Mine was volleyball.

It’s the little things that have stayed with me. The slightly musty locker room. The spandex uniform I had to constantly pull down to prevent a wedgie. My knee pads bunched around my ankles to put off making them sweaty. A brand-new volleyball, smooth and untouched before getting scuffed up on the gym floors.

I even loved the sport enough to tolerate preseason conditioning that left our thighs screaming every time we tried to sit on the toilet.

And there was plenty more where that came from. Coaches yelled. Missed serves earned laps. Practices ran until our bodies felt useless. Winning mattered, and if you weren’t playing well, you knew it. Keep playing badly and somebody else took your spot.

None of it made me want volleyball less.

I started playing officially in seventh grade, and when my coach was figuring out everyone’s positions, I proudly told her that I wanted to be a setter. They’re not usually the ones getting the glory, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be in the middle of everything.

Ideally, a setter touches the ball on almost every play. Someone else receives the serve. Someone else usually makes the final hit. But that second touch was mine. I had to get to the ball and decide where it needed to go: outside, middle, right side. Where could I reasonably send it? Because, as you might imagine, middle school volleyball players rarely make a perfect pass to the setter.

Sometimes the best option was not setting anyone at all. One of my favorite things to do was make it look like I was about to set the ball and, at the last second, drop it barely over the net instead. If the defense had already shifted toward the hitter they expected me to use, the ball could fall almost stupidly easily into the now-empty space.

That was the part I loved: seeing where the ball needed to go before everyone else did.

I worked hard for that position, but almost every preseason, something happened. One year I rolled my ankle. Another year I overextended my thumbs. Junior year, I pulled my groin, which I didn’t even know was a thing I could pull. Soon enough, my athletic trainer became one of my best friends. We talked while he taped my thumbs up every day.

Every season seemed to begin with me expecting to start as setter and somehow finding my way back to the bench.

In eighth grade, I didn’t get to move up with the rest of my class. The coach felt I wasn’t ready, so I stayed with the younger team. That sounds like it should have devastated me. Honestly, it was fine.

I liked those girls, and I especially liked the assistant coach compared with the head coach, so in my mind being farther away from her was not exactly a punishment. I wasn’t desperate to say I played at the highest level. Even later, in high school, varsity itself was never really the prize.

I just wanted to be on the court.

That distinction became clearer as I got older. Volleyball was not something I did for a few months. It filled my year: school volleyball, summer leagues, club on weekends, lifting after school. I spent years with many of the same girls, from seventh grade through senior year.

You would think spending that much time together would make friendship inevitable.

It didn’t.

I knew what everyone was talking about because I was always there: boys, drama, popular kids, who liked whom that week. But a lot of the time, I felt like I was observing those conversations instead of participating in them. Same uniform. Same gym. Same bus rides. And yet, somehow still a fly on the wall.

The girls I became closest to were often younger than me. They seemed genuinely curious about who I was. They talked to me because they liked me, not simply because practice had placed us beside each other for two hours every day.

Off the court, I was never entirely sure where I fit.

On the court, at least, I had a job. Or I did when I was allowed to do it.

By junior and senior year, I was on varsity and spent a lot of time warming the bench. My dad hated it. He would sit in the stands, silently irritated, because he believed I could play just as well as the girls on the court, and I knew I could too.

I wasn’t imagining it. When I played with our strongest outside hitter, we had a groove. I knew where she wanted the ball; she knew what to do with it. We could string together point after point and build real momentum. My serve was strong too, but more importantly, it was dependable. The coaches would put me in specifically to serve because they knew I could get the ball over the net.

However, I rarely started.

There was always a reason. I wasn’t loud enough. I didn’t make enough calls. I needed to improve this or that. Meanwhile, a freshman had slowly replaced me. If she made enough mistakes, eventually I might get sent in, usually when everyone was frustrated and we were already losing.

I was expected to fix the energy of a game that had been going badly before I ever touched the court. If I made one mistake, it felt enormous. The other setter could have several bad plays before I got my chance, but mine arrived under a microscope because we were already behind.

