A note of context: I played ultimate competitively for a long time, and this newsletter began as an effort to examine life through the lens of the sport.
The end of the season can be a slog. Whether your season recently ended, you’ve got a few days to go, or your playing days are in the rear view, I imagine you can relate to this reality:
Frisbee gets really overwhelming.
Personally, I think of late summer 2017, during the final months of my years with Truck Stop. I was a captain, and I was exhausted by the physical and emotional grind of a season that had started in February. I had also been fired from a job in July and, a few weeks after that, had come to the pretty sudden realization that I had little desire to play anymore. I didn’t want to go to practice; I wanted to take a nap.
It doesn’t take some kind of tectonic life shift, either. Practices run late into the night no matter how early we have to get up for work. Workouts and lifts and booking hotels for next weekend pull at our free time and attention spans while dishes pile up in the sink and bank accounts dwindle and dating life asks why we aren’t more available. Until the season ends, there are always more obligations than we can handle.
It’s also not like frisbee has a monopoly here. No matter your commitments, the dishes still find their way into the sink. Feeling overwhelmed is part of life.
Where there’s smoke, there can be fire
I’m interested in overwhelm because personally, it goes hand in hand with angry blow ups. Being overwhelmed is a red flag: looking back on times I’ve snapped at someone rudely, or taken a vindictive and accusatory posture and dug my heels in, or full-on lost control and started screaming, I almost always see that in the lead up, it was waving.
Another way of putting it is that I’ve got a finite capacity to process what’s going on and regulate myself, and if that capacity gets maxed out, the autopilot function does what it thinks it needs to do to lighten the load. Sometimes—and the reasons behind this are for another time—it picks something aggressive.
Here’s a random example from off the field: I recall picking a fight with my partner over whether or not to add tomatoes to what we were cooking. Very silly. But the moments before that? It was after 9pm, and after a day of spinning my wheels at work I had just spent an additional 2 hours on a Zoom call that felt pointless. We were also mid-pandemic, and it felt like this what happened literally every night. I was tired, hungry, and frustrated, and in that moment, overwhelmed by it all. With all that on my plate, my ability to self-regulate was drained.
On the field, how many times have you seen a player blow their lid and known there had to be more going wrong with their day than just a bad foul call? How many unproductive shouting matches have been preceded by a mile-long to-do list at work or drama with a partner or the unfolded laundry and all the other stuff at home that there just isn’t enough time and energy to handle?
A lot of us are carrying things that lead to angry outbursts. Maybe in some of those cases, it’s that we’re overwhelmed.
Long-term overwhelm vs. right now overwhelm
What I’ve mentioned thus far is the kind of overwhelm that builds up over time. The days and weeks and months of our lives (and the years, generations, and beyond) bring stressors that we carry with us because we don’t live in a world that gives us much time for stopping and handling them. Eventually, it gets to be too much, and we cope the best way we know how.
There’s also a smaller scale: the moment. There are times when what’s happening right this very instant can engulf me. I’m tired; there’s someone asking me something; someone else just texted me; there’s music playing; the TV is on; I’m hungry; I forgot to call my mom; the neighbor’s baby is crying. With all this going on, I’m a little more likely to make a snide remark or slam a drawer shut.
Or maybe I’m exhausted because we’ve already turned it twice this point, and the guy guarding me has been fouling me on the mark all game, and someone on the sideline is yelling something at me, and I can’t tell if that teammate’s about to get open or not, and what’s the stall at?, and… I’m not sure how level-headed I’m going to be in my next interaction, whether it’s a foul dispute or a sideline conversation.
The moment itself can certainly put a lot of stress on that capacity to regulate. What’s more, it’s not like the “bigger” stuff goes away. Add sadness about a death in the family to the mix, or financial worries, or an ongoing pandemic, and the available energy—energy that in less full situations might generate more calm and balanced responses—gets snatched up quickly.
At the end of the day, it’s all the same: stressors taking up space.
Awareness is power
If we know that when we get overwhelmed we’re prone to do something we’ll regret, we might treat overwhelm as a clue in our efforts to choose a more pleasant path. With the argument over tomatoes in our dinner, for instance, had I paused and recognized the pressure I was feeling after that Zoom call, maybe I could have relieved the tension with a few yoga poses or a short walk or 5 minutes of journaling.
Examining overwhelm more deliberately, I’ve found it particularly helpful to develop my understanding of what feels like in my body. If I can stop and just physically experience it—for me, it’s often tightness in my shoulders and forehead—I come to a moment where I see that wow, yes, it’d be really easy for me to snap here. From that vantage point, it’s much easier to step back from the ledge.
Regarding the stuff that builds up over the long term, I think it’s good practice to take stock of what’s happening in our lives and the things we feel about it all. The more conscious we are of the emotional energy that comes from life’s successes and failures, the less we’re likely to be overwhelmed when that energy shows up in a challenging moment. This includes stopping to feel all the ups and downs of a frisbee season, from competing for playing time to training when you’re tired to the euphoria of winning a tournament.
I also want to note that there’s no shame in needing to yell or throw something or otherwise get aggressive. Those can be the healthiest ways to deal with the overwhelm that we’re feeling (or the contributing anger, or the grief, or whatever).
The answer to whether or not going those routes are really nuanced, and they depend on the unique answers to a whole host of questions. Would those actions be directed at another person in a harmful way? Even if they weren’t, can the people around me hold me and this behavior, or would it hurt the collective? Would they help release tension, or add to it?
There is no single right path. But if we can more easily feel when we’re overwhelmed, see what it is that’s overwhelming us, and understand the link between that feeling and the actions we take next, we’ll probably be better for it.
A few notes
What’s this project all about? The more I’ve learned about my emotions, the better I’ve become at taking care of them. In turn, I’ve come to show up as a more loving and whole version of myself. My with both this newsletter and its parallel efforts is to invite others into the same ongoing journey.
What are you doing beyond this newsletter? I’m facilitating conversations with men about anger (learn more in last week’s newsletter, sign up to attend here, or reach out if you’d like to get your team/league/organization involved). I’m also going to start running writing groups in the not-too-distant future.
Why frisbee? Because we need common ground if we’re going to get beyond small talk, and this game is as good a starting point as any. That, and ever since I started playing the game… and coaching, and writing, and eating and sleeping and breathing it… it’s been one of the primary lenses through which I’ve viewed the world. I know I’m not alone there.
Let me know what you think. Or ask questions. Or suggest topics to write about. Or push back on something I say. Or just say hi. However you might want to engage, I’d love to hear from you because I want this to be a community thing. If you reply to this email, it’ll come straight to me.
Last thing: I want nothing more than for this to find the people it’s supposed to find. If you feel moved to share this with a friend, encourage teammates to subscribe, or shout about it from the social media rooftops, I’d be very grateful.
See you soon,
Jonathan
I love that no matter what, whether you play frisbee, a different sport, or no sport at all, you can totally relate to this article and get great information from it.