On Solid Ground
My first semester at Harvard, I was terrified of mirrors. I’d glance at the one hanging on the back of my dorm room door and become obsessed with what it reflected, trace lines across the glass in a compulsive attempt to piece my features together. When I shifted, and the shadows shifted with me, I became increasingly disturbed rather than relieved. Despite everything I had been taught about the realness of my flesh, I constructed conviction upon conviction that I was little more than a trick of the light.
***
Sometimes I have very particular thoughts, like I’m going to have Berryline after dinner on Thursday, or I’m going to get a tattoo in August. I always know they’re going to come true before they do. You might say it’s a matter of my agency in making them happen, but I think it’s more like a glimpse I have into the next phase of my timeline: celestial and brief.
When the sentence I’m going to be on the club ultimate team next semester appeared in my brain in mid-January of last year, fraught with that particular deterministic cadence, I was more than a little confused. I’d never played frisbee in my life. And trying something new on Harvard’s campus is scary; it cracks whatever facade of being perfect you’ve put up.
But when the heavens call, what am I to do but listen? I emailed the contact listed on the team website. The captains told me their roster was normally finalized by the fall’s end, but if I came back to campus early for their pre-semester training camp, I could try out for the team. So I bought myself some new cleats and moved my train ticket forward a week.
***
I left my room at 6:30 a.m. my first morning with my hair tied up, loose strands pinned back, cleats dangling from my gloved hands. The wind seared red into my cheeks as I made my way over the Charles River, and I wondered when the sun would rise.
The first thing I noticed about the Bubble, where practices take place in winter, is that its sky is white. What look like upside-down laundry hampers hang from the ceiling, casting a luminescent glow across the massive half-orb. The aura endows the space with a sense of timelessness: It could equally have been seven in the morning or seven at night.
The second thing I noticed was that the Bubble didn’t feel like Harvard — not the Harvard I knew, at least. It smelled like turf and sweat and the utter demolition of pretense. There is only one thing to think about in the Bubble, and that is the rule of the game.
I became painfully re-acquainted with my body that week. I learned that when I jogged in circles my calves and my left knee got sore, but my adrenaline covered up the soreness. I noticed that breath scarred my throat when I’d been running for too long, and the edges of my feet were unused to pressure; blisters settled beneath my cleats. I learned that two two-hour sessions a day is a lot of time practicing, and it’s best to lie perfectly still in bed in between.
As the rest of the team scrimmaged at the end of practice one night, I sat off to the side with one of our coaches. She recreated the vertical-stack formation the team plays in with plastic cones, explaining the cycle of cuts and resets that lay the foundation for the game. “Does that make sense?” she asked, restlessness showing through her furrowed brow. She was on a pro team — she lived and breathed frisbee. I understood that to her, the gift of comprehending the game was the greatest one she could give me.
“Yes. It does,” I said. It actually made about half-sense, but I wasn’t about to say that out loud; I knew it would click eventually. The more important thing was that I had witnessed the magic some people found in this sport. I learned something entirely new that day; I hadn’t learned something so new in a long time.
***
I really don’t like being bad at things. It’s a quality that many of us here share: We got here by finding pursuits — mostly in our comfort zones — that we had a natural affinity for, and then we worked until we became the best at them. But turning that quality into a lifelong habit tends to engender perfectionism. And I am absolutely positive that in the long run, perfectionism does far more harm than good.
I was fairly terrible at frisbee that first week. I couldn’t throw a forehand for the life of me, and the phrases yelled from the sidelines — watch the inside, no around, force backhand, strike, no upline, she’s going deep — left me feeling a little like I was in the middle of a tornado.
But being terrible at something is also kind of like gulping a breath of fresh air. It didn’t matter how many times I messed up; I didn’t have anything to prove, to myself or to anyone else. I could try a throw or catch or cut in an entirely different way without being worried that it would make a teetering mountain of success come crashing down, because I was at the base, my feet on solid ground. I’ve come a long way since my first training camp practice; I have even farther to go. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
The rest of what I learned at training camp? That the people who play this game are a little bit one-of-a-kind. Their stances are loaded with the capacity to spring up and catch uncatchable discs, but they are also closer to the earth than most anyone I’ve met on campus before.
There is something about setting hours of your time at Harvard aside just to play frisbee with your friends that is quietly rebellious, even a little exhilarating. The people who do it see giddy laughter less as a choice than a necessity. Moving my body with them on a field across the river — breathing in cold sunset-laden air, tossing discs back and forth — has started to feel like home.
There is something about the flow of the game that requires me to become unselfconscious; I’m able to inhabit my skin instinctively. The kind of movement the sport requires — sprinting, jumping, crashing back onto the ground — is of a distinctly embodied character.
When I look in the mirror after practice, I find that my body is legible to me in ways it never used to be: my muscles made real in my reflection by remnants of sweat, my cheeks textured by wind.
— Magazine writer Kate S. Griem can be reached at kate.griem@thecrimson.com.