Dear World,
I lost a little bit of myself in the last two weeks. After being bed-ridden because of a muscle tear from heavy weight lifting, I finally made it back to work and stepped foot back into the gym. As I made myself to the employee's lounge in the back, I stood in front of the free-weights area momentarily stunned for what seemed like a timeless paralysis of movement, thought and comprehension. The battlefield in which I had come to love so dearly struck quite an intimidating shock to me as I stood speechless with caution staring at all that iron, the weight benches, dumbbells and weight plates. I felt so futile, weak, and fragile. Somehow, the pounds and pounds of metal that I thought built my confident character over the course of years of training deserted me and at that very moment I felt completely naked.
I whispered to myself,
"Get a grip Khanh, you're going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay."
But who was I fooling? Something happened to me during these past two weeks and it wasn't the torn middle and upper trapezius that had a story to tell. It was my world, somehow broken and shattered and here I was left behind puzzled in a leery limbo of time attempting to put these broken pieces back into place with one another with its ridges and sharp edges. It is going to be painful but like everything that hurts, this is going to make me stronger. This is going to complete me.
Probably one of the biggest reasons why I stopped pursing racing cars was because I met Maurice. I saw him deteriorating and all he had to live on was his memories of the past; his lifeline was his memories of when he was that world, soccer, star player for Egypt back in the 1930s. Not an hour went by when I was volunteering with him where he did not boast about the days when he would have given David Beckham a run for his money. But guess what? It all apparently didn't matter after all. He was self-insufficient, unhealthy and desperate to die with no one to talk to other than the ashes of his recently deceased border collie, Napolean III, his third one all physically identical to one another. One and a half years of spending time with Maurice taught me to make sure I would die early but more importantly, it taught me to never put myself in a state where my happiness solely resided on the accomplishments of my past. One of the things I learned from Maurice's curse of old age was to live in the happiness of the moment; live in the happiness of your present accomplishments. So that was exactly what I did.
I honestly do not know of anyone else as talented in as many things as me and up until my recent injury, that made me happy; that made me confident and because of that confidence, I continued to succeed. In any case, "I came. I saw. I conquered." Life was bliss and unlike Maurice I wasn''t living in the past. My confidence was a result of the present; the accomplishments I made day by day.
However, when I recently became injured, as I painfully dragged myself out of bed time after time, I kept looking at myself in the mirror, slowly watching my muscles deteriorate, shrink and vanish into thin air. All those years of hard work started to feel as though they were in vain and after about day three of being a crippled, of being pathetically insufficient to my own standards of confidence and success, I broke down. My confidence was tested and it dwindled into nothingness with unbelievable haste like a flame suffocated by quenching pinch. At one point, I saw my own reflection in the mirror as an old degenerative man very much like the one that surrounded me from every mirror of every angle in the weight room when I finally made it back to work. And that was when it all made sense to me. The confidence I built based upon my physical strength and accomplishments in my endeavors was as superficial as the meat-heads sneaking a peak at their flexed abdominals as they lifted their wife-beaters in the back corner of the gym to look at themselves in the mirror. My confidence was previously built on something that would not be around forever. What I realized that very day was that I am only human after all.
The two, confidence and success, goes hand-in-hand, for better and for worse, like a pimp and his prostitutes. They both exist and survive on the exploitation of one another. Similarly, to succeed one needs to be confident but without confidence one would find it difficult to succeed. This is the reason why it is extremely difficult to sever the relationship between the two. However, it needs to be done because only true (and a safer) confidence will occur. If you do not sever the two, what will happen when your superficial confidence ends? What happens when an athlete is no longer able to compete? What happens when a professional defined by the accomplishments and the success of their careers loses their jobs? The success, which mistakenly and unhealthily have come to define the confidence of the individual can no longer be sustained. What I am trying to say is as competitors within this world, we must find a way to be confident and gain confidence without relying on the merits of success to build it. If we do not do that, what will happen to our confidence when we are no longer able to succeed?
Like me, your confidence will shatter because for example, my inability to maintain or gain physical strength began to negatively affect my confidence as a strong person.
A friend of mine suggested that instead of relying on accomplishments and success to be the fuel for our confidence, we should simply be confident in the fact that we have attempted; that even before we know how well (or bad) we will do in whatever it is we are pursuing, be confident for trying and be content in our confidence regardless how often we succeed if any at all. In taking my friend's advice, this idea of confidence is still new to me as I have always used the merits of my success to correlate to how confident I am. Although I have no doubt in my mind that I will continue succeeding, I need to start all over and build my confidence from scratch again. I need to build my confidence without relying on success because when I am 38, I am no longer going to be able to dunk a basketball. When I am 50 (if I even live for that long) I will not be able to be as strong. Or when I am 70, I will not be able to race cars as well because in the end, I am, we are, human after all and no good thing lasts forever.
So before you go to bed tonight, I would like you to stand in front of the mirror and take a long look at yourself. Try to realize what it is that makes you confident? Is it your looks? What car you drive? How well you can play sports? If you can do something exceptionally well more than others? The money you have? Your past? Your present? Your future? Etc.. If your confidence does not come from within; does not come from simply knowing that you can instead of wanting or needing to know, then you suffer from superficial confidence. I urge you to as soon as possible purge yourself from it and seek out a source of confidence that will continue to last well beyond your years through the biological decay of the human body and its depreciative worth through time.
So for those of you reading; for those of you that are listening; for those of you who really care; this is me, Andrew Vo, an ordinary person with an extra-ordinary gift of caring for humanity making an out-of-the-ordinary effort to change the world for the better.
-A12