I started to feel as though I was constantly being asked to prove I deserved to be there but never able to simply settle in and play.

By the summer before senior year, I was tired. I remember standing in the kitchen late at night with my parents thinking, why am I still doing this?

I loved volleyball, but I was miserable. There was a good chance I would spend another season on the bench. Our coach had been very clear: there might be twelve girls on the roster, but only seven positions really played. Making varsity did not mean you would touch the court.

I told my parents I was thinking about quitting. My dad said that if I wanted to, I could. My mom told me not to.

At the time, I probably heard, “Don’t quit.” Looking back, I think she understood something I couldn’t yet. She knew how much I loved volleyball. I don’t think she believed the way I was being treated was fair, or that perseverance magically makes everything okay. She just didn’t want the difficult parts to become the reason I gave up something I genuinely loved.

So I stayed.

Strangely enough, by senior year I stopped caring quite as much about whether my coach put me in. I went to practice, worked on my skills, and played volleyball. The games had become so stressful that sometimes the bench was almost a relief. Our coach wanted to make it to the finals, and every mistake felt loaded with consequence. After years of desperately wanting to be put in, I sometimes found myself perfectly happy staying where I was.

What I remember most fondly now has almost nothing to do with any of that.

For senior night, the JV girls made posters for me. I still have them. I found them a couple of months ago while visiting my parents: blue poster board, my volleyball number, dolphins, and of course, volleyballs. All of my favorite things crammed onto paper.

Looking at them again made me ridiculously happy because those girls knew me. Not just the setter, the benchwarmer, or the girl who got subbed in to serve.

Me.

For a long time, I thought that was where my volleyball story ended.

Then, around 2022, I found a post on the local subreddit. A redditor was looking for a substitute for their volleyball team. I basically thought, well, I’m available, I guess.

So I showed up and looked for “a guy in a red shirt” as I had been instructed to.

There was no grand plan to reclaim some lost part of myself or heal my inner athlete. I was just going to play a volleyball game. But after the game, they invited me back the next season, and one game turned into another.

During that time, I started going to open gyms because I wanted to shake off the rust and get my skills back. That was when volleyball began to feel completely different.

There were people of all different ages and skill levels at those gyms, including players much better than me. We were there because we wanted to play.

No coach threatened to pull you after a mistake. Nobody was fighting over which seven people deserved to touch the court. One bad play did not determine whether you would get another chance. Someone served. Someone passed. If things went well, we got a set in. The ball went over the net, and then we did it again.

For the first time, I got to experience volleyball without all the things I had spent years believing were inseparable from it. I could have a bad night or a great one and still leave knowing I had spent the evening doing something I loved.

I made real friends too. The games and open gyms became the kind of community volleyball had never quite been for me when I was younger. Nobody cared how much I had played in high school or how much of it I had spent on the bench.

Nobody asked.

My body interrupted volleyball again. I kept re-injuring my shoulder, and eventually the pain started following me outside the gym.

So I stopped.

That still makes me sad, because when I stopped showing up, I lost more than the sport. I also lost the easy, built-in reason to see those people. Communities built around an activity can disappear strangely quickly when you can no longer participate.

I’m still grateful I got those years. Adult volleyball gave me something I had never fully experienced when I was younger: the same gym, the same ball, the same sport I had loved since I was ten years old, without somebody constantly deciding whether I had earned my place in it.

Maybe that is why setting appealed to me so much. A setter’s role was clear. The ball was supposed to come through me. I knew what I contributed and what I was there to do.

People were harder.

For years, I could spend enormous amounts of time around people and still not know whether I truly belonged with them. I became good at noticing what I could improve, where I could be more useful, what version of myself might finally make someone choose me. Volleyball gave me rules for belonging that felt easier to understand: get underneath the ball, make the set, don’t miss the serve. Be useful enough that they have a reason to put you in.

It took me much longer to notice that the people who made me feel most like I belonged were rarely the ones asking me to prove myself. They were the younger girls who made the posters. The random adults from Reddit who asked me to come back the next season. The people at open gym who didn’t care whether I was the best person there. Some of them still say hello and send me new open-play opportunities years later.

