Assisting both goals in a man-of-the-match performance. Wow, Hughes was sensational, Arlo. After being benched for Zava earlier this season, he’s back in the starting lineup, and today, the Welshman played like a man reborn.
To myself, raised in an environment that glorified and romanticized restriction and suffering:
There is no victory in skipping dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, or morning coffee, or dessert.
There is no victory in refusing heaters and air conditioners and fans and heated blankets.
There is no victory in denying yourself sleep, or showers, or movement, or water, or a comfortable bed, or taking the elevator vs. the stairs.
There is no victory in refusing pain meds and heating pads and ice packs and medical help.
There is no victory in punishing yourself needlessly, in telling yourself that this pain you feel is because you are bad to the core and deserve it.
There is no victory in choking back your laughter and your tears, to keep an imagined equilibrium of safety that is really just a dry, cracked, empty, endless emotional desert.
You are here. You are in this body, and this body is yours. You deserve good things. You are alive, and that is messy and loud, and messy and loud are okay.
It’s okay to live abundantly. It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to indulge. This paralysis of self-punishment, self-restriction, self-loathing is not healthy or good for you.
“When I was first coming up through Sunderland, there was an old-timer on the team. Local guy. He and his wife were about to have their first kid, so during training one day, I made a joke that, statistically, I was probably the real dad. And the boys fell about laughing, but he went fսcking nuts. He battered me. Properly. I had a black eye, chipped tooth, three broken ribs. I couldn’t play for six games. He got booted off the team. After that, no club would go near him. Then in the summer, after I could breathe again, I bumped into him in a pub. And I got the chance to say sorry for my stupid fսcking joke. And he got to tell me… he and his wife had lost the baby. A month before all that went down. He hadn’t told anyone. Kept it all inside. Look, I get that some people think if they buy a ticket, they’ve got the right to yell whatever abusive shit they want at footballers. But they’re not just footballers. They’re also people. And none of us know what is going on in each other’s lives.”
