Grappling with Change
A long weekend reflection on the unexpected detours of 2024, reevaluating goals, navigating setbacks, and shifting priorities.
"Back to school" season and the beginning of the academic year always forces a reflection on goals for the beginning of the calendar year. So this week, I'm giving a few rough thoughts about my goals for 2024 and the extent to which they've been impacted—or not—by injury, surgery, and recovery.
Hope you have an awesome Labor Day Weekend. Thanks for reading,
EZ
How It Started: The Initial Goals and Plan for 2024
When I thought about my goals for 2024 at the very beginning of the year, a few things came to mind:
Professional stability. I'd been laid off in December from the agency where I'd been working and had a new gig lined up with a start date in January. I'd hoped that working with a previous client—a "devil you know" kind of situation as far as jobs go—would allow me to onboard and transition more quickly from a place of sudden upheaval to relative calm. If you've been following along on this blog, stability has been tenuous, at best, in my new role. I have my concerns about the extent to which the stress of this job compromised the earlier stages of my recovery. All of this is to say that this goal is still in the works for the final four months of 2024.
Publish the book! At the tail end of 2023, I had one acquisition editor who insisted on needing to see a full manuscript before considering making an offer on my book proposal. In the six weeks between January 2, 2024, and February 19, 2024, I focused on transforming my rough first draft into a legitimate second draft. My agent reviewed it in March, gave it the thumbs up, and sent it off to the editor who mentioned her interest in the book. No updates or decisions yet re: acquisition and publishing, but no matter what happens, I can still say that "I finished the book" in 2024. It's just a matter of whether it gets an offer—not in my control, alas.
Have a "last dance" season of competitive success in jiu-jitsu before (temporarily) "hanging up the belt" to prioritize other physical challenges. In the last four years since turning 30, I turned a deliberate but time-bound blind eye to my biological clock when it came to training and competing. I told myself that I "still had time" to achieve the things I wanted to achieve, jiu-jitsu-wise, before I "settled down," and, until recently, I "still had time." But in the new year, I knew that my time was running out. My 34th birthday loomed in the summer. I was scared about taking first steps toward starting a family but more scared about "the cost of doing nothing," knowing that continuing to wait might come at the expense of having trouble conceiving. I knew that age 34 into age 35 would be the year I had to take some action if I wanted to maximize my odds of a healthy pregnancy and minimize the need for extra science to help me pull it off (e.g., egg freezing, IVF, etc.). So I told myself, "You get one more season to go all-in." 2024 was supposed to be that season. While I couldn't control the outcomes of my matches or decisions of my coach, I had hoped, at the end of the year, that I might look back on 2024 with pride at gold-medal performances at Pans and World Masters, and maybe conclude with a black belt promotion at the end of the year. "Just two more titles and a black belt," I thought, "then I can rest for a while. Then I could be at peace with investing my body toward a different, less self-interested, less selfishly-ambitious cause."
Of course, especially re: Goal #3, I had no idea what was coming.
How It’s Going: Forced Re-evaluation of all Goals, but especially Goal #3
Regarding Goal #1: Professional Stability: The re-evaluation of Goal #1 is better suited to a different post, but to cover it briefly: it suffices to say that my current professional situation is a challenging one. I am going through a soul-searching exercise of what I value in a job and what kind of work environment and management situation would positively support the rest of my life and the goals I have for it. It's a bad job market for tech workers, but I am "doing the work" to capitalize on opportunities that might be better for me when they (hopefully) appear—whether internal or external to my current workplace. My belief is that Goal #1 is a critical foundation for Goal #2 and Goal #3, so I refuse to compromise on it.
As for Goal #2: Publish the book!: I've done what I can, and can't control the outcome of whether the manuscript gets an offer to be traditionally published. I'll keep waiting for news and crossing my fingers regarding the one editor who has the book in her hands. In the meantime, I care about getting another book proposal drafted by the end of this year. I have a concept that I need to flesh out into a proposal, and I go back and forth on whether it's "good enough." I hold fast to the belief that there's room in this world for more books, and I now have the faith in myself—and an agent behind me—that if I've written a book before, I can do it again—and that it's the work of years, not months, to get something good to come to fruition. I'm committed to kick-starting things.
You already know where Goal #3 is headed: any "last dance" season is indefinitely on hold. When I tore my knee in a competition in February and had surgery in April, Goal #3 didn't just get adjusted. It got completely wiped from the record, and not just for 2024, but for the foreseeable future.
I have two recoveries I will have to consider in the next two calendar years: from the knee surgery, and—knock on wood, if all goes healthily and well—from birth.
