Dear journal,
I started playing football in third grade. Before then, I had played other sports—soccer, baseball—but football was what I had been waiting for. It was the sport. The one that mattered. It wasn’t just a game in my world; it was an identity. Football players weren’t just kids in pads. They were warriors, heroes, the embodiment of discipline and toughness. I wanted that. I wanted to be part of it.
From third grade to eleventh grade, football defined me. Every fall was marked by practices in the heat, the smell of sweat and grass, the sting of helmet-to-helmet contact, and the rhythm of drills that became second nature. I lifted weights religiously, putting aside every other sport to be the best I could be. I ran sprints until my legs shook, pushed myself harder, and convinced myself that pain was just weakness leaving the body. That’s what we were told. Pain was temporary, and toughness was forever.
Then I reached high school, and everything changed. Like most things in the transition from junior high to high school, the way adults treated us shifted. I had always known football was serious, but now it was something else entirely. The game wasn’t just about skill or effort; it was about endurance, about sacrifice, about how much you were willing to give of yourself before you broke. And when you did break, you were expected to patch yourself up and keep going. I learned that lesson quickly.
In tenth grade, I injured my knee and required surgery. I rehabbed, recovered, and didn’t think much of it. Injuries were part of the game. They happened, and you moved on. That was what we were supposed to do.
Then, in my junior year, just a week before the season started, I injured my other knee. This time, I was different. I knew the pain wasn’t normal, knew something was wrong. I told the adults—the ones who were supposed to know better, who were supposed to protect me. My parents. My coaches. Their advice was simple: Toughen up. The season was starting. There wasn’t time for injuries, for second-guessing. I swallowed the pain and played through it, limping my way through practices, pushing through every hit and every drill. Wrapping my knee tighter and tighter in the weight room to mask the pain.
By the end of that season, I had nothing left to give. Football, the game I had loved for most of my life, had taken more than it had given. I made my decision: I was done. I walked away.
But quitting wasn’t as simple as just walking away. My senior year was hell. I had expected some backlash, but I wasn’t prepared for the depth of it. Any reason I gave for not playing was met with ridicule. Former teammates, coaches, even friends—people who had once been in my corner—turned on me. I was weak. I had let people down. I had thrown away something important. That’s when I learned a brutal truth: most people value you for what you do, not for who you are.
For years, I had been a football player. That was my identity. When I stepped away, I wasn’t sure who I was anymore, and neither was anyone else. My anger grew, feeding on itself, poisoning my relationships, twisting the way I saw the world. I had spent years being conditioned to push everything down, to "man up," to fight through. But now, with nothing to push against, that anger had nowhere to go. I was lost in it. It didn't take long for that anger to transition to depression.
After the season ended, my knee was finally examined. Surgery was scheduled. The pain I had carried for months, the injury I had been told to "toughen up" through—it had been real all along. That realization should have given me some kind of validation, but all it did was make me angrier. It confirmed what I had suspected for a long time: my pain had never mattered to them. Only my performance had.
As the years passed, I slowly began to take control of my anger. But it wasn’t until I first heard about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) that everything started to make sense.
I was always a lineman. Repeated blows to the head weren’t accidents; they were a part of the game, part of my daily life. Every snap, every drill, every block—collision after collision, impact after impact. It was normal. We never questioned it. We were trained to shake it off, to get back in the huddle, to line up and do it again. Concussions weren’t real injuries; they were just part of the job.
Now, I believe those concussions contributed to my anger. Not just the frustration of leaving football, not just the resentment of how I was treated, but the physical, neurological changes that came from years of blows to the head. The science behind CTE is clear—repeated head trauma alters brain chemistry, affecting mood, impulse control, and cognition. When I first read about it, it felt just like when I told my coaches I was hurt and they told me to toughen up. Once again, the reality of my experience was being confirmed too late.
Now, I have a love-hate relationship with football. I am a lifelong Chiefs fan. I still love the game, the strategy, the camaraderie, the spectacle. But I can’t watch a game without thinking about the long-term consequences for the men on the field. I see them take those hits and wonder what’s happening to their brains, what damage they’ll discover years from now when the cheering stops and the lights go out.
As a high school teacher, I see young men walking the same path I once did. I see them dedicate themselves fully, believing in the dream, not thinking about what comes next. Their lives are being altered in ways they don’t yet understand. I don’t know which ones will walk away before it’s too late, and which ones will carry unseen wounds long after their playing days are over. I want to tell them to be careful. I want to warn them. But I also know that, at their age, they wouldn’t listen. I wouldn’t have listened either.
Time heals. The most meaningful relationships stood the test of that time. My relationship with my father, who had been my first coach and biggest supporter, was strained for a while, but we healed. We grew closer. Football shaped my life, but stepping away from it allowed me to reclaim who I was.
Would I tell a young man not to play? I don’t know. It’s a choice they have to make for themselves. But if I could talk to my younger self, I’d tell him this:
Football is just a game. You are more than what you do. And if you walk away, the world will keep on going, and so will you.
Always,
Dave