note from the Garden Variety Academic: I promised some guest blogs while I'm on sabbatical, and here is the first. Enjoy!
Accepting the Artsy Athlete Hybridity
Hello, my
name is Ann Dorris and I went through my undergrad as a frighteningly
passionate collegiate athlete and a full time lover of all things literature
and creative writing. A rare breed, I know. To my teammates I was a
“hipster—weirdy, English person,” while to my classmates I was an
“ESPN-watching, run-too-much, scary and intense jock.” While one day I am
explaining to my English professors my need to miss class for a game, another
day I am explaining to my coach that I need to miss practice for Shakespeare or
in the name of poetry. I am what you might call a hybrid. I am an outcast to
both of my passions because the other half of me seems to conflict. I live and
die for the NBA Finals just as much as I live and die for Mark Strand or
Virginia Woolf. I am here to tell the other rare breeds, reading Villette in the locker room before
practice or showing up to a poetry reading still sweaty and out of breath from
preseason workouts, there are others like you and there is a way to make these
seemingly opposite identities work (which I can say confidently as a graduate
student getting her MA in English and an Assistant Coach of a collegiate
women’s basketball program). In order to ease your doubts, here are a handful
of helpful tips to keep you sane along the way:
At some point early on in the
self-identification process, you need to sit down and just accept that you have
two very different passions that in most eyes directly conflict. Just give
yourself a nice big hug because there will be a million (slight hyperbole)
times when you are going to have to convince the athletes that you love being
an athlete and the artsy academics that you love artsy academia. Your teammates
will be confused by this love for poetry or literature and your fellow poets
and scholars will be confused as to why you physically exhaust yourself day in
and day out for a “game.” That is why it is crucial to have this
self-reflecting sit down and accept the natural hybridity. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO
CHOOSE. Yes, you will feel like an outcast sometimes, but that does not mean
you have to give up one passion to feel devoted to your other. There were so
many times when I would be sitting in a poetry workshop or watching a
Shakespeare play amidst peers who devote every waking hour to reading and
writing with no distractions, and thinking to myself that I will never reach my
potential in academics or creative writing because my love for basketball takes
away too much time. Likewise, there were plenty of times when I knew I should
be putting extra shots up in the gym or watching extra game film, but simply
couldn’t because I had three novels to read and still needed to find time to
write. There is a scary fallacy that is waiting to eat the souls of
Englishy/Artsy athletes, and that is the invention in the mind of a potential
that cannot be reached unless you give up one of your passions. Don’t do it.
Have this sit down, hug yourself, joke with your friends that you are a freak,
and go on reciting lines of Howl during
water breaks of practice.
Not All Friends Will
Mix
For as long as I can remember, I
have had two completely separate groups of friends with a very, very occasional
floater who goes in between. I have my “English friends” whose Friday night
consists of writing lines of poetry on the back of a bar receipt or violent
arguments about Literary Theory and the flaws in the literary canon. Then, I
have my “jock friends” whose Friday night consists of hours of one-on-one or
violent arguments about whether Lebron is better than MJ (which he isn’t).
There is only one night in the year that I force these two friend groups to
blend, and that is on my birthday. Though both groups are wonderfully kind to
each other on this one night, the simple fact is that they do not understand
each other at all. Blame it on different jargons or perhaps different hobbies,
if you want, but none of that changes anything. You just have to accept that
just because you can fit in with both groups, doesn’t mean they can fit with
each other. I’m not saying that there will never be a collective group of
friends that contains the Artsy/English type and the jock type because I do
believe that when the earth is at the right point in its revolution and the
planets are perfectly aligned, a friend group with this mixture can be found.
However, for the rest of the time, it is just much simpler to accept that not
all of your friends are going to mix. But hey, that just means more friends for
you.
Read Everywhere, Run
Everywhere
Beware of the lies that kind
people tell you such as, “no no, there is plenty of time for both.” There is
only time for both if you make time for both. By make time, I mean you must
read everywhere and run everywhere. I was the girl sitting in a laundry basket
(unnecessary detail) reading novels in the locker room before practice or games
because there simply was no other way I was going to get through 3-5 novels a
week and practice and extra workouts and games and writing creatively and
writing scholarly and reading theoretical articles. Therefore, while my
teammates were power napping before the game, I was reading and writing. While
my classmates were on their fifth draft of a paper, I was doing track workouts
and getting shots up in the gym. The fact of the matter is: if you love both
things you’re oddly enjoying the quiet death of managing them without slacking
on either. I’m telling you now, there isn’t “plenty of time” to do both, but
there is so much reward in getting to be immersed in two completely different
passions, while many other people only get to fully enjoy one.
Even though an undergrad major
or a masters in English may look like a waste of space on a coaching résumé and
four years of a collegiate sport may look like a waste of space on a doctoral
application, neither of them are a waste of anything. Both collegiate athletics
and a degree (or two, or three) in English give you countless experiences and
lessons, which inherently fuel both careers. Being a collegiate athlete teaches
you the difference between working and working hard, and how only one of those
will bring you a feeling of success. It teaches you how to survive and lead completely
surrounded by other humans with just as big of a will and personality as you.
Most importantly, it teaches you how to fight for something you want and not
let anybody else take it from you. All of which can fuel you to reach whatever
goals you have whether they have anything to do with sports or not. Likewise, getting
a degree (or two, or three) in English will give you a peek into the lives of
people all around the world, so that when you feel like you are having a hard
day and nobody else will ever go through what you have to go through, you can
think about Pip from Great Expectations
who spent his whole life madly in love with a girl that was reared to hate the
existence of the male population. All the sudden, you realize that everyone in
this world is fighting to survive and understand their place in life and it
would all go much smoother if we just worked together rather than against each
other. Getting degrees in English gives you the necessary tools to take
something you feel strongly about and mold those thoughts and emotions into
intelligent and coherent writing so that you can get that job, or convince that
congress(wo)man, or create that best-selling novel that will change the life of
someone you have never met. Finally, the artsy/humanities English degree will
give you the ability to think and analyze in a way that no other degree will be
able to do. I mean, in a way you will have seen life through the eyes of
hundreds of different people in different cultures and times. Then, you will be
able to think deeply about the internal lives of each and how they came to be.
So when you hit your identity crisis or your friend, coworker, etc. hits his or
her identity crisis, you will be able to really think about what has formed and
molded you or another into the person that they have become. Thus, how is it
that an athletic director or dean of the English department turn down such a
rare breed? They can’t. Unless, you turn down yourself first.
Ann Dorris
M.A English student, Lynchburg College
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