Dying Dreams!

What happens mentally when a dream dies?

Where does it go?

Because even though the possibility of the realization of the dream has long since died it seems that the “what-ifs and the could-haves” still occupy territory in my brain.

I haven’t grieved football.

There are seasons of grief in life. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a job, a home, a pet. You grieve moving cities and ending relationships. How then could I have neglected to allow myself to grieve something that I could make the argument for being the most consistent time, thought, and energy-consuming part of myself?

Football shaped my identity!

It shaped my goals and my dreams. It shaped my worth, based on the fulfillment and accomplishment of the aforementioned. Then with very little warning, it was ripped from me.
 

Suddenly I had massive voids to fill in my head and my heart and I chose to stuff the emotions instead of handling them with emotional maturity.

But I was a 20-year-old boy inundated in a world saturated with skewed definitions of masculinity so I can’t take full blame. 

The result of these decisions yielded a nasty scar and to jump into training room talk; scar tissue is not a good thing. It does not allow your joints and muscles to function at their full capacity and it inhibits them from doing what they were made to do naturally.

Those rules still apply in the mental landscape. The song Heart of Worship has a line that goes “Longin’ just to bring Something that’s of worth That will bless Your heart”

I sang those words and my response was “well God I’m sorry that I don’t have much of worth to bring You..” 

Which was met with “All I am asking for is you.”

I don’t share that story meaninglessly. And it ties together I promise. I haven’t grieved football. I live in a constant state of being disappointed in myself because the what-ifs and the could-haves live in the improperly healed space created by the neglect of my wound.

I have allowed my pain to be residual because it is now festering. Scar tissue and unhealed wounds don’t allow full capacity operation and my head and my heart are no different.

I had assigned my worth and my contribution of value to this world to my ability to perform for other people.

If you have been keeping up with my previous writings you would have learned that I wrestle with disordered eating, unhealthy relationships with food, and body dysmorphia; all of which are a result of a performance-based mindset. 

But nowhere in the Bible does it say “Love others like you would love yourself unless you didn’t do as well in football as you had hoped” and the great commission was not contingent on how tight my clothes felt or how much I hated the angle that I caught the skin under my chin at in the mirror. If my one job on earth is to Love others like Jesus, does the recipient of that Love care at all about my size or lack of worldly accomplishment? 

Rhetorical question and the answer is No. 

But I have for a long time allowed my scar tissue to keep me from operating at the full capacity that the Lord is asking me to because the anxiety that I work myself into due to clothing has caused me to avoid conversation and social interaction. The bouts of depression I have experienced have kept me in more of a state of rain cloud than light and I have actively chosen to sit in it rather than love fully.

I believe that awareness is one of the biggest gifts that you can be given by the Lord. It is a precursor to healing in the fact that you are unable to have something healed that you have become so numb to that it has become the norm allowing it to go unaddressed. 

This last blog post is less a solution and more a challenge. Maybe it could be considered thought-provoking or awareness-seeking. Are there parts of your life that you haven’t grieved? Have you allowed those wounds to heal improperly? What parts of your life are you limping through because you have simply accepted the scar tissue as your new norm?

I can speak to this confidently because I have seen the Lord move recently in this area. Bring these to the Lord because despite your best efforts, regardless of your own performance, our God is Healer and you are human.

Mitch