No. 56: We Had the Nerd / Jock Thing Wrong
The Limits of Your Own Self-Beliefs
When I was young, jocks were the enemy.
At least that’s what we young nerds convinced ourselves — nerds being those of us who grew up being told, and believing, that academic success was superior to athletic prowess. Grades mattered more than muscles. Harvard mattered more than knowing how to do a pull-up. This was not necessarily because we were unathletic. I inherited my father’s coordination and was pretty solid at most sports. But being from an immigrant family, specifically an Indian one, the ethos at the time was that school work mattered above all, and there was little to benefit from wasting time with running around, chasing balls.
It wasn’t just my family, of course. It was the larger culture. My AP classes were filled with kids like me, who secretly sneered at the athletes on campus and knew they would hit dead-ends in life, while we would sail on to glittering futures. If you look at movies back in the 80s and 90s, the jocks were always the villains and the nerds were the heroes, taking revenge on the square-jawed quarterbacks and big-haired cheerleaders and stealing their love interests along the way. Happily Ever After was getting good grades and the hot girl, who ultimately realized that being with the nerd wasn’t just a balm to the soul, but also better business.
So this was my dream, too. The path I’d set out for myself. That I’d get good grades, take a thousand AP classes, be Valedictorian, go to Harvard, graduate summa cum laude, get a high-paying job in the financial sector, and go on to score myself a hot girl or guy, depending on what part of the closet I was in at the time. And the saddest thing about all this is I did exactly as scripted, up to getting that high-paying, white-collar job — when I realized I wasn’t just miserable, I was soulless. Bankrupt of identity and purpose. I reinvented my life. Started over from scratch.
I never really was able to trace why it was the wrong track, though.
Until this week.
It came from listening to a podcast interview with Elon Musk.
Which sounded eerily similar to a podcast interview I’d heard with Mark Zuckerberg a few months back.
And one I’d heard with Jeff Bezos.
All three, former nerds, now seemingly pumped up with hormones and HgH and who knows what else to look like jocks, claiming dominion over the world that once shunned them.
That Happily Ever After story we promised the anti-jocks once upon a time, now come to pass. They got the money, the girls, the power.
But one thing’s missing.
The love.
And all 3 will ransack humanity, searching for it, remaking the world in their own image, sucking our souls, doing whatever it takes to find redemption, validation, until they get the love that can finally set them free. Love that will never come.
In the meantime, we all suffer for it.
(Just look at Zuckerberg, who keeps making public demonstrations of love to his wife, building her statues, writing her songs, and then inflicting such things on all of us, as if it’s not for his wife’s validation of him, but our validation of his wife’s validation of him. Add that in to his jiu-jitsu and game hunting and obsession with talking about both, as well as his desire for more “masculine energy” in this world, and all I can say is he’s found a way to make the pursuit of being a jock feel even more nerd than just nerd alone.)
Turns out the self-mythologizing, megalomaniacal nerds hellbent on revenge for their bad childhoods aren’t the heroes they thought they were.
They’re the enemy.
I should know. I used to be one of them.
And the jocks I reviled and convinced myself I was better than all those years and assumed would crash-and-burn to dead-ends?
Well, I’m practically married to one of them.
A former all-American high school basketball star who barely stayed awake in his classes and lived for his sport.
And I realize now, we were both out of balance. In completely different ways. But if anyone was closer to the truth of what being human is… it was him.
Every morning during the week, I play tennis with kids from the Wash U or St. Louis U tennis teams. One of the kids doesn’t have a car, so I pick him up at 6am to take him to the courts. Sometimes I get there early, and while I wait, I watch the swarms of college athletes, leaving their dorms in packs, trekking down to the fields. They’ve got their gear on their backs and their breakfast sandwiches and protein shakes in hand, dozens and dozens of these athletes, executing a precisely-planned design for their day.
In high school and college, I tried to demonize these folk to make myself feel better. Now I look at them and my heart swells. Talk about learning life management at an early age! These kids go to sleep early, wake up at the crack of dawn, to participate in team sport that will build not just their bodies, but also their humility, resilience, mental strength, friendships, sense of community, and ability to work in a group towards a larger goal. They commit 2 hours to practice, then another hour to lift weights, 4 or 5 days a week, plus the commute time for all this — and then still have to study for midterms and write papers and find time to eat and sleep like everyone else. They’re fitter than I was at their age. They have more energy. They live less in their heads. They’re happier. They have purpose. And they have a tribe to do it with. They have the balance in life that I needed as a kid and never had.
Which is perhaps why my life looks like a college athlete’s now!
I’m realizing this in real time while I write this, which is making me laugh. (This diary really is turning into self-therapy.) But it’s true. I wish, wish, wish I’d been a jock in high school or college, because I actually had the athletic skills at the time — and just made a wrong turn. But now, a college jock’s life is how I structure my days. Up at the crack of dawn with the rest of the athletes, playing alongside their teams, doing my homework during the morning and early afternoon (aka writing books,), lifting weights for an hour mid-afternoon with a trainer (aka my coach), then more homework till dinner time and an early bedtime.
Literally your average college tennis player’s day.
Only I’m like two decades past college.
But it’s what’s making me truly, deeply happy these days.
Fixing an old, terrible, dunderheaded mistake.
I should have been an athlete from the beginning.
And maybe that means, I would have been more self-balanced, less in need of creative expression, and never would have found my way to writing. That would have been a tragedy, perhaps. But certainly a smoother start to life.
The good news is it’s rectified now. I get to be a writer and an athlete. Former Nerd, now aspiring Jock. Body and soul finally in balance. A happy ending, just very different from the one I sought long ago.
What did you grow up thinking about Nerds vs. Jocks? What do you think now?
Until next week —
Oh honey NO. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A TOTAL TRAGEDY FOR YOU NOT TO BE YOU!!! Not to have your books and your voice in the world??? NO! I'm sorry we were so sad in high school. And I'm so glad you have found deep happiness now. But NO! No no no. Who else but artists are sad enough to create something wonderful? That is our burden and our gift as artists. We feel too much, we're too sad. But then we go on and MAKE THINGS and WRITE BOOKS and it is a GIFT. Love you! <3 Mel
I have always, always self-identified as a nerd, and I have some hidden disabilities that mean I'm definitely not able to keep up with the athletes. However. One of the most impactful and important things about my life/development I suppose, is that I went to a tiny little private school where there were only about 60 of us in the whole high school hall. That meant that even short little me was not only on the JV basketball team, but I was captain for a year. That plus AP classes and the school musical. Because that's what we ALL did. We all had to do everything or it didn't happen. And there were some things that a tiny little school just didn't have, like a football team or an art program or an orchestra, but what we did have we all had.
That, and I was raised by a dad who's two favorite things as a kid and teen were basketball and Dungeons and Dragons. I may never be able to keep up with the athletes, but I really appreciate and am grateful for this reminder that it's not really a dichotomy, and we all have things to learn from each other.