Softball; My Home away from Home

I was the girl who sat in the back of the classroom with her nose so deep in a book you almost couldn’t see her, internally pleading with the teacher not to call on her, because we all know what happens when you get an answer wrong. I was the girl who walked with her head down in the hallway and books pulled close to her chest, as if they would protect me from the forces of anxiety and fear controlling my life. I would walk around praying to be invisible, or at least blend in enough to hide away with my thoughts and my books, and after school, my bat and my balls.

Everyone thought I was just a shy kid, but that wasn’t quite the case. Hundreds of dollars spent taking me to people who sat me in a chair and asked me to talk about things I didn’t understand, and told my parents about words I could barely pronounce, dozens of adults trying to understand what it was like to be me, without actually living a minute in my life. Nobody seemed to understand this, with the exception of my parents, who did everything possible to figure out what made me special. There was always something no one seemed to understand though, why did my personality change completely the minute I stepped onto a field?

It takes approximately 400 milliseconds for a 65mph softball pitch to reach home plate. In those 400 milliseconds I cannot think, the process in which my neurons are colliding occurs at a speed to fast for thoughts to process. However, my mind calculates trajectory, spin, and speed, decides whether it’s a ball or strike, and tells me which of the hundreds of pitches and which of the dozens of spots it will be thrown in. At the same time, my hands have already picked a slot, my bat is already across home plate, and the ball is making contact with the sweet spot of my bat. Less than one millisecond later my knees have touched, my feet are in front of home, on their way to first, and the ball is now somewhere between 15-25 feet in front of me. At the level I play at, and the speed I run, I have no room for error. An infielder can field and throw a ball in about 2.8 seconds, and I can run the 60 feet from home to first in 2.7. In the entirety of my at bat I have .1 seconds to think, and my mind isn’t focused on if I gave a wrong answer, who’s looking at me, or if what happens if I accidentally run into someone in the hallway, its focused on hitting the inside corner, and getting me to second before the ball touches the fence. In case you haven’t figured out what that means, my mind essentially reprograms itself to no longer fear those around me, or the irrational things. It means that for the three hours it will take me to finish a regulation softball game, I will physically not have enough time to think about anything except spin, pitches, trajectory, and location. The anxiety that no one can find a cure for, suddenly cures itself. Softball bridges the gap between what I can and can’t do. In fact, it erases the word cant from my vocabulary entirely. My parents would stand in awe as their quiet girl would suddenly transform into someone afraid of nothing except not being great. They would watch as before their eyes I would go from being the quietest kid in a room, to the loudest girl on the field. The change was dramatic, and in fact, the exact reason I was diagnosed. I have generalized anxiety disorder, along with a slew of other oversized words that basically amount to the same thing: a fear of what and who is around me. Through countless months on the field, hundreds of therapy sessions, and finally understanding that it’s okay to be different, I achieved something no one thought I could ever do. Now I talk in class, occasionally raising my hand, I go to football games packed with people I don’t know, and try new things for the sake of showing myself I can. I walk through the hallways with my head up and my eyes ahead, no longer afraid what’s in front of me, but rather look at what’s behind me and smile at the realization of how far I’ve come. You can always take the easy way out of life, but true strength comes when you decide to push past the obstacles and the odds, to prove others wrong.