Do it for the love of the game, for life is play.
Like the rest of the world, I fell in love with Alysa Liu in less than eight minutes.
She arrived at the Olympic Games with the sole intent to share her art and left with two Golds. She still considers herself an artist before an athlete. She is only twenty. I am already twenty.
Comparison is at times a thief, other times a giver.
Another thing that Alysa and I have in common is that we both began as quitters. Alysa retired from competitive figure skating at sixteen and returned two years later, having discovered who she is, what she loves, and how to redefine the sport that once consumed her life. I, too, retired from most of my childhood pursuits—swimming, novel-writing, piano—with far less global scrutiny, retaining nothing but regret. Hell, half a decade of finger contortions over faux ivory keys, and I can’t even remember how to read sheet music. Shamelessly mediocre at the hobbies I still love, I’m a slow reader, an uncallused guitar player, a point guard who’s kept all the zen of being the only girl on an all-boys team in her hometown.
What if my only constant is not change, but quitting before allowing myself the privilege to struggle, to fail, to have something to lose? What if I stay a Jack of all trades, then some, then none at all?
On my dorm wall hangs a portrait of young Kobe Bryant and a poster from Black Swan’s fifteenth anniversary screening. Together, Kobe, Natalie, and I watch Alysa’s exhibition gala performance to PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson’s “Stateside” on repeat. All my life, success meant gaslighting myself into doing hard things with brute discipline and/or delusion—delaying gratification until mamba out, until I am perfect, until joy exponentiates in the bank of the future. I’d like to cash out, frankly. I want to experience beyond the what’s-nexts: the thrill of eternal recurrence, the happiness of pursuit.
Almost halfway through undergrad, I still live as if I am infinite, with the agency of a rock: trembling atoms fixed in the lattice of the status quo. I am so far from the child I wish I didn’t outgrow, and the grown-up I’d like to die as.
I’m trying to use the same courage it took to quit to begin again: bending a $20 blues harmonica, booking a freediving trip in the Caribbean, and “artifying” my own academic interests. I may never return to Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis on my own terms, or turn Gradescope autograder debugging into an art form—but I hope to stop haunting my own life, and become an artist in the medium of perception, sculpting the forgiving clay of my mind.
Perhaps “Stateside” will trigger another spiritual awakening at Spring Fling; by then, I hope I find the writer of this piece a stranger to me. I hope to have no excuse but to concede: I am a pursuer, an artist, a player. I love struggling, too. It brings me back to life.
Life is a game, and the goal is not to win, but to play.
For winning ends the game with ennui. It borrows joy from the future that tempts: “Stop, rest a while, spend the rest of your life in this moment. It won’t ever get better than this.”
Oh, but it has. And it will. Alysa’s smile tells all—jumping across ice or onto the podium—the pierced fangs between her teeth more dazzling than gold. One must imagine her happy.
