TRANSCRIPT

 I'm R.K. Russell, and this is The Slowdown.

This morning, the biggest surprise was the silence. Living in Los Angeles, often you get used to the noise. You get used to the helicopters, the traffic, the people — maybe your own internal monologue if you're me. But this morning at 5:00 AM, it was so quiet. There were no cars really on the streets. I didn't play music, which I normally do. I'm obsessed with music. And my mind wasn't racing, which was nice. And there was just something very unexpected but welcomed about the silence.

I think when there's silence and moment to really be present in my body, I'm more aware of it. I'm going through an injury right now, and I could feel it throbbing, but also loosening up as I was taking those first steps. I also, playing football, have a tirade of injuries, so my shoulder also loosening up, my bicep also warming up, feeling myself kind of wake, both mentally and physically.

In terms of my relationship with my mind and my body, it's often my mind pushing my self physically. That just comes from the world of athletics. And in the morning, especially this morning, when your mind is still kind of lulled in sleep, it allows your body to take the lead. So, you're doing things that feel good. You're stretching a little more. You're taking your time instead of the mind kind of communicating, "We need to be at the gym by 5:30. We need to be on the treadmill at this time. We need to be, we need to be, we need to be." You finally get to listen to what your body needs, or just let it do what it needs, and it's actually a much more peaceful way to ease into your day.

My body's most natural state or feeling is dance, which is crazy, because I'm also this very large man. Lifting and things, it feels good to be stronger. And even in playing football, it feels good to dedicate your life to something and practice at something and it works. But there's something about music that when it comes on, my body just moves, and it's uninhibited. It's raw. It doesn't care. I'm not overthinking it. I'm not a professional trained dancer. Especially with my relationship in sports and athletics, it's forcing your body to do things it's not really used to doing or that aren't comfortable — or when you play a contact sport, you're moving another person's body against its will, and there's this push and pull. But dance is just... Yeah, it just is.

I often think of the difference between creation and curation. And a lot of masculinity and manhood in my experience is a lot of curation. It's a lot of people telling you what you can be, who you can't be, how you should move, talk, act, how you shouldn't move, talk, and act. I'm in my 30s now, but when I was 26, I came to the crossroads of, “Okay, how much of this did I pick up from somewhere else and it's going against my natural thoughts, intonation, body? And how much of this comes from me, or at least is a more natural or genuine relationship to me?” And not saying everything that you curate is bad. A lot of the times, that's how we learn and grow. We reference and curate and imitate. But to really take stock of those things and to hold onto the things that feel like they align, not just with who you are now, but with who you want to be. And removing some of those other things, especially if they're holding you back or making you feel shame or some type of limiting feeling.

For me, a lot of my life was about sacrifice to get to a greater goal or outcome. Whether that was waking up early, working out, going to practice, staying after practice. To be a better football player, to make it to the NFL, to provide for my family. Or whether it was in relationship to my family. Being the man that didn't have to be told to do certain things but just did them. Taking out the trash, paying bills, making sure that everyone's protected and feels good. It was always rooted in identity. My identity as a football player, my identity as a son or a brother or a teammate.

When you start to want to live authentically as yourself, there are also sacrifices that must be made. A lot of those sacrifices are rooted in your relationships. How people view you, how people want you to give to them and love them and care for them. And that's hard because you want to love and care for a lot of these people, but to be your authentic self, you have to sacrifice some of how that shows up.

There's also this discipline in authenticity that is unlike anything else. It's rooted in a lot of deconstruction. Learning and forgiving and having mercy with yourself as you go through different phases of life, different phases of self. What feels authentic to you one day might not feel that way the next day. And only in your relationship with self is that kind of okay. You can't show up as a brother one day and then show up the next and be like, "Actually, I don't wanna be your brother. I don't wanna do these things. I don't wanna love, care, and protect for you." But with yourself, you can kind of shift and change.

But there's a thought that change is a scary thing. And I think we view fear a lot of the time as a warning of something negative, when fear is actually, most of the time, a thought, boundary, lesson, or mode of survival that comes from somewhere else. Whether it's experience, or whether it's a lesson that you heard, or whether it's observation that you had of someone else. So you need to find where the fear is coming from and then see if it is aligned with who you are authentically or where you want to go, and then you push past it. Fear doesn't mean something is automatically negative. It just means that you have an experience, observation, or lesson that's bringing up some emotions for you.

That's why I give myself grace, because I wouldn't even have the same understanding or appreciation for poetry if I didn't also have "bad poetry," or unedited poetry, or raw poetry, Instagram poetry. Especially in the age of technology, we think that these things dilute something, and I don't think it's true. I think if anything, it just gives us deeper appreciation for these things. It broadens it, it makes it connect to more people.

Writing, outside of just being therapeutic, outside of being a way to communicate, it is, to me, pure possibility, as well as an honest, raw, vulnerable depiction of grief, of loss, of love, every emotion you can think of and even those you can't. But when you read a line, a paragraph, a sentence, you feel so viscerally what it's trying to convey. And as a writer, in really claiming that, regardless of what type of background you have, what type of education you have, what form of writing you do — to be a writer is to be someone who creates possibility, who sees possibility, who also grieves lost possibility. You exist in the multitude of possibility, which in of itself is hope.

Especially nowadays, we live in very dark times, and sometimes writing about those dark times allows people to know they're not alone. Writing out of those dark times allows people to understand that there has been light before this and there will be light after. And I think those things are so, so important.

Oftentimes we see writing as a reflection of society, when really writing is where we bend society. It's where we bend the rules. It's where we bend even the preconceived outcomes that we've been sold online or through media or just even in our own homes. There is a gateway that happens every time you put words on a page, and that is not only possibility and hope, that is the true essence of what it means to be human. Society is not shaping what we write. What we write is shaping society.

