the woods
I’ve been off the internet for a little while. I always take a break after the draft — usually a couple weeks once UDFA signings have been finalized before I start prepping for the next season. This year it’s been longer, though, and I’ve been stricter about limiting my interaction with Twitter. But if you know me outside of my public-facing Twitter account, you probably heard about where I was planning on going: the woods.
And so, last weekend, my two best friends and I drove just short of two hours northeast, to the outskirts of the nearby national forest, and embarked on what we jokingly called a darkness retreat of our own. Unlike Aaron Rodgers, we did not do any drugs, and we were also on a 20 acre property tucked in the back of a neighborhood within walking distance of a town of about 1,500 people. The point, however, was that we didn’t have internet and barely had cell service — when we did, I had my phone in airplane mode to force myself to unplug.
In the tent just behind the house, I realized that not only had I needed this physical removal from the internet much more than I had thought, but that mentally, I had been in the woods the whole time. I just hadn’t seen it.
forest for the trees
I’ve always been very detail-oriented. It’s a point of pride, most of the time, one of those things you can toss straight on a resume and feel good about. But my fixation on detail has frequently gone a step or two or twenty too far. The amount of stress and strain I put on myself is never congruent with how much a detail matters to the big picture. In idiomatic terms, I can’t see the forest for the trees.
That’s what made this trip into the physical woods so necessary. We had no plans beyond reaching the house we rented for the weekend. Maybe we’d hike, toss a football around, walk into town, sit on the patio and have a few beers. But there was no structured plan to do all those things, unlike the way my life had operated for the past year prior. During football season, every minute of my life is planned out. There is no room for spontaneous plans, desires to do something else, nothing. I am locked in, for better or worse.
There’s a pretty simple reason for this. My brand, at least the way I understand it, is built on workrate. Most of the spreadsheets you’re probably following my account for are built using only information available to the general public as long as you know where to look. I’m not breaking any news or leaking any information, just compiling it. And my commitment to compiling it means that I do it better and more than anyone else. Most of the comments I get about my work are charged with disbelief that I’m able to build something so complete and so robust with little to no help, with even further disbelief when people find out I do so without the aid of caffeine. It’s a one-man show fueled purely by attention to detail, so I have to be locked in.
At least, that’s how it feels.
That’s not true, of course. But sometimes that’s harder to remember than others. Sometimes I post a picture of me out in the real world taking a break and the comments are all clamoring for me to get back to work and find Georgia’s pro day results. Sometimes I post that I’m taking a break and people tell me to take my time and avoid burning out. Such is the nature of being online, probably. But I tend to believe I can shift the tide of those comments by working harder — you can’t ask me for more if I’ve already given you everything there is, after all. But giving everything is structurally impossible — even if I had all the information, there’s not enough time to put it all in right away. Even if I did, I grow increasingly aware that people will always want more, whether it’s there to give or not. And so I begin to doubt: do I really need to be this locked in?
pileup
I’d already started having some of these thoughts before I headed into the woods. It was draft day — the culmination of another year’s worth of work, this time with a full year of study I could put into my Chargers-centric coverage.
On day 3, I sat down around 9am to embark on the last day of this marathon. Between then and 9pm, I left my couch twice: once to get water and once to use the restroom. I did not eat. I had a UDFA tracker to prepare, with the goal of launching it as soon as Mr. Irrelevant was announced. Then there were signings to track.
For a while, it seemed like it was working. And for a while throughout this season, it seemed like a lot of things were working. Sure, I was working 12–16 hours a day, every day, but it was temporary, I thought. People liked my Chargers coverage even though it was my first time covering one team instead of having a national focus. The influence of the spreadsheets were growing — at least two Power 5 schools used my transfer database and a CFL team and PFF lauded my pro day data, and that’s just what I knew about. I got a tweet on NFL Network. People told me when I got to Las Vegas for the Shrine Bowl that even NFL teams were using the spreadsheets. I left with handshake agreements to set up at least three meetings about furthering my reach.
Except, those meetings never happened. Maybe they still will, I’m not sure. But I put a lot of stock into that follow-through being swift, and when it wasn’t, I coped by working even harder. I was determined to ensure that nobody could afford to flake on me if they wanted a piece of my services. That brings us back to day 3 of the draft, my body going into overdrive as it entered hour 12 of continuous work.
