What We Carry

What We Carry

Some thoughts on baseball, family, love, shame, and the complicated business of being human.

By Curtis Pelletier

I wonder how many times in our lives we’ve stood right beside someone who was falling apart and had absolutely no idea.

Maybe we were too busy. Maybe they were too good at hiding it. Maybe we noticed something was different but didn’t know what to say.

Or maybe we assumed they’d figure it out.

I think about that a lot.

And I think about how many times I’ve probably been on both sides of it.

I’ve spent much of my life around people. Baseball players, coaches, parents, families. People chasing dreams, building businesses, raising children, trying to hold relationships together. People celebrating incredible moments and people experiencing things they wouldn’t wish on anyone.

And the older I get, the less convinced I am that we really understand one another.

We know what people do. What they’ve accomplished. What they’ve done wrong. We recognize when they’re happy, angry, successful, or disappointed.

But how much do we really know about what it feels like to be them?

It’s easy to love someone when they’re being everything we need them to be.

What happens when they’re not?

When the person who normally makes everyone laugh has nothing funny to say?

When the person who always has an answer doesn’t have one?

When someone who’s spent years showing up for other people suddenly struggles to show up for themselves?

Do we see someone who needs us?

Or do we see someone who’s letting us down?

I’m not sure there’s a comfortable answer to that.

And I certainly don’t think I’m exempt from the question.

Baseball has given me a strange education in people.

I’ve watched grown men become emotional over a game. I’ve watched young players carry expectations that would overwhelm most adults. I’ve watched parents sacrifice enormous amounts of time, money, and energy for something their child loves.

I’ve seen incredible kindness. Selfishness. Loyalty. Betrayal. Joy. Heartbreak.

And I’ve seen how quickly one moment can change the way someone is viewed.

A player strikes out with the bases loaded.

We see the strikeout.

We don’t see the conversation he had with his father that morning. We don’t see the anxiety he’s been managing for weeks. We don’t see the pressure he’s placed on himself to justify everything his family has sacrificed.

Maybe none of those things happened.

Maybe he simply struck out.

But we rarely seem comfortable leaving things there.

We need an explanation. Was he prepared? Did he compete? Did he want it badly enough?

And sometimes we turn one moment into a judgment of someone’s character.

I wonder how often we do that with the people we love.

A husband forgets something important. A wife seems distant. A child has a meltdown. A friend stops returning calls.

We see the behaviour, feel its impact, and create our interpretation.

But there’s almost always a larger story.

Understanding that story doesn’t make every behaviour acceptable. It simply means we’re interested in more than deciding who’s right.

And sometimes being right doesn’t bring us any closer to the person.

I’ve been thinking about love, too.

Not the easy version. Not the celebrations, photographs, holidays, or wonderful moments we’re comfortable sharing.

I’m thinking about love when people are exhausted.

When they’re disappointed. When money is tight. When responsibilities feel overwhelming. When neither person feels particularly understood.

What does love look like then?

I don’t believe love means accepting everything or abandoning our own needs.

But I wonder how often love becomes conditional without us realizing it.

We develop expectations about how someone should communicate, respond, contribute, or show affection.

Some expectations are reasonable.

Others are based on who we want someone to be rather than who they are.

And somewhere along the way, two people can spend more time measuring what they’re not receiving than recognizing what the other is trying to give.

One feels unappreciated.

The other feels criticized.

One withdraws.

The other becomes frustrated.

Both feel lonely.

And both may genuinely believe they’re the one trying hardest.

There’s a particular kind of sadness in feeling emotionally distant from someone who’s physically right beside you.

I think people experience that more often than they’re willing to admit.

And I wonder how many relationships spend years trying to determine who’s responsible for the distance instead of acknowledging how painful that distance has become.

Then there are our children.

I don’t know that anything changes how you look at life quite like becoming a parent.

There are moments of joy that are almost impossible to explain.

The ordinary things.

A little hand reaching for yours.

The sound of your children laughing at something that isn’t particularly funny.

A story that takes twenty minutes to tell because every detail matters.

A child wanting you to watch something they’ve already shown you six times.

And you watch it again.

Or at least you try to.

Because sometimes your body is there and your mind is somewhere completely different.

Thinking about work. Money. A difficult conversation. Something that hasn’t happened yet.

And I wonder how many moments I’ve missed while worrying about things I believed were necessary to give my family a better life.

