What Am I Looking For?

What am I looking for?  If you know, please tell me.

Am I looking for health that enables a normal sleep schedule and the ability to be with people when they want, not just when I'm available?  Am I looking for enough concentration to be lucid most of the day, rather than hiding from people because I get strangely fatalistic missing even a couple hours of sleep, and because I'm sneezy from being underslept the first couple hours of most days?  Those things definitely would be nice, but I've managed to build a life around them, making friends in other countries and resulting in having friends who are awake whenever I'm awake.

Am I looking for more sex?  Quite possibly.  But when you spend ages 15-25 assuming you were a child molester based on something your parent said about you, it's difficult to feel the confidence to ask.  Rejection for any reason feels like a confirmation that I'm the creepy person I believed I was all those years, so I don't venture anything.  And I don't gain anything either.

Am I looking for a body I would be happy with?  Maybe, but these other issues showed up when I was lighter.

Am I looking for people in general liking me?  Maybe, but I already have several amazing friends.

Am I looking for specific people liking me?  That seems to be an issue.  There are some people who seem "major league" in their circles, and everybody seems to love them, and I want to be in on that.

Am I looking for approval?  It seems so, but that might be a cover for not having enough internal approval.  Whenever a writer talks about privilege, it tends to hurt because the topic frequently goes to excess and stereotyping.  In ranting moments, those articles tend to tell white Christian males like me that whatever you do isn't due to your effort, but the efforts of others who gamed the system for you.  And since privilege can't be fully quantified, it feels like a taint on whatever I do, an asterisk on anything I accomplish.  So I don't talk publicly about when I get promoted or when I win something or what I get for birthdays or Christmas, because no matter what it is there's that risk that somebody will say "yeah, you only got that because of your privilege."  It's impossible to disprove something like that, so it hovers.  I don't find minefields relaxing.  All this means that other people tweet things about something happy that occurred to them and they get congratulated, while I'm scared to talk about anything happy that occurs to me because shouty writers and people who publicize their opinions way too much might take those happy things from me with a word.

Am I looking for belonging and acceptance?  Probably.  But if it's that simple, why does it feel so complex, and why, given my amazing friends, do I feel like I don't have it?  Why do I feel perpetually locked out of what the cool kids are doing?  Am I still trying to answer those kids from 1990-97 who would tell me "You don't go to real school" because I was homeschooled?  I know they still sting me even as they've definitely forgotten me.  I try to be a real lawyer, a real musician, and a real writer, whatever those mean, and having gone to a Tier 1 law school and being published on major web sites makes me feel, however briefly, like I was real.  I've done a lot of stuff in part because my emotions want to disprove some 8-year-olds.  And saying that makes me feel awful in several ways.

I suspect a lot of what I'm looking for is an internal sense that I did something real and permanent, something whose praise is objectively deserved, something nobody can tear down for being privileged or tainted just because I did it.  Because of those kids saying I didn't go to real school, and because of the child molester accusation, I've felt an asterisk on my head most of my life.  I'm perpetually different, niche, outside.  I rarely feel fully accepted in a group and have no way to judge whether I am.  It's likely that I am accepted but can't feel it, but maybe it's egotistical to assume I am accepted.

This is not me whinging about my life; if it were, I wouldn't publish it for fear of people saying I'm privileged, so how dare I voice concerns.  Day to day, my life is pretty awesome.  But I don't know what I'm looking for in these moments of melancholy.  I don't know what's missing.  I can say that I want to find X, but since I don't know what X looks like, I wouldn't find it even if I saw it.

I'm desperate to know what I'm looking for.  Maybe it's obvious to you from knowing me; if so, tell me.  I can't feel more lost than this, so anything helps.

About Anna McDonald

As I compose this, I am not composed.  I've been choked up for the last hour and a half over the news that Anna McDonald likely has written her last regular article.  There are many of the same emotions I felt when Tim Wakefield retired - the strongest link to a chapter in my past is now broken, the chapter has ended, and I have to embrace a new reality.

Today I essentially finished revising my book draft on negligent communication before submitting it to my friend in book publishing to get advice on the next step.  There's a lot of emotion bound up in that effort, as it's a topic I feel strongly about and that I think needs more people exploring it.

