I found out the hard way, receiving awards and impressive remarks often becomes an addiction, an enslavement of the mind. The more you do, the more you feel the need to do, to stay ahead of others and your past self. And when you're not doing, you feel worthless to the world. It's one thing to be build a resume to get into college or to get a good job, it's another thing to believe that resume gives you self-worth. We live as social profiles unable or unwilling to admit that Saturday night we did nothing. Looking back, tennis was trying to free me from those future expectations. [Excerpt]
This is a story.
Charcoal clouds circled in the valley from high above the city’s center. A man, a little older than the both of us, stood on his doorstep in a town miles away and watched the black veil stretch from the infinite sky down to the ground below and violently swirl east to west and west to east, but always being brought back towards the center by some unseen force. The clouds moved so quickly he wasn’t sure they were moving at all.
Squinting his eyes, he witnessed the clouds pass over far away buildings, and when they had moved on, there was no sight of the previously familiar buildings. No steeples, no towers blocking his view through the valley now. [Excerpt]
I’d already been to hell twice in my life by my 18th birthday. My first trip was near the end of high school, back when gas prices averaged a buck thirty-five and Kelly Clarkson was busy being crowned the first American Idol. These factors coupled together would eventually equal my escape from childhood: my first car on the wide open road, me inside belting ballads.
But not before I first paid one hell of a visit to American Legion Boys State in The Sticks, Tennessee. If inside my car was a place I could reinvent myself, then Boys State was the place where I could try just being ‘one of the guys’. And that’s all I secretly wanted for my sixteen-year-old wretched self. [Excerpt]
