a difficult relationship

My prior discussion about the football as a gendered object — and especially how I talked about my own complicated relationship with it — sparked a lot of interest on this blog. I didn’t really expect that, but maybe it makes sense. For a lot of people, a football is just a thing, a piece of sports equipment. But for me, it’s always been a lot more than that. It carried this weight — physical and emotional. It felt like something I was supposed to connect with, supposed to embrace, because of what it meant in the world I was raised in. Masculinity, toughness, fitting in. But I didn’t always feel like I had a place in that world. So the football became a strange object to me — both familiar and foreign, something I understood but wasn’t comfortable with. So yeah, I guess that’s why it feels relevant to try and explain it now. To me, it wasn’t just a ball — it was this little, compact object that carried everything I wasn’t sure I could or wanted to be a part of. It bothered me the way it was inflated and always so firm — no matter how many times it got kicked, thrown, slammed into the ground — it just kept coming back. The air destined to be trapped inside, unable to come out, so tight, so tense. The thick, tanned, rugged skin that couldn’t be broken not matter how manny times it was kicked. The harder it was kicked the quicker it bounced back. The repeated shapes, so tightly bound together. That kind of pointless resilience and compliance was something I didn’t want and it really bothered me that somehow had more power than me. It was like the football was performing this version of masculinity I didn’t want to match — never showing weakness, always bouncing back, like pain didn’t really stick. I wasn’t that tough. I didn’t want to be. But there it was — this object I was made to believe I should match , dictating what I should and shouldn’t be, always strong, always unaffected’ and yet, it was just a ball! This object always rejected me! It was a constant reminder that I wasn’t part of something. At school, when teams were being picked, and I was left standing there, not being seen, chosen, included. There’s something about being passed over, again and again, that quietly reinforces your difference, even when you’re not entirely sure you wanted to belong in the first place. But the football, just sitting there in the middle of the field, became the embodiment of that divide. The thing I was outside of. And while I was holding all these feelings — the rejection, the confusion, the quiet resentment — I didn’t really understand the joy everyone else seemed to get from it. The aggressive kicks, the loud shouts, the celebration around all that stuff, how the ball love them, but not me. There was this wild enthusiasm involving the football, that was more than just the game. Like it was freedom or belonging or identity or something. But to me the game just looked like putting this object in a box - literally — just trying to get it across a line, into a goal, into a space it was meant to fit into. That was what felt strange — how it all seemed so simple on the surface, but felt so loaded underneath. They were all out there chasing joy, and I was standing on the edge, watching, not quite sure what it was I was supposed to be feeling. I remember going to football matches with my father, trying to grasp something — trying to feel what he felt, or at least understand it. I didn’t really know what it was. Maybe pride, maybe excitement, maybe some unspoken rite of passage. But mostly, I ended up falling asleep and becoming a disappointment. Many times I asked for footballs, with a pretend enthusiasm, I learned how to mimic the joy, to cheer when it seemed right, how to act like I was part of it. But I never really got it. The connection never clicked. It felt like all the other boys had this natural connection to the game, to the object, the football liked them but didn’t like me; and I was just hovering around the edges, performing the motions without the feeling. But the idea of engaging with it in that way — the chasing, the kicking, the shouting, the aggression to then putting it in that box it was meant to be in — it was never for me. I tried, but it always felt like I was borrowing someone else’s rhythm, someone else’s joy. There was a script everyone else seemed to know by heart, and I was just mouthing along, hoping it would start to mean something. It never really did, or at least not till recently when I decided to claim it in my own terms and make it my friend!