Fall in love with sports

Go fall in love with sports. Any sport. Pick a sport, pick a city, pick a team. Now fall into a deep, passionate, intense, enriching love with it and never let go. Everyone should know what it feels like to be dedicated to something so grand and special in which they have no control. As fans, we have zero say in what happens. We don’t determine the next play, we don’t get to decide that the next pitch should be a fast ball, we don’t construct who is on what line together in order to ensure that the perfect players are on the ice for the game winning goal. All these facts, these extremely key components to any team and sport is beyond us. All we can do is sit on our couches, or buy tickets to sit in an arena seat and pray the game goes our way that day.

There is something so romantic and rewarding about being so invested in a team. It’s a community, it’s a family. There is instant camaraderie among fellow fans. The quickest way I’ve made friends with people is by liking the same sports team as them. You both have this unifying common knowledge, as well as an understanding of the other’s love for the game. It is instantaneous and not needing of words. An important friend has just been made because you can relate to the faithful love that is necessary to be committed to a sports team like that. I've even met some amazing people simply because we like the same sport, but opposing teams.

Jimmy Fallon said it best in his movie “Fever Pitch.” It’s a love story of a man, and a woman, and the Red Sox. He has an undying, overriding passion for the Red Sox, which I completely understand. But it’s in a time when not only had the Red Sox managed to screw up every chance they got to be the best, but his obsession was scaring away all interested women. He meets a smart, beautiful woman and as they get to know each other, he beings to reveal just how strong and committed his obsession is. In a conversation about loving the Red Sox, he says, “I like being part of something that’s bigger than me-than I. It’s good for your soul to invest in something that you can’t control.” And I couldn’t agree more. Even when all circumstances around him, mainly his girlfriend and fellow game goers who felt as if the season is going down the toilet, he triumphantly defends them. “…the Red Sox never let you down…That’s right. I mean – why? Because they haven’t won a World Series in a century or so? So what? They’re here. Every April, they’re here. At 1:05 or at 7:05, there is a game. And if it gets rained out, guess what? They make it up to you. Does anyone else in your life do that? The Red Sox don’t get divorced. This is a real family. This is the family that’s here for you.” I have felt the same way. Even in being awful and having a losing season, where all hope is lost, they are still there. They will always come back in the fall. There will always be another game, another season to look forward to. Even in letting you down, they will never can truly let you down.

Sports bring people together. You all gather around a TV or the computer or in the outfield bleacher seats and you create this unique experience. You’re having a moment with each other, with fellow fans, and with the team. There will be other games with other teams, but this one is yours and that’s so special. Sports move people. There is a palpable anxiety and excitement in the air during a close game, and an uproar of joy when the game winning goal or run or point has been scored. You feel moved to jump and clap and sing and practically kiss the people next to you because you feel as if together you have conquered something, even though you haven’t. When the unfortunate event of a lose occurs, you have each other for support to get through it.

I was raised to be a sports fanatic. My mother grew up in Brazil and was indoctrinated with their love of soccer early in life. A passion that was passed on to me as a child. One of my closest friends would marry Tom Brady if she could, despite that she doesn't even like guys. Every birthday and Christmas since I found the NHL, I’ve asked for Stars tickets. Part of my identity is being a sports lover. My friends know what’s going on when they hear my screams of elation and desperation. I wear my Dallas Stars pride on my sleeve. Coworkers know who to come to with any hockey or Stars related question. So many people think that I’m over the top, and too invested in something that does seem to matter. But it truly matters to me.

Everyone should have that. Everyone should feel the undying, deeply rooted love that comes from putting your whole self into a sport and a team and a community. It is magical, inspiring and moving to sit anonymously in a crowd and know that thousands, even millions share the same love you do. 

Remember to love yourself

Imagine that someone in this world loves you more than any song can song, and any phrase can express.  You are the first thing on his mind every morning, and the last thing on his mind every night. He worships you.  He can’t go more than ten minutes wondering what you are doing, and if you are happy.  Your happiness and success are his only goals in life.

You are literally his drug.  He doesn’t need narcotics or booze because you are his high.  Everything you are, is everything he wants and the only thing he needs.  He would take a bullet for you.  He would kill someone for you.  His love is that real.

And he tells you all the time, “I love you so much.”  And you can feel it in his presence. You can see it in the way he looks at you and the way he bares his soul. In the way that he has made himself a better person, for you.

