This week, I put a volleyball into orbit.
It wasn’t even that hard. All I needed was for our team to be in the semi-finals of our weekly league, for us to go match point down with one final opportunity to stay in the game, and then – and this bit was crucial – for it to be my turn to serve.
That ball, believe me, it flew. Whatever pan-galactic laws of gravity the House of Commons wants to be freed from this week, I’m pretty sure I struck a blow for sovereignty. By the time the shockwaves had subsided, Earth had a whimsical new satellite and my status as the UK’s newest spaceport was assured.
It was gratifying to watch our opposition’s eyes bulge and their jaws drop open, heads turned to track the missile’s gravity-defying trajectory. Some of my team mates got teary-eyed. I’ll swear the referee threw it a salute. It was enough to make you reassess the inspirational value of a space programme.
Obviously, nobody on the opposing team had to be warned not to hit it. I doubt interception would have been possible with anything short of a Saturn V. Instead, the combined laws of Kepler, Newton and the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball made it clear that the serve was out, the match was lost, and the fault was irrevocably mine.
It is very tempting, when one has shanked a sitter into low earth orbit without the help of any mediating equipment one can performatively tut at, to conjure up a fissure to the Chthonic depths and let the darkness claim one’s weeping soul. However, this is not only inconsiderate to the year 5s who have use of the hall on Thursday mornings, but results in an immediate forfeit, leaving as it does only five players and one fiery borehole on court.
All one can do is hate oneself. One hates oneself for being so stupid. One hates oneself for being so flabby, so unreliable, so out of shape. One hates oneself for letting the rest of the team down, for letting oneself down, and – at this point one’s brain starts to get slightly carried away by the freedom it’s been given – for one’s childhood habit of getting teachers to sign one’s yearbook as though they were one’s friends and not, in fact, virtual strangers who were slightly weirded out by one’s insistence but thought it safest not to say anything and instead wrote something banal like “have a good summer” and misspelled one’s name.
The downward spiral is deep and dark and tempting, and each new horror from your past is more seductive than the last. Left to my own devices, I would remain curled up in an unresponsive crescent on the centre of the court until the year 5s arrived and bullied me off it.
But I am now part of a team. And teams react to individual mistakes in the strangest way. They say things like “well played” and “great match” and “see you next week”. They invite you for drinks or ask about your day or tell you a joke. They move on, they help you move on, and they bury all memory of your mistake beneath a cairn of solidarity and forgiveness.
They are also, slowly, helping me break my lifelong dependence on praise. It’s anyone’s guess how this addiction arose – it may be because I am a millennial, and millennials are a notoriously needy demographic group that I have chosen to define for the purposes of this piece as me and 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Jeb! and I both want people to clap for us when we do things. We do it in very different ways: he runs for President, I do not. My, what a diverse and unpigeonholeable range of behaviours we millennials exhibit. What an unhelpfully elastic demographic construct we turn out to be!
Praise, of course, for millennials as well as others, is fleeting and immaterial. It carries no value and conveys no meaning. It is that third bay leaf in the ragout of reality, the Jeb Bush presidential campaign of the soul. Until I started playing with a team, though, I believed praise was what I wanted. But it turns out I was wrong. What I wanted all this time was something much simpler: the freedom to make mistakes without being despised. And, as the celestial object VBAL-2019 will testify, twinkling as it folds its arms around the weary world, I believe I’ve found it.
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