Dear football,
Growing up, I always wanted to be you.
I didn’t necessarily want to be your quarterback or wide receiver, or even your literal football — the real star on the field, the key player everyone’s eyes are relentlessly fixated on. And it isn’t that I wanted to be loved or constantly checked in on the way that you are.
I just wanted purpose.
And purpose is an arbitrary thing, that life goal that everyone tells you is unimportant — impossible, even — to track down early on. It’s that something that “most people discover along the way,” but to tell you the truth, I didn’t (and still don’t) care that most people find theirs along the way.
Yours is innate. Your game has a plan, and your end goal a plan even clearer: to win. Your plays are drawn out for you, a purpose within sight at every corner, at every first down. I wanted my purpose to be innate like yours, something handed to me so that, truthfully, I wouldn’t have to put in the work to discover it myself.
So yes, I’m jealous of you. I’m jealous that some guy named Walter Camp decided a hundred years ago who you are, and with that manufactured a purpose so plain, yet so embossed in promise and clear success. And you were a hit! A star, even!
And what’s more: Your purpose is art. The game itself relatively simple, but its products? Magnificent.
Intricately woven into the lives of millions, your purpose has inspired admiration and community, hope and something to believe in. One victory may be just another in the grand scheme of victories to you, but to the little kid sitting at home before their TV with the volume just loud enough to keep their parents asleep, your victory is not simply exciting — it is their world.
Do you even recognize your power? How important you are to the people around you, the people who have dedicated themselves to you? I mean, seriously, do you?
But it’s not even about that — it’s about the fact that some dude called Walter Camp handed you a purpose, and it is one that, without a doubt, legitimately means something. You galvanize and unite communities, surpass linguistic barriers, bring hope and promise to delicate lives. Your purpose is promise, and it is beautiful. It is everything I could only dream of achieving.
So I admit that kind of, maybe, it’s not about having to put in the work. Kind of, maybe, it’s the unrelenting terror of incorrectly choosing and therefore squandering a lifetime focusing on some arbitrary purpose that leaves my soul desolate. Some arbitrary purpose unworthy of the warm embrace of a conclusion that leaves my heart whole. Some purpose that to its core, is wrong for me.
Why do you get the luxury of that correctness, of that warm embrace, the crowds that reign sweetly, hotly on your victories?
While I pour tears concocted of ink and graphite onto finite pages, your cries wet with purpose run like floods consuming and swallowing my tears whole, dragging me under so deeply I can’t remember the aim I yearn to swim in. Well, truthfully, I can’t even find that aim. And even more truthfully, I know that it’s not you dragging me under your waves, attempting to drown me with every ebb and flow.
And maybe that doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s unfair of me to compare myself to you. In all of your glory, who am I to even put us on the same playing field?
I am not you. I can never be you. Maybe that’s why I hate you.
Mia Wachtel covers football. Contact her at mwachtel@dailycal.org.