Unfulfilled Dreams, Grief and Finding Fulfillment

Last October, I had a speaking engagement outside of Madison, WI, which happened to be on the same week that my Alma Mater, Army West Point, was scheduled to play the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an Army game and Kara has shockingly never experienced a college football game, so we decided to stay an extra day and the enjoy the game.

Although football feels so far removed from my life, I was excited about going with Kara as this is the one part of my life that she isn’t too familiar with. She knows my story, but she has never seen me in this element so I was looking forward to sharing this experience with her.

After spending some time throwing back a few beers and eating one-too-many hot dogs with former teammates and classmates, Kara and I found ourselves scanning our tickets and walking into the stadium. When we finally found our seats, I sat down, looked around and took it all in. And at almost the same time, someone made a big enough play to send the 80,000 people inside of that sold-out stadium to their feet screaming.

I haven’t heard a roar from a crowd that loud in I don’t know how long.

I also haven’t felt that kind of energy course through my body since I was the one making the plays that left entire stadiums on their feet screaming. The energy that moved through me, in that moment, felt like two defibrillator paddles were just placed my chest and for the first time in a long time, I felt alive—really alive.

But the roar of the crowd shook something else up in me and as I continued to sit there, I began to feel something that has been buried deep in my bones and something I haven’t given myself permission to fully feel.

Grief.

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When I graduated West Point, the majority of classmates went off to war and I went to the NFL. As you might imagine, I quickly internalized that the NFL was my way of serving and my way of giving back—my own battle to fight and my war to win.

But, the last thing that I did was “win.”

The NFL was the perfect storm that ripped through my life and like a tree stripped naked, this storm left me fully exposed. The life that I worked so hard for and the man who I thought I was were suddenly unrecognizable—and I couldn’t help but to feel like a failure and a fraud. The perceived promised land full of milk and honey was nothing more than a desert full of mirages and I was now dying of thirst.

And something had to change.

I couldn’t continue to live in a way where suicidal ideation and substance abuse were my daily experiences. I couldn’t continue to live in a way where I spent every ounce of energy that I had perfecting and hiding behind a facade so that I could continue to meet the expectations of who people thought I was. I couldn’t continue to feel trapped like a prisoner in my own life.

I was the type of soul-tired that more sleep doesn’t solve so when my time in the NFL came to an end, not only did something need to change—but, I was desperate for real change.

So, through a strange occurrence of events, I hung up my NFL cleats, packed my bags and drove to Canada where I would become a janitor of an organization and sweep floors and clean bathrooms in exchange for free therapy.

And, if you’ve followed my journey after football then you know that the last decade has been a decade of deep inner healing and personal growth. When I left the NFL, I went after healing with everything I had and my life has evolved and grown in the most beautiful and unimaginable ways. I’ve learned so much about myself and also the healing journey.

And the one thing that I know about healing is it happens in layers.

In other words, you can’t access the deeper truths without leaning into and alchemizing the pain that is surfacing here and now. And as you lean into what’s surfacing now, you can see the things that you once weren’t able to see and therefore you can step into deeper measures of healing—deeper experiences of freedom.

And earlier this year, something had surfaced in my heart space, and I saw it for the first time—and it changed my life.

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Kara had just gone to bed and I decided to do something that I rarely do, stay up and watch the football game. Truthfully, I don’t watch football often but this last season, and more specifically, the playoffs, left me and millions of others glued to the tv so I decided that sleep could wait.

Aaron Rogers was doing what he does best and was marching the Packers down the field for a late game comeback and almost out of nowhere, I felt something so deep that it vibrated through my heart space in such a way that I thought someone was talking to me. I called Kara’s name thinking she might have said something from the other room, but I quickly realized that she was deep asleep. So, I decided to mute the football game and get still and I felt it again. I felt it so clearly that it was as if someone else was speaking directly to me.

It’s time to move on. It’s time to move on. It’s time to move on.

I was slightly taken back by the clarity of this moment and I wanted to act confused but I knew exactly what it meant. My story has always been that I’ve moved on from football the day that I left the game and moved to Canada. And while that is partially true—it’s not the full truth. There’s no doubt in my heart or mind that I’ve moved on from the game of football, but it was so clear in that moment that there were parts of me that were still emotionally trapped to that past. And in my living room, with the game on mute and tears rolling down my cheeks, I felt it again.

Grief.

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There’s a term for this type of grief that comes from the more ambiguous losses in your life like the loss experienced around unmet expectations or unfulfilled dreams. It’s called non-finite grief. And if you ask me, we don’t talk about it enough.

And here’s why.

For so many of us, we have these ideas of what we want our lives to look like and what we think they should look like. But, as we all know, life happens and when we continually fall short of the future that we think we want or even need. The push and pull of trying to figure it out leaves us empty and tired.

But, what I know from my own experience and also from working with high achieving and high performing leaders is that we have this uncanny ability at internalizing this pain and using it as motivation to fuel our ambition. We take our failures, our rejections and our shame—all of the pain from these moments of unmet expectations—and we turn it into this rocket fuel that enables to go and go and go.

And the truth is, it works—until it doesn’t.

It was this very grief that was birthed from my own unmet expectations and unfulfilled dreams that gave me the energy to go from playing in front of 80,000 fans to cleaning toilets in hopes to redeem myself. It was this very grief that moved me and my life forward time and time again despite not knowing where I was going or how things were going to change. It was this grief that gave me the power to stand with the determination in the face of hopelessness knowing that no matter what—I was going to figure it out.

It was this very grief that helped me mobilize the energy that I needed to run in this fast pace life and do all that I can to make something of myself.

But, it was also this very grief that left me full of despair because despite how much I continued to move forward at all costs, the inner void that was still left undone, the deep subtle inner ache that pervaded every area of my life and left me drowning in a sea of dissatisfaction no matter how good life was, mirrored back to me that I was either broken beyond repair or that I haven’t done enough.

Either way, I was tired and left standing feeling trapped in emotional quicksand and my life was sinking more by the day.

And it was this moment, I realized that my life, since leaving football, has been me trying to work my way out of a grief deficit—an attempt to compensate for who I was not and what my career never was. In other words—I’ve been trying to achieve my way out of this non-finite grief.

And, it was in that moment that I was able to realize and finally see that I haven’t been living as much as I’ve been avoiding. And how can we possibly feel alive in our lives when we’re not living our lives?

This changes everything.

Barbara Brown Taylor is one of my favorite spiritual teachers and authors and she once said that “it’s the the sadness that sinks a person’s life, it’s the energy a person spends avoiding the sadness that sinks a person’s life.”

And ever since I’ve read that quote, I’ve never forgotten it. Truthfully, I think about it often—especially as I’ve been unpacking the non-finite grief that I’ve been carrying in my life for over a decade.

And, it’s more clear than ever before:

It’s not the grief that will sink a person’s life, it’s the energy a person spends avoiding their grief and calling it ambition that will sink a person’s life.