I spent a lot of years trying to earn my place.

Some of the best places I ever found were the ones where nobody made me.

And yes, there was a valid excuse. His daughter was struggling at bedtime, and I understood that she came first. I never wanted him to feel like he had to choose between being a good father and being with me. I knew parenting could not follow a strict schedule.

But... I hadn’t heard from him for several hours. There was no text letting me know he would be late and no update informing me of what was happening. I was sitting there waiting for someone I loved, with no idea when or whether he was coming over.

I understood the reason, and I was still hurt.

Both things were true at the time, and I wasn’t really sure how to process them. I could understand why he was delayed and still feel forgotten in the silence. I could care about his circumstances and still wonder where I fit inside them.

I was longing to be chosen after experiencing the feeling of not being chosen for so long. So I did what I always do when my heart wants to speak unfiltered.

I wrote a song.

It took less than thirty minutes.

After he finally arrived, well after my normal “no visitors after this time” period, I opened the door and said,

“I wrote you a song.”

He looked back at me sheepishly and replied with his normal self-deprecating humor,

“Oh God, are you about to rip out my soul?”

I grabbed his hand and led him inside, directly to the piano. I sat on the piano bench with my leg tucked underneath me, slightly guarded. With my guitar on my lap, I clipped my pink capo into place and played the very song I had just created while waiting.

That detail feels a little wild to me now. I did not wait until I had calmed down or found a gentler way to relay the message. Instead, I wrote the loudest version of what I was feeling and then performed it for the very person who had caused it.

Verse 1:

I’m not sure I would still use the same words I chose back then. “Pretty lies” sounds harsher than how I generally retell the story of us. I don’t recall believing that every word he said was a lie. In fact, I took almost all of his words as truth, as gospel.

But I digress.

I was embarrassed that I had let myself believe I mattered more than his actions seemed to show in that moment.

I know songs tend to catch the strongest version of a feeling. I used them as a way to dive into an emotion, however fleeting, and try to live inside it. Therefore, they don’t always leave room for every explanation or contradiction, especially when written in a heightened state of upset in thirty minutes.

The chorus was even more certain in its stance:

The title, “Won’t Be Me,” sounds like it belongs to someone who has reached a conclusion, as though the girl singing the song has finally seen the truth and decided she won’t continue to accept less than she wants or deserves.

The girl writing it had not.

I was hurt enough to write that I wasn’t even on his list, but I was still deeply in love with him. I was not ending the relationship or even planning to. I wasn’t sure whether I had the right to be as upset as I was. Part of me was angry, and another part was already explaining his side back to myself.

That was something I now realize I did often. I could identify exactly why something hurt me and then immediately begin building a case for why I should be more understanding.

The second verse said:

Apparently, I knew I was making excuses. I knew I had let smaller things collect until they felt much larger. I knew that promises to “do better” were beginning to lose their meaning. I could put all of that into a verse, but I couldn’t quite decide what it meant for my actual life.

After I sang the chorus a second time, I stopped playing. That was all I had written so far, but it seemed to portray the message clearly enough.

He was sitting on the floor beside me. When the song ended, he clutched his chest over his heart and pretended to fall to the side.

“You’ve struck me right in the heart!”

He said it almost in jest, but there was a serious undertone. He quickly apologized that I had been left waiting and promised to make it up to me. I was quick to accept his apology. Mostly, I was just glad he had finally made it.

Several days later, I finally finished the song by adding the bridge, which I often consider the turning point or highlight of a song. When I looked back over what I had written, I realized something significant.

The narrator had become much braver than I was.

I had not made a final move or packed his things, as he didn’t live with me yet. The song gave me an ending that I may have believed was right, but I was not ready to choose.

The line that stands out most to me now is,

“Her” was the girl from the chorus: the girl he truly needed, the one he would choose. The line revealed that even though I feared that girl would never be me, I was still willing to try.

The contradiction feels important now. The chorus sounds like acceptance: “That girl won’t be me.”

