Becoming Restoried Reflections
#5 | Milling
Writer and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, shared that “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”
Love and compassion are actions (I won’t get too deep — check out All About Love by Bell Hooks for a sweeping take on this). It’s not passive, yet, we have a tendency to believe it’s just floating out there, existing by nature of blood, time, or proximity (which is not synonymous with allyship).
In preparation for one of our community calls, we were asked to read The Handless Maiden (told and narrated by Dr. Martin Shaw). The mythical story begins with a poor, impoverished miller, who makes a devastating deal with a magical forest creature. This deal decorates him with wealth he once had and lost, but costs him whatever is behind his house. Thinking there is only an old apple tree, the Miller eagerly makes the pact. He doesn’t remember that his young daughter is under the apple tree, where she always is.
When we’re depleted, numb, and desperate, we’re easily distracted, losing our sense of discernment, pause, and intentionality. In this rash place, we misplace the seeds of life. We are apathetic and indifferent. We passively sell our love, soul, and spirit for quick fixes without even knowing it. These aren’t intentional choices. And we don’t realize that we ever had a choice until we flip through life’s receipts, peppered with contracts we thought were coupons.
I sold a very large piece of my soul to my first love — basketball. We had a complicated 14-year relationship (to say the least) which ended in 2022. Of course, there is much more to this story. And how I’m going to attempt to restory it.
I loved (and still love) basketball, though I haven’t played in a few years. You could argue that I was (and maybe still am) half decent at it, too (I played at the top of Division 1 & with the Canadian National Team). But in my climb to the crest, basketball became self-medication — a morphine drip — and I gave myself away in using it as the sole escape from pain chewing through my life. The worst part was, I sold myself years before we’d met.
The rigid, uncomfortable truth is that my basketball skill mushroomed because I was addicted to the way it helped me cope. Though I think I hid it well, I struggled with criticism, constructive feedback, and coaching. I needed basketball to anesthetize passively, and I didn’t realize the costs until I was forced to be someone without it — forced to breathe through the withdrawal until I found my roots planted in toxic soil: a mixture of dispassionate indifference where I expected to find hate. I don’t hate basketball and I don’t blame it. And though I feel shame, I don’t blame myself either. Because I know what love means now, and that I needed (and need) to let it in to heal.
I’m introverted and bashful for the most part, but Becoming Restoried has afforded me a safe community where I’ve turned on lights that I would never have seen switches for. This week’s example: the Miller in The Handless Maiden is not a good guy or a bad guy. He is not both, either. He is nuanced. Talking about this helped me allow myself — past, present, and future — to be nuanced too.
I wish I could say that I loved basketball so much that I chased it wherever it would take me. Truthfully, I’m infinitely grateful for everywhere it did and everything it afforded me. But that’s not the whole truth. Pain and gratitude coexist. And when the pain in my life grew to the point of inhibiting my ability to play, I attempted suicide. Both stories are true. Now, I hold and tell both.
Love is not using a bandaid for a wound, corking the blood flow to enable the infection beneath. Love is scooping out the dirt with soap and hot water, stinging out the infection with peroxide, massaging in the Neosporin, and then blanketing with a bandaid. It is choosing to sit through all of the gradations of healing.
The thing with a bandaid is that it risks creating an echo chamber of pain in service of covering what might make us uncomfortable. This is often how I approached basketball. Fortunately and gratefully, it’s not how I write. And because of my relationship with basketball, I can feel my healthy bond with writing — I crave feedback to make it better, and I have healed alongside it.
To close, I want to share James Baldwin’s words on love: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Different contexts, of course, but vital in lieu of recent events. How many times have we—have our countries—been the Miller? Brilliantly capable of deep, compassionate love, yet indifferent to its ability to grow and change because we are bruised? There is hope, though. Because Becoming Restoried enables that inquisitive, critical look into the stories we’re living (and believing). If anything, this is an act of love.
You can take Becoming Restoried’s What Story Are You Living assessment, or join one of their ongoing free virtual workshops.
