Most summers throughout high school and college, I worked at Deer Creek Golf Club in Clayton, Indiana, by my family’s house. One day our fairways had been aerated, which is when the maintenance crew punches holes in the ground in order to keep the grass healthy, and I was asked to go out to the ninth hole and tell a group there to keep their carts on the path because of the aeration.
I froze mid-confrontation and told him that our fairways were being “radiated,” not aerated, as if he was near a nuclear site like Chernobyl. The man went off on me, making fun of me in front of his friends, and made me feel dumber and smaller than I already felt. I went back to the clubhouse with a flushed face.
What did this teach me? The way that one moment ate at me throughout the rest of the day, the fact I can recall it even now, teaches me that I am horrified of being perceived as incompetent. But also, that it doesn’t really matter what people think. Why was I allowing what a jerk thought about me to have any say in who I was or how I felt? This one small moment shows how seeming insecurity, and daring to name it, can also be a pathway toward truth and learning about oneself.
—from Franciscan Media’s Off the Page
with host Stephen Copeland, featuring James Martin, SJ