It is a fairytale.  Except that it isn’t.

The only problem is you don’t love him back.  Maybe you did at one time and have fallen out of love.  Maybe you never loved him at all.  Maybe you do love him, but not enough to save you. How do you live with yourself, knowing that you have literally crushed the soul of another? How do you sleep knowing that you may have scarred him for life? Knowing that he may never be able to love someone else, because of you.

The answer is simple: time and conscious thought.  Time doesn’t completely heal all wounds, but it can help.  At first it will seem like a selfish act…you are the villain.  But in time you will understand that your happiness and your choices are just that, yours.  Do your choices affect others? Absolutely.  But can continue to blame yourself for the way other people choose to feel? Absolutely not. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to love whomever the hell you please. You are responsible for you, and that’s it.

Stop beating yourself up about it.  Stop pitying him.  He will get over it someday, on his own accord, when he is damn well ready.  When he starts to take responsibility for his own happiness, and his own choices, he will be free from you. And he will feel stronger, and more able because of it.

Maybe he didn’t deserve for you to break his heart.  But he certainly didn’t deserve your guilted-love either.  Maybe he will find someone else, maybe he will never love again.  Either way, that isn’t your concern.  Take pride in the fact that you are brave enough to know what you want, and make the hard decisions that need to be made.

You aren’t a bad person because you broke someone’s heart.  You aren’t a villain for not returning someone else’s love.  You’re human.  Someone may break your heart someday and then maybe you’ll understand both sides of the coin.  But until then, remind yourself that no matter how much he loved you; you loved yourself a little more.

Because eventually you will find someone who you love, just as much as he loved you. And if you’re lucky, that person will love you too

Challenging our own differences

The way we define ourselves is by what we like and dislike, what we do or don’t do, what we believe or don’t believe, etc. and the problem with this ego-level method of understanding ourselves is that it doesn’t leave room for other opinions, reconsideration or inherent tolerance for the opinions of others. We have based our own person on ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong– challenge those, you challenge who we believe we are.

We’re conditioned by our individual experiences, and our minds filter through situations in constructed lights crafted by past experiences that our subconscious does not want to repeat. We attach ourselves to or plight ourselves against different things and ideas and people to ground ourselves in some version of reality. We’re choosing the quality of our lives by what we choose to subscribe to by the way of what means having a happy life, a fulfilling life. But in doing this, we forget to consider a crucial element of happiness, and that’s being able to affiliate with people, all people, and to seek greater peace among people: to coexist.

These opinions, or self-definitions as I see them, have become a source of tension on a micro scale, and a cause of world war on a macro scale. What instilled in us the notion that we all have to agree, and that our points and opinions and self-identities are only as valid as we can make others believe they are?

Our differences should be opportunities to learn and grow and evaluate and re-evaluate and to realize that our beings and our mind’s idea of who we are are not the same. To recognize that we should all have respect (and largely do) for the internal beings that reside within even when we most vehemently disagree with what the external of those people are doing.

In an ideal world, we should be using these differences to understand why we’ve chosen to subscribe to a certain belief of lifestyle and then to realize why something means so much to us when another person disregards it as worthless, and why this threatens us so much.

A spectrum of people and ideas and thoughts can be healthy and informative and worthwhile if we learn to not buck them. We need our differences. We actually, literally need them. We’re otherwise destined for nothing but a robotic utopia, denying every part of us that isn’t like the rest; as though the majority’s opinion is the only one worth having.

But we were taught how to have our own opinions, and it’s easy. We get emotionally attached to something and we stick with it. We fear change. But we need to work on curating the new norm for what comes after we’ve sworn ourselves to our own opinions, and that’s acknowledging other people’s ideas as being valid, even if they threaten or undermine ours in some way. Because the issue comes back down to the fact that you can disagree with someone, but that doesn’t mean you can disrespect them. 

A heavy heart goes unnoticed

A heavy heart goes unnoticed. It becomes an ache that is pushed out through weak valves and into the corridors of an upset stomach. Like shots of adrenaline, thoughts of you stir in my core. My heart races. My breath is heavy. My nerves are shot. Ailments of a broken spirit. Ailments of a spirit so far lost into the depths of the human body, into the human soul. It can’t be seen, it can’t be touched, it can’t be tasted. Love is felt.

