It was “ladies night” at Fat Daddy’s and I gingerly sipped a free vodka soda that was strong enough to make me sprout a few chest hairs and smelled more like the cleaning solution from my old waitressing job than an actual beverage.
I was having trouble trying to shout meaningless conversation over Sean Paul’s “Temperature” so my eyes wandered to one of the TVs mounted above the fluorescent lights of the bar.
Lo and behold, the TV my eyes settled on was showing the World’s Strongest Man competition. In amazement, I watched a massive, slab of a man brace himself and then proceed to lift up a car.
Yes, you read that correctly. He used his physical strength to lift up a car. If that wasn’t absurd enough, he also had the freshest white guy flat top I have ever seen in my life.
Things just weren’t adding up so I squinted a little harder and realized that I was watching a competition from 1999. Why was a 15-year-old strength competition being shown at a crowded college bar on a random Wednesday night?
I couldn’t even being to answer that. I watched man after man lift up heavier and heavier objects and at the end, one guy even pulled an entire charter bus with nothing but chains wrapped around his body and his brute force. It got me thinking that 1) we might have gotten to New Orleans faster on the LSU road trip if this guy had been pulling our bus and 2) the whole idea of the competition being on the TV might not be that random after all.
Although we may not be walking around hoisting up vehicles in our every day life (if so, my parallel park jobs would look a hell of a lot better), as college students, we are still carrying a ton of heavy, heavy shit.
We’re only twenty-something and yet we haul around enormous pressure to figure out who we are and how our future is going to look and what we have to do to make sure it turns out that way and why it even matters that we do anything at all on this tiny planet spinning in an infinite universe. The load is enough to make anyone ask for another shitty vodka soda. Or two. Or three.
Not to mention, the charter bus we are pulling on a daily basis has every seat filled with a different insecurity and a cargo area busting at the seams with saved garbage from our past. Whether it be angst over a scathing divorce from when you were 10 or a broken heart when you were 16 or a blurry, drunken rape when you were 20, the load only seems to get heavier with time.
When you meet someone new you try and position yourself so they don’t see the baggage you are carrying around. For a while it’s manageable, but eventually the person starts to notice the charter bus of pain always lurking behind you and more importantly, they notice the chains that are still tethering you to it.
What it would be like to suddenly cut loose?
I remember during soccer training we used to do a drill where we would try to run as fast as we could while our partner held us back with a resistance band that was tied around our waist. No matter how hard I ran, I ended up in the same place, trampling the same patch of grass. If I happened to move a couple brutal feet forward, the effort expelled to do it was more exhausting than it was rewarding. At the end, when my partner would finally let go of the band, however, I would go flying. I felt faster and lighter and freer than I ever have before.
Could the same be true for life in college?
What if you simply decided to lighten your load? What if you turned around and let yourself take an honest look at all the shit inside that bus and then simply walked away from it? We forget that we cannot change the things that have happened in the past; we cling to them in hopes that they’ll offer some wisdom later on or we wait for justice on past wrongdoings that will ultimately never come.
Every single moment in the 4.6 billion years that the earth has existed has created the life you have right now and those moments will continue to unfold to create your future life as well. You do not need to work so hard to bring it all with you.
If you find you can’t ditch the entire bus right away, that’s okay. Just force yourself to get on it once or twice a day and get rid of something in it.
It won’t be easy. If it felt like shit when it happened two years ago, it will feel like shit when you deal with it again now, but the difference is that it will be the last time you feel its weight. Throw out the box filled with “I can never lose the weight on my hips,” the Hefty bag of “I’m never going to find a job that makes enough money” and the old containers of “Why did this happen to me? It just isn’t fair.”
Cut your chains, let go of the past and embrace the beautiful life that is manifesting right in front of you.
Unlike the World’s Strongest Man, there is no prestigious competition for who can bare the most weight internally. But if you ditch the heavy lifting inside, you just might be surprised with how strong you actually are.
Featured Photo courtesy of: GivenLife
