What’s Left Standing Is Not Always What You Think It Should Be

The last time I walked out of a locker room as a professional athlete, I didn’t know it would be the last time. Nobody told me it would be a mundane affair. Nobody told me I would have no farewell tour. No goodbyes to all the coaches and teammates and fans I loved playing with and for 20 years.

No, there’s no final buzzer or external recognition for that. Not unless you’re a legend in your sport like Mia Hamm or LeBron or Sue Bird, or Kobe or MJ. The thing is, I didn’t know it would be my last game. For my last game in France, I just packed my bag, threw my hoop shoes in the garbage, and handed my jersey to a kid fan. At some point later — a week, a month — you realize you’re not coming back, and no one’s going to ask you to either.

I’d spent 20 years being the guy who trained before the sun came up. I’d spent 20 years loving my craft and popularity and attention and status and money. I treasured traveling the world playing the game I loved. I knew exactly what I was intended to be. Who I was for. What value I brought to the world.

But you take that away, and you find out how much of what you called “yourself” was actually just “what I do.”

Turns out, for me, it was most of it.

That was my first death.

When I retired from the game, I had to give up everything I had built my ego around becoming. I came home to the U.S., and barely anyone knew what it was like to start over from scratch. No one talks about the sadness, the pain, the suffering, the loss of a career you love, the healthy drug basketball was for me, and like that, it’s over.

There were no athlete support groups. No companies willing to hire me as a captain and leader. No amount of degrees or talents or intelligence could replace the decade of a resume that read, “I was a damn good Basketball Player.”

The truth hurt: I wasn’t needed by an organization, team, or company here.

But my name stayed the same. The face in the mirror stayed the same. The thing that used to answer the question, “Who are you?” is just gone, and you’re standing there holding a version of yourself that doesn’t work anymore, trying to figure out what to build instead.

I thought that was the hard part. I thought I’d already done my dying. It took me years and years to reinvent myself. To find community. To build community. To begin moving through the fear of expectations and perfectionism. To fall in love. To stay in love. To allow myself to fall in love. To choose a partner and move across the country. I thought I’d already let go of the thing that had made so much sense to my soul, brain, and body.

I was wrong.

Six months ago, I lost my beautiful, soulful wife, Natalia, in an instant — a normal Tuesday that ended with a phone call I’ll never stop hearing. I’m not going to tell that whole story today. It’s coming, and it deserves its own space, not a paragraph inside an introduction post. But I’ll tell you this much: losing her broke something in me that losing my career never touched.

And the strange, useless-feeling thing I noticed almost immediately was that I recognized the shape of it. I’d been here before. This loss, this physical death of love — nothing prepares you for it — but this particular flavor of disorientation, this intense shift of wanting to love her again — this is specific to who I am now.

I’d survived a smaller version of grief once already, on a court, in a locker room, alone.

But athletes die twice. Or in my case, three times. Once when the game stops needing you. And then again, whenever your life ends. It seems my life will continue to process the dead things I quietly rebuilt my identity around. Nobody warns you death is coming, and nothing about surviving the first one guarantees you survive the second.

But it does mean you’re not doing it from scratch.

Here’s what I actually have to offer, if I’m honest about it: not answers, and not a comeback story with a bow on it. What I have is a body of tools I didn’t choose casually — Stoicism, discipline, training theory, the specific mental architecture that gets built into you over a decade-plus of professional sport — that I’ve now had to use twice, for two entirely different kinds of dying.

Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, alone, before dawn, trying to figure out how to get through a day he didn’t want to face. That’s not a self-help quote. That’s a guy doing exactly what I’ve been doing for six months.

My Substack is where I write that down as it happens — not after I’ve figured it out, but while I’m still in it.

Some of it will be about specific Stoic ideas, some of it will be about professional sports lessons, and some of it will be what I’m actually doing or not doing to heal and process my grief. I would write regardless of my sharing; it is the thing I’ve found that feeds and heals my soul the most.

Some of this Substack will be about what life teaches you about identity that no one tells you until it’s gone. Some of it will be about Natalia, and about loving someone, choosing them day after day, and about what’s left standing after love ends. I’m not going to pretend all of that resolves into one clean lesson.

It doesn’t, and I’m not interested in writing as if it does.

If you’re looking for five-step happiness hacks or a wellness routine that promises to fix this, this isn’t your newsletter, and I mean that with respect — that’s just not what I’m making. If you’ve ever had to rebuild who you are from a loss that had nothing polite about it — a career, a person, an identity you didn’t choose to lose — I think you’ll recognize what’s here.

I don’t know yet what I’ll be on the other side of this. This is the only promise I can actually make you: I’ll keep showing up here and telling you the truth of it as I find it, not after I’ve cleaned it up.

That’s the whole pitch. Come die with me a little, and see what’s still standing after. I promise that part of you will help you live the most beautiful life you can.

— Trevor

P.S. If this is the kind of writing you want more of, subscribe to my Substack — new posts land every other week.