The Athlete Way

        I am ready to stop pretending. I am ready to be honest; ready to reclaim my beauty, my story, my passion, and my voice. I am ready to wrestle with the truth, and that means standing face to face with the lies. I retired from field hockey six years ago, and I am finally ready to stop playing the game.  I am 36 years old and sitting at a table with my family in the ballroom at the Union League of Philadelphia. I’ve come here to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. This should be a happy moment but happy is not the right word to describe it. I don’t like the word happy. Happy is wrapped in deception and comes with a lot of baggage. It expects way too much from us. Decisive is a better word for this moment. It’s decisive because I feel something I’ve never felt before - I feel like myself.  I’m wearing a bright orange dress that I found on the sale rack at Kohl’s and earrings borrowed from my sister-in-law. I dyed my grey streak with a box of color from CVS the day before. All

          I remember the first lie I ever told. I was five years old. I can still feel the weight of that lie in my pocket. The lie was yellow, rectangular-shaped, and wrapped in plastic. It was called Chiclets Chewing Gum. Chiclets were the expensive, sparkling white, candy-coated gum, shaped like teeth and reserved in my young mind for the upper echelon of society.            Chiclet-chewers were glamorous thin wealthy white women with straight blond hair, long legs and sparkling smiles. Chiclet-chewers snapped their gum with effortless confidence. They didn’t ask for attention, they demanded it, and damn, they got it. Chiclet-chewers were desirable.            Suffice it to say, I wasn’t a Chiclet-chewer, and I wasn’t desirable. I was an over-sized awkward kid from a blue collar Catholic family in New Jersey with frizzy hair who wore hand-me-down clothes, sucked her thumb and drove around with my mom in a gigantic, ugly as hell Dodge Ram Van. I wasn’t allowed to chew gum, or drink s