I sat in a sterile-white room, perched above a bicycle designed to go nowhere, breathing into machines while my legs pedaled indefinitely. The apparatus tucked inbetween my lips smoked a foggy vapor from its other end every time I exhaled. The bike work didn’t seem particularly difficult, but at the same time, the puffs of vapor before me grew more labored and erratic. A familiar doctor reappeared, ending the experiment without ceremony.

Efforts to make a quick return to rowing proved frustrating. Confused pulmonogists prescribed me a laundry list of inhaler varieties to try, which did nothing to aid my attempts at getting onto a rowing machine (except perhaps to add a degree of nausea). It seemed that I could hardly even keep a paddling pace on the machine without my chest swelling itself shut. The results from the bicycle test revealed that, while most people’s breathing capacities maintained (or even rose) during exercise, mine dropped more than 25% after no more than a light, 5-minute workout. I shuddered to think how far it must have fell during the 500-meter sprints I was doing just a week prior.

Brittle optimism at the boathouse began to break as the days turned to weeks. For a while, I tried to remain a team player despite my sudden inadequacy. I was briefly made an “official” freshman coach and helped teach them form on the river for a few afternoons — until it became evident that we already had more coaches than was needed — and I would of course attend the races. That was, in truth, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done: I watched my boat go by without me, no longer able to do any better than a distant third. Team parents would accost me at the sidelines, offering suspicious inquiry as often as condolences. The implication that I had simply bailed on the team for some change of heart with less than a month in my high school career (after four years of hard work and sacrifice) wasn’t painless — especially considering how we had been in such close contention for some gold medals, and all I wanted in my life at that time was to win them. Thankfully, the majority of the team knew me well enough to know better, and they were very supportive — but it was still hard to go from being the cornerstone of the crew to its biggest disappointment in the course of a night and day. Freshmen who had once held me as some kind of mentor now looked at me with pity and disappointment; my boatmates tried to put up a kind facade, but it was clear that beneath the surface they were no less frustrated than I; and my coaches were so confused that sometimes their own doubts about me bubbled to the surface. Only making it harder was the knowledge that they couldn’t be blamed — I probably would have felt the same.

Around this time my senior project kicked in, and as time went on, crew became too much of a mental stress for me to continue — especially after medical professionals told me I wouldn’t be getting back on the river anytime soon. While I still occasionally showed up at practice and duly attended all races, I decided that I needed to get my mind off of rowing, to focus on things I could actually still do. My senior project was to make a movie, into which I poured hundreds of hours of my time and energy — tellingly, like many things from this period of my life, the project went unfinished (to date, at least). I was strung out from four years of trying far too hard in high school, more than a season of physical ailments, and the mental stress of so badly letting down my coaches, my friends, my team and myself. Embarking to make a 40-minute video was not what I should have been doing then. I was completely spent, inside and out.

The defining moment came at the start of June. Ever since my slapdash EA Day video became a runaway hit and scored 10,000 views in a single week — an experience that, for a brief time, made me some kind of local hero and resulted in at least one practically life-affirming standing ovation; something that I’ve vowed to repeat — I had been more or less assigned to make the video for the senior dinner that was coming up in a week. I put my own project on hold and made an effort to find 83 people and film them over the course of two days, then began the unnecessarily protracted editing process. My computer was too slow for the software I was using, so every edit took several minutes to load, even if I just wanted to try something out. Everything was taking so long that I had to get an extension on my main project, which was tentatively titled The College Video.

It came down to the night before the video was supposed to debut. I pulled a very reluctant all-nighter, then traveled to the school media lab to continue working. The school principal — we’ll call him Rind — stopped by to check out the work-in-progress and said he liked what he saw. I asked him how he thought we might project the video to the audience, and he reassured me that Harold — who had the strange distinction of being both school president and head of the audio/video department — would have the needed equipment.

Several hours passed, and it was now around 6pm. The senior dinner was beginning, and as the video needed a little more work, I had opted out to keep working. While my friends and peers dined and reminisced, I tried to put the finishing touches on my damnable FinalCut file. Sometime during the meal, Harold moseyed on down to the lonely lab and asked me what was up. I relayed Rind’s comments about Harold’s A/V equipment, which, to my horror, seemed to be the first time Harold had ever heard about it. Even more to my horror was Harold’s revelation that the necessary cables were stowed at his house — some 45 minutes away.

Worse yet, Rind had not even thought to check in with me again, and instead had already directed the students to the auditorium where the clip was to be debuted. Had they been left to sit and chatter at the dinner table, all would have been well — but now they were sitting in uncomfortable foldout chairs before a large, blank screen, expectations and impatience rising with each passing minute. Basic communication and a modicum of thoughtfulness on Rind’s part would have averted the crisis, but now the die had been cast.

A scramble ensued, and I’m not exactly sure how everything was resolved, but some forty minutes later I turned up before the audience to boos and jeering. Even then, the recently recovered equipment took another ten minutes to set up. I played the clip off my laptop, cradling it on my knees from the top of a precarious rolling ladder that was necessitated for some reason or another, grinning with every moment of laughter and applause my video elicited. But these were pyrrhic victories — it was still just a modest eight-minute clip that could never make up for a bored and restless hour spent inside an empty auditorium, and I knew it. Once it concluded, most politely applauded while a few others made their parting shots from beyond the stage, filing out of the building while I descended from the staircase to gather my things. Just as I was zipping up my laptop, Rind approached me.

“Hey great work, great job,” he said tonelessly. “I mean, if you could have gotten your other video done and this one, that would’ve been really great. But, I mean…it was nice.” And then he walked away, leaving me to ponder by my lonesome on the stage.

As I left the building, I realized how hungry I was, and made my way over to the dining hall to see if there were any leftovers. A nice cafeteria worker hooked me up with a tray of cold steak and stale vegetables, which I sat and ate alone in a cavernous room that was brimming with familiar faces just over an hour prior. There was a display of childhood photos of everyone in my grade, as provided by the class parents, I suppose, and once I finished eating I took a moment to peruse them. What must have been a fun and nostalgic diversion for my classmates just a little bit earlier now felt like the pastime of an eerie voyeur. My own photos only made me even sadder, for some reason. I walked back out into the moonlight, past a bench where Rind and his associate were conversing freely, not giving me so much as a glance’s recognition.

On the drive home, I realized how the night summed up exactly all that I had gotten wrong in high school. I had spent too much time worrying about my creative projects, tried too hard to impress people into being my friends rather than just going out there and letting my personality speak for itself. I often told myself that I’d sometimes rather try to be productive than socialize with a lot of the people that surrounded me at that time, but to be perfectly confessional, I’ve always been a pretty shy person — insofar that the idea of having some creative work vouch for me had always seemed appealing. It’s a neurosis that, to this day, I’m not sure I’ve entirely shaken.

It was an easy realization to make that night, having toiled away on a video for people that, after four years, I felt little to no connection. They ate together, laughed and cavorted, while my eyes practically wept blood from nearly 30 uninterrupted hours of laptop radiation. Now, as I was having this epiphany, my tired eyes welled up with tears. Having to quit rowing still fresh on my mind, I felt pathetic — as though I couldn’t get anything right anymore.

As the other facets of my life began to fall apart, I found it increasingly easy to invest myself in something new. Athletics, creative filmmaking, even friendships seemed to be falling at my feet. And with every collapse, the luster surrounding my newfound musical aspirations grew ever brighter.

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