There’s a contradiction in parenting that I find difficult.

We work hard because we love our families. We make sacrifices because we want them to have opportunities. We accept responsibilities because we believe that’s what we’re supposed to do.

But those responsibilities can become so consuming that the very people we’re doing it for receive whatever energy we have left.

That thought makes me uncomfortable.

Because I don’t believe our children will remember most of the things we spent our days worrying about.

But they may remember whether we seemed happy to see them.

Whether we listened.

Whether they felt safe telling us something difficult.

Whether we were interested in who they were becoming rather than simply what they were accomplishing.

I’ve worked with enough young athletes to know that children notice far more than adults sometimes realize.

They notice disappointment. Frustration. Approval. The expectations we communicate without ever saying a word.

And sometimes they carry those experiences into adulthood.

I wonder how many grown people are still trying to earn the approval they wanted when they were twelve.

How many are still afraid to disappoint someone.

How many have built successful lives while quietly feeling that they’re never quite enough.

And how many of us, without intending to, are passing some version of that experience on to our own children.

Shame is something else I’ve been thinking about.

Not guilt.

Guilt can serve a purpose. We recognize we’ve done something wrong, take responsibility, and hopefully make an effort to repair it.

Shame seems to go somewhere deeper.

Instead of questioning what we’ve done, we begin questioning who we are.

A poor decision becomes evidence that we’re a poor person.

A failed relationship becomes evidence that we’re incapable of being loved properly.

A difficult period becomes evidence that all the progress we’ve made was somehow an illusion.

And sometimes the shame becomes so uncomfortable that we stop talking about what’s happening.

We withdraw. We become defensive. We avoid people.

We work harder, accomplish more, help someone else.

Anything that might allow us to feel useful again.

I wonder how many people are living lives that look successful from the outside while privately carrying an enormous amount of shame.

Especially people who spend their lives helping others.

There’s something profoundly difficult about knowing how to support someone through a problem and then finding yourself struggling with something remarkably similar.

You understand the strategies.

You recognize the patterns.

You know what you would tell someone else.

And yet none of that knowledge makes you immune to being human.

I’ve seen athletes become completely discouraged when something they’ve worked hard to improve suddenly becomes difficult again.

They start questioning everything.

The work. The progress. Their ability. Their future.

Adults do the same thing.

We convince ourselves that once we’ve overcome something, it shouldn’t return.

But life doesn’t seem to work that way.

We can be doing well for months, sometimes years, and then find ourselves somewhere we thought we’d left behind.

And perhaps the hardest part isn’t the struggle itself.

It’s the disappointment of recognizing where we are.

The embarrassment.

The frustration.

The fear that people will see us differently.

Maybe becoming healthier, more aware, or more emotionally capable doesn’t mean we’ll never struggle again.

Maybe it means recognizing what’s happening sooner.

Understanding ourselves better.

Knowing when we need help.

And maybe there are times when simply getting through the day is genuinely enough.

I don’t think we say that very often.

Joy is interesting to me because it seems so easy to overlook.

Not the big kind.

Not championships, weddings, birthdays, or the moments we spend months planning.

I’m thinking about the joy that’s available in an ordinary day.

The smell of a baseball field early in the morning.

The sound of a ball finding the barrel of a bat.

A conversation with a player that has nothing to do with baseball.

Your children laughing together in another room.

A quiet drive.

A familiar song.

A moment when the people you love are all in the same place and, for a little while, nothing seems particularly urgent.

Those moments can be extraordinary.

But we often don’t recognize them until we’re looking back.

We see photographs from years earlier and realize we were living through a period of our lives we’d give almost anything to experience again.

At the time, we were probably worried about something.

We were tired.

We wanted the next stage to arrive.

We were trying to accomplish more.

And somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary life, something beautiful was happening.

I find that both comforting and sad.

Comforting because it reminds me there’s often more good in our lives than we’re able to recognize.

Sad because I wonder how much of it we miss.

I’ve spent years thinking about attention in the context of performance.

Where athletes direct it. How they control it. What happens when it’s consumed by things they cannot change.

But attention is much bigger than performance.

It influences what we notice about our children, our relationships, our accomplishments, and ourselves.

One difficult conversation can occupy our thoughts for an entire day while ten positive interactions barely register.

We can have so much going right and still become completely consumed by the one thing that’s wrong.

