The following is an article I wrote for the online publication Fullcourtpress. I think you have to be a subscriber to get access to it so I'm putting it on my blog. Most of this is sentiments I expressed last year but now I have the wisdom of hindsight so its a little different.
When people find out that I play professional basketball in Greece they immediately want answers. What’s it like? Do you love it? How is the food? The money? The level of play? What are your teammates like? How do the men act? They ask these questions and more. I articulate answers as best I can but really the experience is dynamic, capricious, and constantly reinventing itself. My first year, you could have asked me if I liked it on a hundred different days and I would have given a different answer every time.
Yes, it is a dream come true. It is exciting, romantic, and fascinating. It can also be lonely and depressing and uncomfortable depending on the day, the hour, whether you won or lost, whether you are expecting a visitor from home or saying goodbye to one. The emotions and moods are unpredictable and somewhat uncontrollable. The first few months are the most difficult. You live your life under a fog of uncertainty. The tiniest expectations you have about everyday life, people’s behavior, the nuances of a society, the cultural roadmap, are all thrown away and everything is up in the air. Each time you step out of your apartment, you are uncomfortable and on alert.
This is my second season playing basketball in Greece so my perspective has changed quite a bit. I love it here now. What a difference a year makes! This time last year I was confused pretty much all of the time. From the appliances in my apartment, to what to buy at the grocery store. From practices, to navigating the city. From opening a bank account, to taking a taxi, everything in life was more complicated. And then there was the slight problem of a language barrier.
Obviously, there was a great deal of culture shock involved in my transition. Living in a country is far different from visiting one. In the beginning I liked it here, it was exciting. I was taking pictures at the Acropolis with my college teammate, Tracy Gahan, who lived in an Athens suburb and hopping over to the Greek islands on a day off. It was great. And the crazy things Greek people did were amusing, comical. I felt so lucky to be a professional basketball player. What a life, I thought. I’m getting paid for this? And then reality hit. I was stuck here for 8 months. Then the crazy things Greek people did weren’t so amusing and everything wasn’t so exciting, it was just uncomfortable.
I think the adjustment for me came at various levels. First of all, post college life is a struggle for everyone, athlete and non athlete alike. For the first time in my life I was living alone, without roommates or family, and somehow I had to learn to entertain myself. I didn’t even know what free time was because since I was twelve years old I had been running around from practice to school to eat to study. And I liked it that way. I liked going going, and doing doing, and being productive and busy all the time. But all of a sudden I found myself post college in a foreign country with 21 hours of free time everyday, no one to spend it with, and without the large focus of basketball season as I always knew it. Yes, I was still playing basketball, but it is so very different over here. I was used to the stress and adrenaline high of a season, the exhaustion, the ups, the downs. Here we were practicing two hours a day and playing once a week, rarely traveling. I didn’t know what to do with my time without that stress of a season or at least the anticipation of one.
I felt unproductive and wondered what I was doing with my life. The next four years weren’t planned out like they had been in college and since the basketball wasn’t at a higher level I didn’t feel like I was moving forward. I wasn’t in school so I didn’t feel like I was improving intellectually either. I felt stagnated. I told myself to be grateful I wasn’t job searching or working a 40 hour week but I still felt like I wasn’t improving myself. I was seeing a beautiful country, experiencing a culture, and visiting ancient ruins and yet at 22 years old I couldn’t help feeling like a retiree who was walking around the house all day, wondering how to now fill up their time.
There were days when I wouldn’t talk to a soul until practice at night. I couldn’t call home because of a ten hour time difference and after checking my email when I woke up I couldn’t expect communication from anyone until late in the day. Its not like I sat around the house and looked at the wall. I would go to the gym, buy groceries, or go out for coffee and read a book. But doing everything by myself, all the time, having no one to laugh with, share stories with, wasn’t really my style. Some days it bothered me more than others but slowly I began to actually like my own company. But in the beginning I didn’t know how to deal with virtually no social interaction.
As time passed I became less and less focused on what I didn’t have in my daily life and more focused on what I did. I stopped comparing Greek professional basketball to college ball. I stopped expecting the same feeling of loyalty when I put on my jersey, that my teammates would be heartbroken if we lost, that everyone in and around the program was focused, goal oriented, and worked hard. Instead, I began to take it for what it was worth and truly appreciate the opportunity. The things that I once hated about being over here I started to love. I started loving the fact that I can sit down and read a novel for hours in the sun, sipping coffee. I can go workout and then stop at a bakery and get fresh bread in the morning with no one rushing me. I can go to the outdoor market all by myself and look at all the vendors selling beautiful fruits and vegetables in every color you can imagine. Then I can go home and cook a meal in the quiet of my apartment. Whatever I want to do I can do.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that being productive and growing as a person was happening every second. The stress of living in a foreign culture was forcing me to learn and grow and mature in ways I never knew possible. Of all the classes I took in college, of all the books I had read, television shows I seen, conversations I had had with others, not one of them could ever teach me the lessons I learned while living on my own in country so different from my own. I was being productive every day, moving forward, I just didn’t know it.
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