You know who first said to me, unsolicited, that I should write a book?  Anna.  More or less after my stint at The Hardball Times ended due to looking for work, then finding work, then becoming a columnist in Magic: the Gathering, Anna e-mailed me saying she had read my archive and it, among other things, helped her start establishing enough confidence to write herself, as she had just started to do at The Hardball Times.  I was going through a lot of emotional stuff at the time, and she was willing to listen and care about me, and together we boosted each others' confidence enough to get ahead. 

For a long time, she beat herself up over an aborted attempt to interview Todd Worrell.  But even as I suspect there was always that bit of trepidation, she's interviewed tons of players and coaches since then: Bill DeWitt III; John Mozeliak; Joe Kelly; Adrian Beltre; Devin Hester; and others.  And she had a great interview style, being particularly adept at sculpting the interview into a narrative, which was aided largely by her asking thoughtful questions to begin with.  There was a fullness and a richness to her interviews, and her regular essays carried the same thoughtfulness and level of detail.  There was always a gracious balancing of opposing opinions, and you left the article feeling like you really had gained something.

That style served her extraordinarily well when she became a leading media presence on youth football concussions, spurred by her son's involvement in the sport.  She was part of a momference hosted by the NFL to help teach safety-conscious football techniques - a conference commissioner Roger Goodell spoke in.  If I had told the 2010 Anna McDonald that she'd hear the NFL commissioner speak to her on the NFL's invitation, and that her experience would get her an article on the front page of the New York Times, she wouldn't have believed me.  But that's how it ended up.

And this is the woman who put the bug in my head to write a book.  Admittedly, when I completed the first draft quickly in 2011 and she didn't have the time to read it, I was devastated - way more affected by it than I ought to have been - and didn't pick up the material for another 18 months.  I'm in my mid-20s; I'm not as mature as I would like to be.  But the point is that she believed in me in a way no one else had dreamt to believe in me.  And so on the day when the project she started in me came full circle, finding out her writing career has come full circle as well is incredibly emotional for me. 

Ultimately, Anna was the biggest fan of my baseball writing, and I wound up becoming one of her biggest fans in return.  Her sportswriting far eclipsed mine in quality and in popularity - ESPN and the New York Times are kinda big venues - and I was always kind of in the back as something of a proud parent, like maybe I had some sort of legacy.  It's a vain thought, I know, but friendships intertwine like that, where you're just honored to be a part of something special, no matter how small or large.

And that's why the news feels a lot like Tim Wakefield retiring.  As long as Anna was writing, I still had a stake, sort of, in current sportswriting, an anchor point for when other things were chaotic.  I went from a 9-year-old squirt to a baseball writer to a lawyer with Tim Wakefield still pitching for the Red Sox.  And I went from a confused twentysomething in Alabama to an arguably competent lawyer in Seattle with a mostly-completed book while Anna McDonald was writing for ESPN.  And I kinda rooted for Anna the same way I rooted for Wakefield; there was a personal investment beyond the basics.  (Wakefield is from my mom's hometown, and Anna and I had all these e-mails and times when we helped each other out.)

I'm out of words to describe the feeling.  When Anna's last article publishes on ESPN, it's going to be a bookend for something I never wanted to end.  As she tweeted to me on August 29, "I would have quit writing a LONG time ago without your encouragement."

And I wouldn't have accomplished what I have without your encouragement, Anna.  I'm going to miss your writing more than you know.  You mean a whole lot to me, and I hope that our next chapters are as fulfilling as this chapter has been.

-Brandon Isleib
September 26, 2013

On Harmonizing All the Various Bits of My Life That I'm Known For

I have a number of different roles and friend groups.  And by different, I mostly mean different from each other - distinct, discrete, or separate.  From what I've discerned, my Magic player/writer and baseball writer friends would be surprised at my level of what they would deem fundamentalist church involvement.  Meanwhile, my Christian friends would be surprised at who some of my other friends are.  I assume, anyway; I don't try to jab people with ideological sticks and find out who'd keep me around if they knew everything I did.  It's not like I'm lying about anything; I just don't go out of my way to shock people or bring all my groups together.