And the opposite can happen too.

We can become so determined to see the good in something that we ignore what’s genuinely hurting us.

I don’t believe noticing joy means ignoring pain.

I think sadness and joy can exist in the same day.

Sometimes in the same hour.

We can love our lives and still wish certain parts were different.

We can be proud of what we’ve accomplished and disappointed by what we’ve neglected.

We can feel grateful and overwhelmed.

We can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely.

Those things don’t necessarily contradict one another.

They’re part of being human.

I’ve also been thinking about the stories other people create about us.

How someone can know a version of you that feels almost unrecognizable.

They remember a particular decision. A reaction. A period of your life. Something you said.

And that becomes the person they believe you are.

Sometimes they’ve seen something real.

Sometimes their understanding is incomplete.

And sometimes you’ve changed considerably since the experience they’re using to define you.

Our intentions don’t erase the impact of our actions.

If we’ve hurt someone, we still have a responsibility to acknowledge it.

But I also don’t believe we’re obligated to spend our lives trying to become the version of ourselves that makes everyone else comfortable.

There’s a balance between accountability and self-respect.

Between listening to criticism and allowing it to define us.

Between making meaningful changes and constantly trying to prove that we’ve changed.

And sometimes, despite everything, someone has already decided who they believe you are.

That’s painful.

Especially when it’s someone you love.

But perhaps part of growing is accepting that we can take responsibility for our lives without controlling every story told about them.

We can acknowledge our mistakes without allowing those mistakes to become our entire identity.

I sometimes wonder whether the hardest part of being human is how desperately we want to be understood while often struggling to understand ourselves.

We want people to see our intentions.

Our effort.

Our sacrifices.

The things we’re afraid of.

The things we’re trying to change.

But sometimes we can’t even explain those things clearly to ourselves.

We just know something feels different.

We’re tired in a way that sleep doesn’t necessarily fix.

We feel lonely around people.

We feel guilty when we’re resting.

We feel overwhelmed by things we used to manage easily.

We want connection but don’t always know how to ask for it.

And perhaps what makes those experiences especially difficult is the belief that other people won’t understand.

So we carry them quietly.

We keep working.

We keep coaching.

We keep parenting.

We keep showing up.

Until sometimes we can’t.

And I wonder what would happen if we became a little less interested in immediately fixing people and a little more willing to understand what they’re experiencing.

Not every difficult moment requires a lesson.

Not every expression of sadness requires a solution.

Not every person who’s struggling needs to be reminded of what they’re doing wrong.

Sometimes people need an opportunity to be heard without having to defend how they feel.

That doesn’t eliminate responsibility or repair every relationship.

But it might create enough room for someone to stop pretending.

I think that matters.

I’ve spent a lot of my life around competition, achievement, expectations, and the pursuit of excellence.

I still believe in those things.

I believe in hard work. Standards. Discipline. Responsibility.

But I’m becoming increasingly convinced that none of those things mean very much if we lose our ability to recognize the humanity in ourselves and others.

Because eventually the game ends.

The season finishes.

The business closes for the day.

The children grow up.

And some of the things we spent so much time worrying about become almost impossible to remember.

What remains are the relationships.

The moments.

The conversations.

The people who felt safe with us.

The people who needed us when we were too distracted to notice.

I think about the kind of person I want to be.

Not just what I want to accomplish.

Not the titles, the businesses, or the things I’ve built.

Those things matter to me, but they’re not the whole story.

I want to be someone who tries to understand.

Someone who pays attention.

Someone who makes people feel that their lives matter beyond what they can accomplish.

And I’m aware there’s a difference between wanting to be that person and consistently being that person.

Some days I get it right.

Other days I don’t.

And there are days when I wonder whether I’ve become so focused on helping other people understand themselves that I’ve neglected parts of my own life that deserve the same attention.

Maybe that’s something I need to keep thinking about.

Maybe we all do.

Because I don’t think the greatest tragedy is that life can be difficult, that people disappoint us, or that we sometimes lose our way.

I think one of the sadder possibilities is moving through a life filled with love, relationships, experiences, and opportunities for connection, and becoming so consumed by everything we’re trying to manage that we fail to recognize what’s right in front of us.

Until we’re looking back.

And wishing we’d noticed.

Not everything important in life is asking for our attention.

Some of it is quietly hoping we’ll give it.

Curtis Pelletier