"You gotta learn to play with pain!!"

My high school rugby coach was a tiny, nasty, hard little man who used to scream and yell at us, belittle us, push us and then push us some more. At the time I thought he was just a big jerk and didn't like him at all. He even had the temerity to suggest that I wasn't putting in 100% when I played. I was, I was just fat, slow and weak. One thing he said to me has stuck with me more than anything else though, it was something he said directly to me a couple times and what I overheard him tell others on the team a lot, "You gotta learn to play with pain!"

Who would have thought that such a ,simple, slightly sadistic line would resonate with me for over 25 year? I've had a great life, and my share of pain has been limited at best, but I have mulled this one over for so long now that it has a deeper meaning for me. It doesn't just relate back to the physical pain I experienced when I broke all the nails on my right hand completely in half when I tackled a guy on the field...

Me: "Good lord coach look at them!"

Coach: "Meh, you gotta learn to play with pain, -wrong name-" (he never, not once, got my name right). He then snapped them all back into place, taped each finger up and pushed me back on the field.

Me: with a blister that covered the entire underside of my left foot, "Um, it hurts a lot."

Coach: "Gotta learn to play with pain!" taped my foot, put the shoe back on and pushed me back on the field

Me: with a broken and bleeding nose, "Gah, mrpghlgkeh ig]ph blorkenn!! Mthrfkcher!"

Coach: "I'm sending you back out cause you gotta learn to play with pain" Wiped my nose and sent me back on the field.

Yup, he was a freak. But pain comes in so many forms. I didn't know that then, but it started to dawn on me as I got older. A big part of my learning came when I was tree planting. I went there fat, depressed and not really engaged with life. To be honest with myself I wasn't sure I was ever going to be able to do anything with my life at that point except work retail for min wage. There was pain. I didn't recognise it at the time. Funnily enough the moment of clarity came when I was at a "fire safety meeting" on the school bus after a long week. The pipe had been round dozens of times and I found myself with so magnificently complete a body high that my mind started flipping and flopping. I had a turning point that night cause the voice that floated up at me was my old coach saying, "You gotta learn to play with pain!". Yeah, I thought, pain. That's what all this self loathing is about, I'm in pain cause I have no direction, no goals, no dreams. Quite the night for me. Something in my brain rewired that night and I started to look at things differently.

It was a short time after that that the letter came and I had the conversation with Suki that changed the course of my life (see the post, 'I almost didn't go'). From that night on the mantra of "you gotta learn to play with pain" has been in my head at key points in my life and it's helped me pick myself up, dust off and push through. I never thanked him for that line cause at the time Ii despised him, but in retrospect I should have. Thanks Coach.