In the last few months and especially the last few days, I've been forced to think critically about Goal #3. The last tournament that was supposed to punctuate that dreamt-of "last dance" season, the World Masters Championship, happened between August 29-August 31.
My social media feed has, inevitably, been filled with highlight reels and podium pictures for the last few days. People I have competed against made their black belt debuts. A number of people I know and have trained with medaled in their divisions, and a few won their division. Some of them got promoted to new belts. I wouldn't call the feeling I've suffered "FOMO," because I don't have a "fear of missing out" so much as a forced reality of missing out.
On Thursday and Friday, I watched the tape of my division and adjacent divisions, wondering aloud, "What would I have done in that situation?" and "Could I have beaten that girl?" I still grieve my loss from last year from overtraining and being in a bad headspace coming into the tournament.” I still grieve my loss from last year from overtraining and being in a bad headspace coming into the tournament. I had hoped that 2024 might be a year I come out on top with a win, entering the tournament and eradicating the sad memory with a triumphant one.
I've bothered my husband at least once with some version of the following conversation:
Me: “Do you think I could have won?”
My husband: “No, because you injured your knee and had surgery.”
Me: “But if I hadn’t injured my knee and had surgery, do you think I could have won?”
My husband: “But you did injure your knee and have surgery. What’s the point in wondering?”
He deadpans the responses, refusing to indulge my fantasies or what-if scenarios.
I can't help but think of alternative timelines.
In which I was never hurt.
In which I was never cut open and stitched back together with grafts and screws.
In which I spent the last four-and-a-half months training to peak at a competition instead of relearning how to walk.
I can't help but get jealous and envious of those who got the opportunity to compete and achieve the results I most wanted to achieve.
Mostly, I can't help but cry.
I cry thinking about how much pain—both physical and emotional—I've had to endure in the last few months, a kind of pain that few people in my life really understand.
I cry at the thought of lost time: the season I'll never get back and the two seasons it will take before I will be able to "come back": one season from the knee surgery, another from pregnancy.
I cry most of all because of a certain realization, one I suspected might hit me when I first got injured, but never expected to hurt as much as it did:
That this sport over which I had been so obsessed, to which I had been so single-mindedly committed, might not have been as important as I thought it was.
Where It’s Going: I’m not sure...especially Goal #3
I have a point of view on next steps for Goal #1 and Goal #2.
Goal #1: Set myself up for better, more aligned, more harmonious professional opportunities by networking, keeping my eyes out on job boards, and discussing my professional objectives with people I trust.
Goal #2: Work on a new book proposal and creative writing projects and use writing groups/retreats/people in my life for accountability to reach the milestones I believe I can hit.
I'm not sure what to do with Goal #3. Defer it? See if I still care about it in two years' time? For now, I care about getting my leg back to normal. I worry that the stress of my current job could compromise a pregnancy. I worry that the chemistry of pregnancy, the loosening of ligaments, could compromise my recovery from surgery. I worry that all the worrying is getting in the way of writing well about all the above.
The tournament of last week enters the rear view mirror. People are back to other hobbies, tasks, and their usual ways of living. The season ends with me on the sidelines, spectating sadly. I find myself in physical therapy, at Crunch Fitness, in Pilates classes still missing jiu-jitsu and still trying to figure out who I am without it, asking myself questions like:
Why did jiu-jitsu matter so much to you? Why does it still?
Why do you care so much about it?
Does it even matter?
The most painful thing of all is that jiu-jitsu did give me a sense of purpose, a home for my ambition, competitiveness, and drive. It was a counter-balancing force for all the frustration I faced in my professional life. It gave me something to "be good at," or at least something to keep working towards that felt like I could study, like there was some vague meritocratic element that my day job could never seem to provide. It gave me friends, community, a sense of connection in a new city, in the absence of a job that put me in contact with real people in real life instead of behind a screen and across time zones.
I have not found anything that scratches the same itch, that gives the same community, gets me in shape the same way. I'm scared I won't be able to come back and be better than I was before. Most of all, I'm acutely aware of how silly my passion for the sport is. I can't rationalize the extent to which I have given so much of myself to it over time and why—irrationally, it seems, after being literally crippled by it—I want to get back to it.
There will be no medals this year. There will be no black belt. Any sense of victory I have will have to come from the other goals, from other things.
Against the odds, I care about stepping back onto a mat. While I still have no idea when that day will come, I have no doubt that when I do, it will be harder fought than any match, harder won than any other victory in my life.
If there's a black belt in my future still, I hope it arrives when I am in a place of true confidence in my own resilience and pride in my own body, in what it can come back from and what it is capable of doing.
If I can pick up a version of Goal #3 in two years' time, I hope I'll be standing firmly on two strong legs and watching a small human starting to crawl.
