getting older and pride
truthfully, its hard being the older guy in places now. you never quite get used to it. especially when i used to be the young guy that people would notice— oh that kids going to go places, oh that kids gonna be amazing some day, oh that kid has potential.
im not a kid anymore. people think ive hit my potential. there is no more “when i grow up”. its both a sobering realization and an unflattering reality. who, what, and where i am right now has been the sum of all my previous decisions, the accumulation of both my hard work and my laziness. in college, when i was tired or sleepy, i would just sleep. i thought id hit my upper limit of what was possible. if i woke up tired, i would tell myself that there was no way i was going to get anything done feeling like that so i would choose to sleep in rather than grind. im learning now at my job that those were mental blocks id put on myself as excuses. ive learned now that my mental and physical limit is much higher than what i’ve every thought or realized. it makes me question what other self imposed limits ive placed. are the weights im lifting a mental limit rather than the actual physical capacity that my muscles can carry? when i give up on a set, is it because my muscles have genuinely given out or because ive decided i want to stop? i suspect its the latter.
anyway, today i was playing basketball with some kids probably 7 to 10 years younger than me. i was playing fine and i probably would have been fine if they didnt keep fouling me. the issue was not that i couldn’t play or that the kids were doing better than me— if they’d been playing proper defense and stripping me and such, i couldn’t be mad. but it just looked like i couldnt play against a bunch of kids but it was because the kids were literally tackling me. something about that made me upset and i was getting loud and perhaps slightly rambunctious.
i dont think i should have let it bother me as much as it did. i think that part of it was pride. i hate that i let my pride get to me, i need to be better. i just also hate losing and losing to a bunch of kids hurts even more. but no, now that i think about it, this was definitely more of a pride thing.
“pride is the devil”
- Jermaine Lamarr Cole
112 - 07/09/2025