My elbow started twitching, more of an annoyance than a barrier. Then the twitch was accompanied by pain on the inside of my arm that kept me from straightening my arm all the way. Eventually, my friends convinced me that I needed to stop working. I still didn’t take it too seriously; I posted a tweet comparing myself to Brock Purdy before calling it a night, expecting the pain to leave by morning.
It’s three weeks later and I’m only beginning to feel normal again. It hurt to type for too long at a time, so I took a hiatus from writing that is ending with this rambling. In that time, I’ve meant to be resting, but the lack of writing assignments has brought every other aspect of my life back into focus. I’d shoved all those things, big, small, everywhere in between, to the side for the whole season to chase this with the relentlessness that I thought people wanted. I thought I had to pour my whole life into this to get where I wanted to be because I didn’t know any other way forward. And now, I have a whole life staring back at me wondering where I’ve been.
branching paths
Every time I see my friends, they want to ask me about how writing is going. I’m very lucky that they’re all so supportive, and I try to update them more than I used to. But football has become the main thing I talk to them about, and sometimes I wish we could talk about anything else. Then I think about it a beat longer and realize I have nothing else to talk about. This has been my life, ever since I committed to turning myself into a full-time member of the industry by my birthday in 2024.
I thought it was working. The increase in reach. Sharing lunch as contemporaries with people I saw as idols. The promises of meetings, connections, projects that fell by the wayside. Only after physically removing myself from the constant churn do I realize it’s not working. I half-joked on a video I did for Guilty as Charged that once the draft ended, I’d finally have time to get a haircut. I thought details that minute would ruin my writing. I haven’t finished unpacking from a vacation I took three months ago. There’s a full year of projects around my house to start and finish. I’ve been interested in the same person for over a year but haven’t told them because I cannot fathom how to change my schedule to accommodate change. All of these things I said I would push to the offseason, when I had more time.
You may notice at this point that there’s no time penciled in for me to relax. By the time I get the rest of my life back in relative order, it’ll be football season again, or at least OTAs and training camp season. I’ll have articles to write and projects to undertake and podcasts to go on. The rest of my life will take a backseat.
As we left the woods, I had to confront this reality. I defaulted to saying that next time, I was going to go into the woods for longer. Logging off and experiencing the world with this sense of freedom felt good; I didn’t want to leave. By the time I got home, I realized that actually, nothing was stopping me from doing that in the first place. There was cell service in the woods that I actively blocked myself from, which is something I could also do anywhere when I need a break. There is no physical barrier for me leaving my house and doing something other than writing pretty much any time I want.
It’s quite the antithesis to the way I’ve been thinking for the last year. I’ve been so zoomed in on detail — crafting the perfect sentence, the perfect tweet, the perfect spreadsheet — that I haven’t appreciated the progress I’ve made towards achieving this dream of mine. I started with zero background in journalism and less than 100 Twitter followers as a college senior in September 2019. In less than four years I’ve put my name on close to 400 articles for USA Today and have nearly 2,600 accounts that follow my work. That’s…insane, and what makes it more so is that I’ve overlooked that the entire time because I want to jump straight to the even bigger time.
binoculars
Like the people in my comments asking where the Georgia pro day results are, I think I’m beginning to realize that there’s always going to be more. Even if I hit the big time, I’m going to want more. I’m wired for perfection, not good enough. Maybe I can’t change that wiring. But there are a lot of things that look perfect from a distance, and so maybe zooming out is my workaround. Perfectly trimming one tree will not change the aesthetic of the whole forest.
There’s a balance I have to strike here, of course. It’s difficult to competently manage everything I want to accomplish all at once. Juggling everything I want runs the risk of not making the kinds of astronomical progress I want to. But doing what I’ve been doing only ensures that problems I’ve been ignoring grow in intensity. There’s something in between, surely.
I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to be everything to everyone as often as possible. That’s what I thought everyone wanted. But the more the fog lifts from these mental woods, the more I realize that most of you just want me to be me. I’ve been so zoomed in on my shortcomings and projects I promised and didn’t deliver and things that didn’t go my way that I’ve never fully come to terms with how much this audience has supported me.
A lot of things look perfect from a distance. Maybe I’m one of those things.
