"Coulda, woulda, shoulda." That's what my dad always says when I start a sentence with "I should have..." It's infuriating. Sometimes I just need to decry the injustices that have befallen me. Let me wallow.
If I had only taken that shot, we would've won the state championship.
My senior year in high school, our soccer team went on a miraculous run. The previous three years had been lackluster, our seasons riddled by nerves, factiousness and underperformance. This time around, though, we had a newfound sense of confidence. We'd been here before. We'd pushed through grueling preseason practices in August. We'd managed competing egos on the team. We'd dealt with the butterflies, the ones you get as you lace up in the locker room before the game against our cross-town rival.
But there was one thing we hadn't dealt with before. After winning 20 straight games, we found ourselves playing for the state championship, our ultimate goal, the final stage in our journey and we were losing. In the 20 games we played up to that point, we had never trailed another team. So what did we do? We froze up. We forgot everything.
There's this memory I have of that game where I have the ball, and I'm just outside the other team's goal box. The game is almost over. I can feel the crowd waiting for me to shoot, but instead I pass to our star forward, who's being covered by two defenders. Ten minutes later, the other team is running all over the field celebrating, and the dream that my friends and I had, the one we worked so hard for, the one we deserved, is gone.
I should've taken that shot. A simple problem, with a simple answer. At Dartmouth, I found my problems to be infinitely more complicated. When I tried to be a good guy, I ended up being a jerk. When I tried everything in my power to make a relationship work, it ended up in flames. When I found a world view that I was certain would finally make things clear, I soon realized that it was no less riddled with blind spots than the last one.
There is one thing, though, that I'm sure I would do differently at Dartmouth: sophomore summer. Instead of spending all my free time laying around, and instead of saying "yes" when anyone asked me to play pong, I simply would've gone outside more. It sounds silly, I know. Sophomore summer is supposed to be spent outside. But under the weight of some personal issues, I couldn't bring myself to get out of my own head and just go exploring. I preferred to stay where I was, even though I knew it was making me miserable. It was the safe thing to do. I chose unhappiness because I preferred knowing exactly how things would end up. I would get drunk. I would bounce around the frats. I would feel empty at the end of the night and would wake up hung over and apathetic, waiting for something or someone to come along and make me feel better.
Since coming to Dartmouth I've learned a lot. I've learned that neither worrying about school work nor scrambling to finish it makes it any more manageable. I've learned that unless I can admit when something's eating me and talk to a friend about it, I close off and start to doubt everything. I've learned that pressing the snooze button on my alarm clock only postpones dealing with all the things I wish I could sleep through. I've learned the dangers of hiding from life.
So here I am, writing some stories about my past, watching them spin out from the confines of my mind and hoping that they might take on new life in someone else's imagination. I don't always learn from my past certainly not as quickly as I should but I can always count on it to provide a few good stories. That shot I told you about, the one in the state championship? I should've taken it. What would I do differently at Dartmouth? A lot of things.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
