More than a week ago, I went to hang out with some friends here in town to watch some football.
While I was there, a guy I’d known for a long time talked to me about “Where Are They Now?”, my summer series that I did to highlight former athletes from the area who’ve gone on to do good things in life.
The sole focus of WATN wasn’t necessarily to always do athletes who went on to have Division I scholarships, but to focus on athletes who had interesting stories to tell.
However, I did write about two that ended up at top programs and two that didn’t even play sports in college. The latter left him confused about the criteria I used to pick athletes for the features.
Basically his point was just because he wasn’t coaching or working a white collar job doesn’t mean he or people like him didn’t make it in life.
At that point, we’d been “watching football” for a while and so we were all laughing while this was going on.
Nothing bothered me about his opinion and the points he made because they were valid points and I’d rather hear what people actually have to say than just be showered with compliments all the time.
There’s people all over this world who are inadequate at their jobs and have probably stunted their growth mentally because they’ve become too fragile to listen anything critical.
But the thing that really stuck with me was the idea that this guy, who had a difficult upbringing and became a father in his late teens only to years later to become the guy that I seemingly see at every youth sports league or camp because he and his wife are so involved in their children’s life, possibly didn’t feel like that I felt like he’s “made it” in life.
Because by my standard, that is someone who truly embodies what it means to make something of yourself.
When it comes to me, “making it” in life can be so many different things and not just becoming someone “influential” in society.
It can be leaving home and creating a life for yourself that you want to live and not the one your family has in mind for you.
It can be leaving an abusive relationship and finding someone who loves you the way you deserved to be loved.
It can be you making enough money to help your loved ones out so they don’t get thrown out on the street.
A big problem in the U.S. is that we make so many people feel like they’re not worthy of pride because they’re not in an “esteemed position” in our social hierarchy. As someone who works a white collar job and notices how impressed some people are when they hear I work as a reporter, I never forget how a lot of people treated me when I was delivering pizzas trying to save up money to travel while figuring out what was next in life.
Because of that mentality that does our society a great disservice, I also remember feeling very inadequate and dissatisfied after college because I didn’t have a job lined up at a trendy tech startup and a nice apartment in a city that everybody wants to live in.
While thinking about what he said to me over this last weekend, I thought “How do I even know I’ve made it in life?”
Since my time following college graduation and dropping out of graduate school in August of 2016, I’ve lived in Australia, traveled around Southeast Asia and spent of lot of time in Latin America…and found something I love, traveling.
I have so much trouble sleeping the night before a big trip, because I’m excited the same way I was the night before a big game as a little kid.
Getting to this point now from where I was in 2016 when I decided to use all the money I saved for graduate school to move to a country 8,000 miles away from home is an absolute miracle.
If that isn’t “making it,” I don’t know what is.
It doesn’t matter where are you now? The more appropriate question is, are you happy?
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