Love is defined as, “an intense feeling of deep affection”. Hate is defined as “intense dislike for someone or something.” To really delve into the meaning of these human emotions and all relative, we also need to define intense. Intense can be defined as having strong feelings or opinions.

We can probably go around and around defining what it is that provokes these strong or intense feelings, though, the key that is missing in these definitions is the use of uncontrollable.

Intense and uncontrollable situations go hand in hand. Uncontrollable situations and feelings spark intense and reactive feelings and situations. You might say, “I control everything in my life. Nothing is uncontrollable. Everything is as I want it to be.” False. A BIG NO.

I would like to introduce you to the world of chain reactions. For every action is a reaction. For every reaction, is another reaction and so on. Sure, you have a choice. But when dealing with matters of the heart, choice becomes only a particle to the bigger picture.

A seed is planted in fertile soil. The soil is plentiful and moist, and has the potential to grow beautiful flowers, but the soil alone cannot ignite the reaction of growth by itself. Someone, or something, must choose to water it. The seed will respond. The seed will begin to unfold. The seed will see growth. The seed, in all of its fragility, will seem strong. Its growth thereafter is uncontrollable in the right conditions. The now beautiful bud of petals has deep affection for its water. The flower is now reliant on it. It trusts that the water will come back every time.

A good example can only go so far. Love is something people have been trying to define since the beginning of time. Tom Robbins once wrote, “There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?”

I don’t think you can make love do anything. Love, like the water, has action due to choice. And choice can only be made due to the human spirit; what is felt. And human spirit is uncontrollable.

My choice? Feel this uncontrollable mess, as much as I can. Embrace my choice to love with no guarantee of reciprocity. Conjure up the uncontrollable spirit, and spin it into choices far beyond what the world and its intensities have conjured up for me.

A heavy heart goes unnoticed; but I will water it and watch it grow.

I love people

I’ve heard it far too much throughout my life, and it’s become increasingly more popular to say: “I hate people.” A simple sentence, yes, but one that contains so much bitterness and narrow mindedness that I began to wonder after a while why my peers and my tumblr followers and everyone around me, it seemed, felt this way.

Then I realized- the heart of the problem is our loss of faith in the human race. We’re letting all of the injustice and mistrust and hatred in the world get the best of us as a group. But people are, for the most part at least, good.

I love people. I love their stories. I love their scars and their hardships and their compassion towards others. I love the way their hair sticks up in the morning and even their naiveté to hate. I love their crooked teeth and the way they treat their loved ones. I love their insecurities and their best assets and what they were like in high school and what they want to be in the future. Most of all, I love humankind’s ability to recover.

My adamant love affair with the human race doesn’t necessarily mean I like certain qualities of specific people, because I’m as human as the next guy, but seriously, stop hating. By hating others, you’re isolating yourself, and at the end of the day, you’re no better than the people who betrayed you and the ones who made you lose faith in humanity in the first place. Instead, you’re a sad, lonely misanthrope.

An important lesson we need to learn is that we can trust again. If you hate people, it most likely stemmed from a hurtful experience that has consumed you or even worse, a secondhand situation where you vicariously make a parent or a friend’s issue your own. Don’t let your fear of people keep you from living your life. Do you think that the people who have been cheated on are all still single because they can’t trust a partner again? And what about the people who have had their friends talk about them behind their backs? Will all of those people never be able to make friends again? They’ll move on. You’ll move on. We have to. And if you were the two timer or the backstabber, you’ll learn. I’ll bet you already have. If you’re closing yourself in or boxing yourself out, chances are you’re missing out on meeting the insanely interesting and fascinating people who live in our beautiful world.

I know it hurts. Being taken advantage of always sucks. But it’s important to note that while the majority of people are good, no two people are the same. So put yourself out there again, you wonderful people-haters, or else you’ll grow old wishing that you did.

First love?

Everybody is always making a big fuss over the “first love” concept, and how it’s this life-changing thing that never really fades away. But I feel like while your first love is great, and probably shows you things about yourself that you didn’t know, and inevitably breaks your heart, what we should really be talking about is the second and third and fourth great loves that show us that we can feel that way for someone again.