What this means is that, to each group I'm involved in, I hold a number of heterodox sociopolitical beliefs.  I left Facebook in early 2012 basically because of this; it felt like every day one group of people I cared about and respected would post a "people who believe X are what's wrong with society" statement that would back-door call me an idiot because they didn't guess that any of their friends would dream to believe X.  Every well I drank from was poisoned, so to speak, and the ensuing melancholy made it difficult to feel sufficiently good about myself to get anything done.

"Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent." - Proverbs 17:28

So what ties all of me together?  Am I two-faced or cowardly in what I believe?  I don't think so at least.  The key for me is apparently rare but surprisingly simple:

I respect the viewpoint difference between me and God.

When I explain what I mean, I think you will agree that this is the single biggest reason (apart from hypocrisy) that some end up hating religion.  Buoyed by passages such as Matthew 7:1ff (you'll be judged as strictly/nicely as you judge people), Romans 14:5 (being convinced about something doesn't automatically mean everybody must agree with you), and James 4:11 (only God is the ultimate judge), here's what I'm talking about.

The Bible claims, as you would expect, that God made the universe and is over it.  What that means theologically is that God gets to set terms and conditions on the use of the universe in a way that would make no sense for me to do.  Being the lawyer that I am, I like to conceive of it as God having copyright control over the universe - He made it, so he gets to say what happens with it.  If Dr. Seuss's estate wants to be incredibly strict with fair use/parody/all that, I don't agree that they should care so much, but I don't hold the rights to their stuff.  If Disney wants to warp copyright law just to keep Mickey Mouse under wraps, I don't agree with that line, but why would I?  It's not my stuff.

So when the Bible says X behavior is offensive, I don't always see why that is, but it's not my universe, so why would I have found it offensive in the first place?  I don't care about X behavior personally one way or the other and I have no cause to.  Just as you might not care about certain racy jokes at work but you understand why there's a policy in place against them and could articulate that policy to somebody who asks, so I can be ambivalent about a bunch of things that God cares about and be fine with that while telling you what the Bible says about them.

And this is where the breakdown occurs in society, I think.  There are people who, understandably at the outset, try to conform their thinking to God's as outlined in the Bible.  But their version of it - feeling like they have to both ascertain every reason God cares about something and then care about the thing just as hard - makes them come across like they are God.  If you've ever been pulled over by a cop who seems way too happy to get you for speeding, that's exactly the type of Christianity I'm talking about.  Essentially, the cop agrees too much with the speeding law.  If the cop ran the universe, there'd be no speeders, so when there is a speeder, the cop acts like (s)he runs the universe.

People don't convert anyone; God does.  "What then is Apollos?  What is Paul?  Servants through whom you believed[.]"  (1 Corinthians 3:5)  My role in the universe isn't to get a piece of running it, or act like I run it, or even agree 100% with how it is run.  My goal is to be a servant and tell people what God says; what happens after that is basically none of my business.  So why go into my personal relationships looking for a "win" with them, like this was sports or politics?  I'm a servant and a messenger; neither job has a win-loss record.

And this is how, whether you are an atheist, a Christian, or something else, I keep some friends you might not expect.  I believe in a higher power, but it isn't me.  So while I can tell you some things He cares about as the One who runs the universe, I'm not in the same position as Him, so my interactions with you are different.  I'm supposed to love everyone and be a servant as best I can, and I can't do that if I'm the cop and everybody looks like they're speeding.  If I ran the universe, a lot of things would be different around here.  But I don't, so I'm not going to act like I do, and the goal of my religious activity isn't to ascertain every reason the universe might be run this way.  My goal is to follow, obey, and serve.

Maybe that sounds glib to you - a version of "I just work here" - but the truth is I do just work here, so I'm going to pour myself into my work rather than into being bossy.  A bunch of God's concerns don't make personal sense to me, but they don't need to, and I'm not going to apologize for believing He has those concerns even as I don't care about them myself.  I don't relish telling people certain things from the Bible, but as with the example cop, I don't think talking about right and wrong is a thing you're supposed to relish anyway.  You're supposed to figure it out, but there's no triumph or smugness available in it; it's just a thing.  It's a shame that modern western Christianity seems to have forgotten this (assuming it ever knew) in a culture that overly cares about publicly taking sides and identifying with groups.

So there's my answer.  Hopefully it's coherent.