However, the bridge reveals that I hadn’t accepted it at all. I was willing to reshape myself for the slight chance of becoming the girl he chose.

The most honest part of the song comes after all of that certainty. After the accusations, the packed belongings, and the supposedly final move, the song ends by returning almost exactly to where it began:

Sitting here waiting to see your name light up.

At the beginning, I was praying to see his name. At the end, I was waiting. One word had changed, but I was still sitting in the same place.

That is what gets me when I read it now. The song knew I was hurt. It called out my excuses and the way I let things slide. It knew there was a version of me that wanted to draw a line and finally mean it. But it also recorded what I was actually doing beneath all of that certainty.

I was still waiting.

Years later, as I look back on the girl who wrote this song, I’m reminded of how much she desired to belong. She would have done anything and changed herself in any way to finally be chosen.

And that is exactly how you lose yourself.

I had to lose myself before I could find myself in the ruins.

Two people fall in love without ever seeing each other. No distractions, no first impressions, no physical chemistry confused for compatibility. Just deep conversations, shared values, and the belief that if the emotional connection is strong enough, it can endure anything.

It sounds romantic, right? But as time has proven, it is truly a terrible case study for lifelong marriage.

I used to adore this show. I found the premise unique. It wasn’t just “trash TV” to me, but a real experiment. I could imagine myself on it, idolizing the idea that you could fall in love with a voice. Without seeing their expressions, their body language, or how they carry themselves. And those things matter. I believe they’re vital to connection, even if we don’t always want to admit that.

Maybe that’s part of what makes the show so easy to watch. You can’t help but match yourself up with the people on screen and wonder how you might fare.

Would I fall for the right person? Would I miss something obvious? Would I confuse a good conversation for a future?

I think part of the reason I’m so fascinated by it is because I have done my own slightly embarrassing version of this. Not in a pod, but on a dating app.

“Someone can become important before they’ve become real.”

Over weeks-long text conversations, I learned how quickly a few messages can become a whole emotional world.

I have invested in the idea of someone before I had enough evidence. I’ve gotten attached to their potential, their pain, and the version of themselves they chose to show me through a screen. I’ve mistaken emotional intensity for intimacy because it felt like I’d been given access to something private.

Instead of meeting them where they were, I imagined us years down the road. Five years from now, living together, building a life, falling in love with the version of us I had already written in my head.

Meanwhile, the real person was still right there, giving me data I subconsciously ignored.

That’s the part nobody wants to admit. Sometimes we don’t fall in love with a person. We fall in love with their potential. We fall in love with the meaning we attach to them. We fall in love with the version of ourselves we could become if they choose us.

And that is where “shared values” can get tricky.

Shared values are not the same thing as lived compatibility. Anyone can say they value honesty and communication. Most people do. But values are easy to name when they haven’t cost you anything yet. They sound beautiful in the beginning because they are still theoretical.

The hard part is experiencing what those values look like under pressure. How someone handles the truth when it makes them uncomfortable. How they communicate when they feel defensive. How they show up when commitment becomes inconvenient or boring.

Those are things you can’t always learn from initial chemistry, intensity, or a few deep conversations. You can learn someone’s dreams quickly. You can learn their wounds. You can learn who they believe themselves to be.

But the truth is, knowing someone takes time.

It shows up in stress responses, conflict, disappointment, and the daily choices never told in love stories.

Maybe that’s why the premise is so fascinating. It’s not really asking whether love is blind. It’s asking how much hope we’re willing to pour into the blanks before reality has a chance to fill them in.

So maybe love isn’t blind.

Maybe attachment just moves faster.

Love is what waits long enough to see what’s actually there.

Not the big obvious ones. Not the final conversation. Not the blow-up everyone can point to afterward and say, that’s when it ended.

I mean the smaller moments. The ones that don’t seem dramatic enough to name, but your body remembers anyway.

For me, one of those moments happened after an interpreting assignment I wasn’t emotionally prepared for.

Because of confidentiality, I can’t share the details. What I can say is that it involved serious harm, people I had some proximity to, and information I had to carry professionally before I could process it personally.

