Dear Coach

You never said it out loud, but I always knew when you were disappointed in me. I got good at reading it — the length of a pause, whether you used my first name or my last. I spent four years trying to close that gap before I ever thought to ask what I actually wanted for myself.

I don't think you meant to teach me that my worth was a stopwatch. I think you were doing what was done to you. But I carried it a long time after I stopped playing for you, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand that the quiet after a bad practice wasn't a verdict on who I was.

I'm not writing this angry. I'm writing it because I think you'd want to know, and because I finally don't need you to say anything back for it to be true: I worked hard because I loved it, before I ever worked hard to be enough for you.

Thank you for the day you pulled me aside after I got benched and didn't say a single word about basketball. You asked if I was doing okay at home. I lied and said yes. You didn't believe me, and you didn't push, you just said the door was open.

I used that door four months later, on a much worse day than that one. I don't know if I'd have known how, if you hadn't shown me first that a coach could ask a question that had nothing to do with the scoreboard.

I don't know if you remember that conversation. I remember all of it.