial support (a non-exhaustive list). But it couldn’t give me everything. And because I relied on it to, I allowed it to keep me to half of myself. I needed to leave it behind to heal and find my other half. Not all relationships have a clean break — I realize now, that I’ve spent the past seven years hovering in a state of leaving.
After a long travel period, the girl eventually meets another half-girl with only the left side of her body. Feeling threatened by one another, they engage in a desperate fight for survival, perhaps believing that one cannot survive while the other lives.
Over the past seven years, my two halves have fought relentlessly — the half who identifies as a competitive, performance-based athlete with the half who is nearly the opposite: sensitive, calm, curious, quiet, and thoughtful.
The two half-girls thrash until they combine into a whole girl.
I’ve tried to force myself into only being the former half, because, on the surface, it appeared to be less painful than stitching the two halves together.
I believe that the more truth and knowledge we hold about something — two halves of ourselves, potentially in paradoxical tension — the more painful it can be. But also the more full.
When the now whole girl returns to her village, which she doesn’t initially recognize, she is met with a series of kind questions, two of which are:
“Do you not recognize the village that was once your home?”
“Do you not see that you had to leave here to find what we could never give you in the first place?”
Standing on a court now, basketball asks me these questions. Importantly, it is basketball — the basketball that I still deeply love — who asks, not the world in which I competed, others in that world, or the all-consuming athlete identity. Further, in allowing my second half to fill in my gaps, I better understood how my first half had been hurt.
My sensitive, calm, curious, quiet, and thoughtful half is a writer, poet, researcher, and storyteller. As a researcher, I very recently had the epiphany that autoethnography might become my focus. It lit my heart on fire, which couldn’t have been more timely.
The whole girl soon becomes a wise storyteller in her village for decades to come, though she’s not always sure how she knows some of the stories she carries.
I didn’t know many of my own stories — in their wholeness — until I began the Becoming Restoried program and started writing this blog, sharing them with you.
There’s a wonderful lyric from the song “This Wish” that I’d love to loop in here:
“Oh, this is where we’ve been
But it’s not where we belong
And I may be young, but I know I’m not wrong
So I look up at the stars to guide me
And throw caution to every warning sign
If knowing what it could be is what drives me
Then let me be the first to stand in line
So I make this wish
To have something more for us than this”
“Something more for us than this” — perhaps something more for my two halves, and everyone else presently sewing theirs together. Sharing my stories on this blog, I see that just maybe, I am now a whole girl—authentic not perfect. And I vow to keep telling my stories so long as there is something more for all of us to imagine through them.
As always, thank you so much for reading. :)
You can take Becoming Restoried’s What Story Are You Living assessment, or join one of their ongoing free virtual workshops.