That’s one of the hardest parts of this work. You don’t always get to react in the moment. You don’t always get to be a person first. Sometimes you have to hold your face still, keep working, and carry something devastating in real time.

Then afterward, you still may not be allowed to talk about it. Not fully. Not freely. Not in the way your nervous system needs.

I remember breaking down crying afterward and calling my partner at the time.

Because of his own work, I thought he might understand the kind of heaviness I had just been exposed to. I thought he might know what to say, or at least be able to sit with me in it for a minute.

But his first response wasn’t comfort.

It was anger.

And honestly, his anger made sense. I understood why he reacted that way. The situation was awful. There was every reason to be angry.

But I wasn’t calling because I needed someone to confirm that. I already knew it was awful. I was calling because I was not okay.

I needed calm. I needed softness. I needed someone to help me come back into my body for a minute. Instead, I got off the phone with this sinking feeling that maybe this wasn’t something he could offer me.

At the time, I tried to be fair. He was stressed. He was caught off guard. He didn’t know what to say. Some of that was probably true.

But fairness can become a place to hide from what something actually felt like.

Looking back, I can see that moment was one of the first cracks. Not because it ended the relationship. It didn’t. Not because it made him a bad person. I don’t think that.

But because it showed me something I couldn’t ignore forever.

I needed emotional support from my partner.

Not constantly. Not in an all-consuming way. Not because I expected someone to regulate my entire nervous system for me. But when something genuinely overwhelming happened, I needed to know I could reach for him.

I found an old note I wrote afterward.

The title was:

Emotional support for partner?

Even the question mark feels telling now.

I wasn’t angry when I wrote it. I was confused. I was trying to understand whether a need that felt basic to me was something he could actually meet.

The note itself is hard to read back now, mostly because I can hear how much I was trying to justify the need before even asking for it.

“I don’t often have panic attacks and I only have them when I’m concerned about my health normally. Sometimes I’m dramatic about things but when I’m actually panicking, I need some support.”

I wasn’t asking for constant reassurance. I wasn’t asking him to fix what happened or have the perfect response. I was trying to explain that this was rare for me, and that when it did happen, I needed someone who could help me steady myself.

A few lines later, the real question came out:

“I just need someone to help talk me through it and help me calm down and think rationally, just to help me process. But it seems like you said you’re not the person for that?”

That was the part I couldn’t stop circling around. Not the details of what happened at work. Not even his reaction exactly. The question underneath everything was whether my partner could be someone I could reach for when something hurt.

Near the end, I said it plainly:

“I don’t know how to have a partner who isn’t able to just support me.”

That sentence still feels clear to me.

Because love is not just chemistry. It’s not just attraction or shared humor or deep conversations or the feeling that someone understands certain parts of you. Sometimes love has to become practical. It has to exist inside the hard phone call, the overwhelmed nervous system, the moment when one person says, I need you right now, and the other person has to decide whether they can stay present.

That doesn’t mean someone has to be perfect. It doesn’t mean one partner should carry everything. But there is a difference between having other people to lean on and realizing the person closest to you may not be able to meet you in the places where you most need support.

That’s the hard part. When someone is cruel, the story is easier to tell. But when someone cares and still can’t meet you, you start wondering whether your needs are the problem. You shrink the request. You ask for less. You call it understanding.

Sometimes it is understanding.

And sometimes it’s self-abandonment wearing nicer clothes.

That day didn’t end the relationship, but it made me notice something I wasn’t ready to name yet. I could love someone. They could care about me. We could have chemistry, history, tenderness, shared humor, and deep conversations, and it still might not be enough if I couldn’t reach for them when I was overwhelmed.

I think that’s where clarity often begins. Not in the dramatic ending or the final conversation, but in the quieter moment when your body realizes something before your mind is ready to admit it.

Love is not only about whether someone cares.

It’s also about whether they have the capacity to hold what care requires.

Because I called it confusion, but I don’t think that was the whole truth.