Identity and relationships are what bust down the framework. I think we're always looking for an identity or a relation to someone else that defines us, that gives us a nice, neat definition of our role or our place here, how we show up, how we look, how we talk. But identity and relationship is supposed to do the opposite. It's supposed to give you the possibility. Walking into a football locker room of 53 people in the NFL, no 53 people are the same. You are constantly seeing ways that you could still both be a football player and be something completely different. Hopefully, you find people, friends, lovers, family, both distant and close, that are constantly showing you what more you can be and what more you can do. And it's not limiting you to where you are then or a smaller version of yourself.

Some people don't love labels, but for me, being both a professional football player and a bisexual man was very important because they both expanded on what the other thing meant. It's very rare that you see those two things together, and you would feel maybe like they would be at odds, but really they just create room, so much room for the other. And it's important for people to see themselves in multitude, and it's important for people to see people doing what they're doing and at the same point living completely different lives for themselves. There's no one way to be. Society would tell us, or media or social media, that an identity means A, B, and C, when really an identity means possibility.

There are people that I've followed further into myself in terms of expanding my idea of identity, of athletics, of sport, of writing. Those people would be my mother, who raised me as a single mother, had me at the age of 20. Now being 34, I realize how crazy that is. But she guided me with love and wisdom and a care that is still so tender to me to this day. To usher me into this world, also as a child herself, is someone who I continue to look up to and to see light and love and vulnerability.

Another person would be my best friend, Joe, who even now being gone, in passing in 2018 from cancer, is still teaching me about myself, still reminding me of who I am and the things that I said I wanted then that I'm doing now or that I'm still pursuing now. And to have the title of best friend is not something I give out lightly. It's not a friendship bracelet that I'm passing around the halls. This is someone who truly makes me a better version of myself and someone who still continues to do that through the echo of who they are.

It's my brother, who joined the Army at 18. We had made a deal, actually. We were both playing football, and we knew at 18 we were either gonna get football scholarships or go into the Army, because that was a rule in my mother's house. And I got the football scholarship and he went to the Army. And to see the life that he has created for himself, for his wife, for his two kids continues to remind me that I also wanna be a father, that I also want to build my own community and to give in that way. And also that he in some way fathered us as brothers growing up, and I fathered him, and we fathered each other.

And there are people who you don't follow deeper into yourself. There are people who are actually the warnings of, "Don't go into this room." It's a process of elimination in terms of showing you the path. You can go down these two roads, but I know you shouldn't go down this one. Those people would be my biological father, who I've written about so many times. And our relationship is ever-changing and ever-growing currently, but at the time of growing up, it was a lot of him not being there. It was a lot of him letting me down. It was a lot of him trying to cope with his own challenges, hurdles in life that didn't allow him to be there for me in the way that I would have liked. But sometimes the best example is the example of what not to do. And in being honest through that, we're allowed to have a relationship now. I can call him on the phone now. He'll answer. We can have a nice conversation, and we can get off, and I won't feel as though I need to build on that, and I won't feel as though that has derailed my day. It can just be a nice conversation.

The greatest way to find yourself sometimes is through your relation with people. You just have to be honest when the relationship is showing you who you aren't and what you shouldn't be doing.

Family is the constant challenge, and I say that lovingly because it is also hopefully the constant reward. If you are invested in each other, respect each other as human beings, but also understand that, regardless of anything else in life, your family are the people who have seen you from a very young age and loved you and cared for you and hopefully will see you at a very late age and love for you and care for you. They usher you into this world, and they usher you out of it, and that is not a small feat. That is not a small task. That is literally the bookends of our experience here as human beings.

And if you're not getting that from your family, hopefully you've found chosen family. I think that's why I've always gravitated towards team sports, and every sport has some team component. Like, we see tennis players who have trainers and coaches and physical therapists and all the things. That's a different type of team. But if I wasn't out there on the field, pitch, court without people who were teammates, who were committed to the same outcome that I was, and putting in the same blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice I was, I don't think I would do it as much. Because the communal part of sports is what really makes it exciting and amazing. I mean, that's the reason why whether it's a bar that's packed at game night or whether it's fantasy football that you join a league of 50 people, you're constantly in community. That's either your family or your chosen family. I look at team and family as a synonymous word to me. Teammate and brother and world citizen and community builder, leader, captain, father, mother, these are all synonyms in my mind 'cause they all work under the same premise that we came to this world together, and we're gonna leave it together, and whatever is after this, we're all gonna be there together.

Today's poem is a declaration of how the right language makes room for love and how love makes room for the right language.

They/Them
by Danez Smith

said short: i feel more like a stud. said
with some nuance: as if i came to
masculinity through the women’s gate,
as if a daughter who grew into her father
but not like trans, but like trans or
a transformation without catalyst
or smoke. or more like born
in the right body too early or born
at the wrong time, in the wrong language.
i remember Tommy said he (is he a they now?)
lived for how i put it in that one poem “more
tomboy than boy” and i think that’s what
language does—builds a room made for living.
and who have i followed further into myself?
Cam, Paula, Tommy, Fati, Andrea, Auntie George
or anyone who saved me from a body of silence
by just living their lives in the sun? and if
the soul is a table on which the body sits
crowded with the meat and the marrow
and the red, red wine, around me sit
too many ghosts to ever rest in isolation.
of course you should address me in the plural.
said short: i am everyone. i am everything.
said shorter: i am.

"They/Them" by Danez Smith. Used by permission of the poet.