depressed. No. Depressed was an understatement.
I was fucking lost.
A shell of a person with no idea who I was anymore or who I was supposed to be.
When your identity was wrapped up in one thing for so long, who were you when you didn’t have that thing anymore?
Every single notion I’d ever believed about myself came into question.
My dream of becoming a professional baseball player was gone. Just like that. It had disappeared as soon as they called the last name in the last round of the draft, and it wasn’t mine.
The worst part was, no one had prepared us for this part. We spent our entire lives practicing, conditioning, and working to be a better baseball player. If we made an error in the field, we made up for it by taking five hundred ground balls the next day. If we struck out swinging, we practiced our stance at the plate and focused on our ability to read the ball as it came out of the pitcher’s hand. If we were too slow on the run from home plate to first base, we did drills. We worked on speed techniques, so we could get faster. To improve our time. To beat out that throw to first.
We were never taught how to quit.
We didn’t believe in giving up.
Our whole lives revolved around chasing this dream. From what we ate to how much sleep we got and who we let into our personal lives. Every single aspect of our mindset was on how to be a better baseball player and how to get to that next level. We were always climbing to reach that next goal. We were conditioned to never give up on that dream. No matter what. We were told that it was never out of reach.
Until it was.
Because no one had ever taught you what to do when the dream gave up on you.
No one had talked about how lost you’d feel when the one thing you’d been chasing your entire life evaporated into thin air.
Everyone walked away and expected you to pick yourself up off the floor and simply … move. The. Fuck. On. Like that was even possible when your whole world had just been shattered into a million unrecognizable pieces.
Who were you anymore if you weren’t a baseball player chasing a dream? What the hell were you supposed to do with your life when you’d only planned for one outcome? And even more simply, what were you supposed to do with your day when it’d always been planned out for you?
No one had told us what it would feel like when this day came. They all told us how we’d feel when we got the draft call, as if every single guy who’d ever stepped on that field was lucky enough to get one. Even though, logically, we knew it didn’t happen that way, we always assumed that if it didn’t happen, it was to someone else. Lots of guys didn’t get drafted. But I wouldn’t be one of them. Right?
You see, no one had mentioned that. They all just moved on, left us behind, without realizing that we were stuck in a sea of despair, feeling like we were going to drown at any moment. Because no one had fucking prepared us for this part. Not a single damn person had told us what THIS would feel like. How utterly painful and depressing it would be to lose baseball when you were not ready for it to be over.
No one had told you that you’d fall into a hole of sadness so deep that you didn’t think you’d ever get out of it. And they sure as shit hadn’t told you what to do after you did climb up from it.
“I’m here to tell you that it gets better. That there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And that you will be okay. But first, it’s really going to fucking hurt. But that’s why I’m here today. To help you through it and figure out your next steps.
“Your professional baseball dreams might be over. But your new life is just beginning.”
The crowd stood on their feet, roaring and clapping as I tried to smile from the center of the auditorium stage as all the lights turned on at once. I’d just finished giving a speech to local athletes from all levels of play. Some were as young as high school kids, and others were seniors in college, about to play their