I felt confused. I really did. But looking back, part of me knew what was happening. I just didn’t want that to be the answer. Calling it confusion gave me something to solve. It let me believe there was more context I hadn’t found yet, some missing piece that would make everything feel less painful.

I could tell myself I was reading into things. I could tell myself I was anxious. I could tell myself I needed to calm down before I trusted what I felt.

That was always the easiest place for my brain to go: back to myself.

Was I too sensitive? Did I need too much? Was I making it bigger than it was? Could I be calmer, cooler, less affected?

But I don’t think I was supposed to handle it better.

I think I was supposed to notice that I was hurting.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. How often I treated my own pain like it needed to be defended in court before I was allowed to believe it. I needed proof. I needed a pattern. I needed the right words. I needed something I could point to and say, “See? This is why I feel this way.”

Because without proof, I didn’t trust myself. And I hate that.

I hate that I spent so much time trying to make my own reaction smaller. Trying to be reasonable about something that was quietly taking over my body. Convincing myself I was okay with things I was absolutely not okay with.

The inconsistency. The waiting. The rereading. The tiny shifts in tone that made my whole chest tighten. The way one good moment could make me forget how unsettled I had been the day before.

That’s what made it hard.

It wasn’t all bad. If it had been all bad, I think I would have left sooner. It would have been easier to explain. But there were good moments. There was tenderness. There were things I wanted to believe in.

And I did believe in them.

That’s what makes these things so hard to untangle. You’re not only grieving what happened. You’re grieving what almost seemed possible. The version where the warmth stayed. The version where the distance finally made sense. The version where all the confusion turned into a story I could understand.

I was waiting for that version. I wanted the ending to make the middle hurt less.

But it didn’t.

And that is what I know now: confusion was not always me needing more information. Sometimes it was me already having the information and trying to survive what it meant. It was my body understanding something before I was ready to say it out loud.

I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t too much. I wasn’t inventing the ache just because I couldn’t explain it perfectly. I was trying to make myself feel safe inside something that kept making me feel uncertain.

And I think that is what I meant by confusion. Not that I didn’t know. That I knew, and kept hoping I was wrong.

Like I would finally understand what I was supposed to feel, and it would stay consistent once I got it right.

Instead, I learned how to live inside confusion and call it attachment.

I would type the words “how are you” and wait with anticipation, as if the response might tell me something I couldn’t already feel in my body. Something about where I stood. Something about whether I was still important.

Most of the time, I already knew the answer before it came. I just didn’t want to accept it.

I became very good at reading silence. At noticing timing. At tracking patterns in how people showed up when things were easy, and how they disappeared when things weren’t.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as analysis. I thought of it as care. As attention. As trying harder to understand someone.

Now I see it differently.

There were moments when I confused intensity for connection. Moments where being chosen felt fragile, like something that could disappear if I didn’t hold onto it correctly.

And when distance showed up, I didn’t know how to stay calm inside it. I would either reach for more closeness or pull away completely. There wasn’t much in between.

I used to think this was about the other person. About who they were and what they could or couldn’t give me.

Now I understand it was also about what I believed love required of me in order to be kept.

I have loved people who felt like home in one moment and unfamiliar in the next. And I have learned that sometimes both things can be true. Someone can be someone you love deeply, and still not be able to meet you in the way you need.

I don’t write this as blame anymore. I write it as pattern recognition.

Because I am no longer only inside the story. I can also see it now. The repetition. The same emotional shape showing up with different names attached to it.

What changed wasn’t the people.

It was the moment I started noticing the pattern while I was still inside it.

There were years where I wrote everything down as it happened. Trying to understand it while I was still in it. Trying to turn emotion into something I could hold.

I don’t do that in the same way anymore.

Not because life stopped being complicated, but because I stopped needing to translate every feeling immediately in order to survive it.

I learned how to stay with things a little longer before turning them into meaning.

And this is where this story begins.

Not with the first person I loved, or the second, or the one that made me question everything I thought I understood about connection.

It begins with the realization that I was not confused because love is confusing.

I was confused because I was learning how to recognize what love is not.