Growing Through It
What the Toronto Blue Jays taught me about resilience, loss, and showing up anyway
Last November, in Prague, I got a tattoo of wildflowers.
I didn’t tell many people about it. It wasn’t really for anyone else.
I got it four months after the worst summer of my life.
On Friday morning, my husband had the pregame coverage on in the background. The Blue Jays’ home opener. A new season, Rogers Centre, the whole city waking back up around baseball. And there on the screen were the highlights from last year’s World Series run. The losses. The faces of the players in the dugout. That particular look that only happens when you’ve come that close and it still slips through.
It got me emotional in a way I didn’t see coming.
The Blue Jays have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was little in 1992 and 1993, but I remember my dad and my brother losing their minds when the Blue Jays won back to back. That kind of excitement lives in you. When I lived in Toronto, my roommate and my girlfriends would go to games for about $5 a ticket, sit in the nosebleeds, and have the best time. Sometimes we’d splurge on closer seats. Before my husband and I moved across the country, we lived down the street from Rogers Centre for two months. This team has been woven into my life for a long time.
So when those highlights came on Friday morning, it wasn’t just about last year’s World Series. It was all of it at once.
We talk about resilience like it’s a personality trait. Like some people have it and some people don’t.
I didn’t find resilience. I built it, slowly, over years.
I was a competitive dancer from the time I was eight years old until I left for university. Dance was my sport. It was my life. I missed birthdays, events, my prom afterparty, the kinds of weekends my friends were having. I don't regret a single bit of it. What dance gave me was a deep understanding of what it takes to love something that demands everything from you. The late nights. The physical grind. The performances where something goes wrong and you finish anyway. The way you can grieve a loss, a missed placement, an injury, a role you wanted and didn’t get, and still walk back into the studio the next day.
That’s not something you can explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. It’s a particular kind of devotion. And when I watch professional athletes now, I recognize it immediately. I see it in the Blue Jays players who made it all the way to the World Series last year and lost. I see it in the fact that they’re back today, walking into Rogers Centre carrying all of that with them, choosing to go again.
That’s what resilience actually looks like. Not loudness or toughness or pushing through without feeling anything. Something quieter than that. The willingness to carry a loss and keep going anyway. Not because you’ve forgotten. Because the love for it is bigger than the grief of it.
Last summer I had a miscarriage. I’ve had more than one, and the grief of pregnancy loss is unlike other grief. It doesn’t move in a line. It doesn’t follow a schedule or respond to logic. It comes sideways, at inconvenient times, triggered by things you didn’t expect. A pregame show on a Friday morning in March.
During those months, we watched a lot of baseball. There was a game almost every single night, and I needed somewhere to put my attention that wasn’t the inside of my own head. My husband would turn it on, and I would sit down next to him, and for a few hours we would watch people fight hard for something that mattered to them. Some nights that was enough. Some nights it was everything. And when the Blue Jays made it all the way to the World Series, I was deeply, unexpectedly invested. When they lost, I felt it in a way I understood by then.
Grief has a way of making you fluent in other people’s losses.
There’s a body piece to all of this, and I’d be leaving something out if I didn’t say it.
When we go through prolonged stress and grief, our bodies are working in ways we can’t always see. Minerals get depleted. The adrenals take a hit. The gut, far more connected to our emotional state than most people realize, suffers. The body doesn’t separate what we feel from what we experience physically. It logs all of it.
Showing up for your health during the hard seasons is its own form of resilience. It’s quiet and unglamorous and there’s no highlight reel for it. But rebuilding from the inside, supporting your nervous system, your digestion, your mineral status, that’s part of how we come back. It’s part of how we grow through it.
Today the Blue Jays play their home opener. A new season. All those players walking back into Rogers Centre carrying last year with them, choosing to go again.
I’ll be watching.
And on my forearm, there are wildflowers growing through cracks in a sidewalk, permanent and unassuming, already reminding me of what I sometimes forget.
We have this in us. All of us. The capacity to grieve something fully and still come back. To carry a loss and not let it be the last thing. To grow in conditions that were never meant for growing.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s just what we are.