After that “first great love” breaks your heart you get to thinking they’re one in a billion, the only fish in this sea that could possibly jive with you, that could possibly make you want to touch them all night and then just sit next to them while watching Netflix and go grocery shopping and talk about the annoying things that happened today and all the little, ridiculous nuances of everyday life that nobody else could possibly understand but them.

But one day, usually when we’re least expecting it, someone else comes along. Usually, we’re hesitant to love them. We think we’re broken and “we need time” when really it’s just an excuse to not be with someone because we’re too afraid of our own feelings. But what we realize, slowly, but then all at once, is that the person we have in our lives right now makes us happier than that other person did. They ended for a reason, and you don’t have to end what you have because of what happened in the past. It’s over, your thoughts are the only thing that keeps it alive.

And maybe we want to keep these things alive, because we can’t get over the fact that sometimes in life, we can love greatly and deeply but not forever. This is not what we were taught. We were raised on the notion that once we find someone we care about enough, we have to bind them together with us by law and conform to every convention set up for us to breed the next generation and live a blase life.

You don’t have to choose this. There will always be more love to find. It’s only ever a matter of getting over the fear of feeling again. 

This is all I want

What if all I want to do is write. I want people to know how I feel and for them to understand me. All of these ideas in my head fade when the ink hits the surface of my leather journal. Wouldn’t it be easier to write my darkest secrets? Because I have no one to listen to me. But why should they, it’s not their responsibility to help me work through my problems, and I am capable of doing that myself. So instead I’ll just write and not worry about what they think. I’ll try.

But the thoughts are all gone, nothing left to write about that hasn’t been written before. Of course there are so many ideas in my head, but they all fade. Gone, into nothingness, with only their echo remaining. I want you to know me, but how can I even begin to describe myself. How can I tell you through my writing.

I want to write about this burning passion that is in my heart, but I can’t find the right words. I want everyone to know about the fire that is slowly consuming my thoughts and my lust to have everything in life and more. Where can you even find the words to express the excruciating pain that it causes, but also the overwhelming joy of having something you can love so much?

It’s not a person I love, nor a thing. Instead it’s an idea. The feeling of freedom as you hear the click of the airplane’s wheels as it prepares to land. The way it slams on the ground and how you can feel the pilot flooring the brake. My feelings rush and slam in this same way. I can feel my heart race and flood with emotions as I try to stop it. I try to put out the raging fire but it’s useless. Secretly I love it. I love feeling so much. It kills me, but brings me life. There are no words to describe it, which kills me even more.

Dear Justin

Can you believe that it's already been seven years already? Well, I'm sure you can. You're the one that's gone, after all.

Seven years.

So much has changed. Yet today will always be the same.

I don't think there will ever be an April 1st that I wake up with this feeling of dread. I'll always realize that I've made it through another year when you were taken away far too early. There wont ever be a morning that I don't ever wake up wishing that I could just tell you one last time how much you mean to me. There will never be a morning that I won't wonder what you would have been doing today.

Seven years and everything has changed.

Sometimes I think that maybe you were the glue that held so many of us together. After you left, so many of us drifted apart. I can't even remember the last time I talked to, let alone saw, so many of those friends. We had plans to be friends forever. But maybe that's just how life works. We all drifted apart. I would like to think that would have never happened with us. All of those plans we made and none of it ever actually worked out. I don't know if that's just growing up or growing apart. But we would never have grown apart, right?

Seven years and nothing is really all that different.

I still deal with the same problems that you would spend so many nights talking me through. I guess I've gotten better at dealing. Or hiding it. That really hasn't changed at all. All those late night phone calls and cigarettes and you would call me out on my bullshit when I needed it most. You always had that uncanny ability to look through the facade I put up every day. I have a couple other people that do that, too, now. I guess I'm still not that good at acting okay. Or maybe there are always going to be people like you that can read me.

I'm going to try to make it through the day without having a complete breakdown, but I don't think I can promise you that. I know that you were all about living life for the moment, being happy, and filling the world with laughter and joy. I should try to do the same. But I can't bring myself to do it. Today will always be the day I struggle to get out of bed and face the world that doesn't know what happened. Today will always be the day that I got the worst phone call of my life. Today will always be the day that we never made it to dinner. Today will always be that changed everything.

Seven years.

I miss you. I love you. I will never forget you. You will always be in my heart, Justin, and that is one thing that will never change. No matter how many years go by.