Over the last twenty-five years I have been speaking and teaching a great deal on the issue of men and their identities. Your identity, of course, is how you see yourself. For most men, their identity is wrapped up in their work and how successful they are in that work. This can set them up for great disappointment when their work does not go well or their business fails. Also, what happens to your identity when you retire?
Recently I was doing some research on the male identity and encountered a powerful story that I feel compelled to share in this blog. I think it will touch your life and will provide you with wisdom as you consider the issue of identity.
This is a story about Emeka Nnaka. When he was twenty-one, Emeka was a defensive end with the semipro football team the Oklahoma Thunder. Emeka ran to make a tackle after the ball was snapped—a play he’d made many times before. When he hit the other player, his 250-pound body fell to the ground, as it usually did. But this time, something was different: he didn’t actually feel himself fall. All he felt, lying there on the turf as the crowd fell silent, was the tingly feeling you get when you bump your funny bone. The trainers ran out. An ambulance wailed in the distance. Emeka was carried off the field on a stretcher. He tried to lift his hand to give the crowd a thumbs-up, but couldn’t. At the hospital, he underwent a nine-hour surgery.
Emeka had not grown up playing football. He threw the ball around a bit in high school, but it was not until he joined the Oklahoma Thunder during his sophomore year of college that he devoted himself seriously to the game. As a freshman, he explained, he was “a screwup.” But “when football came to my doorstep,” he said, “it was my chance to make everyone proud of me. I remember thinking, ‘an opportunity has arisen for me to shine at what l’m good at, so let me use my gifts to pursue that.’ It felt like I was moving to a bigger goal.” He trained hard every day and, as he got stronger and faster, felt that his life was finally moving in a positive direction. After he played with the Thunder for two seasons, a coach at a college in Missouri called him, hoping to recruit him to play for the school’s team.
Three weeks later, he injured his spinal cord.
ln the days following his surgery, Emeka did not fully grasp the gravity of his situation. He thought he would spend two months in rehab before he could start playing football again. But by month three, when the hospital sent him home, Emeka still could not use his hands and arms, let alone move his legs—and that was when he realized that he was on a journey that would be much longer and more difficult than he had anticipated. “You are supposed to be in the hospital because you are sick,” Emeka said. “When they tell you it’s time to go home, it’s because you’re better. But when they told me it’s time for me to go home, I didn’t look or feel better.” He thought, “What do you mean I’m ready to go?” The guy who had been able to lift 300 pounds couldn’t even lift a 3-pound weight. His father had to move to Tulsa from Georgia to take care of him.
As Emeka adjusted to his new life, he spent a lot of time asking himself some big questions: “What is my life about? Am I going to get married? Will I have kids? Will someone love me? How will I support myself?’ Before his injury, he had a clear sense of who he was: he was a football player; he was the life of the party; he was a college student with a future full of opportunities. Now he had to come to terms with the fact that the future he had always imagined for himself—the person he thought he would become—was gone.
To make matters worse, he came to see that the person he had been was seriously flawed. As Emeka evaluated who he had been before his injury, he realized that there were aspects of bis identity that he did not like. “The truth is,” he said, “I was really into who I was: I was a guy who partied a lot and didn’t think a lot about others. I thought, ‘You only live once, so do whatever you want to do right now.’ I was living a purposeless life.”
Emeka’s identity was unraveling, but he started weaving a new one—a positive one. He told himself that he was better than the drifting and self-absorbed man he had been. In the spring of 2010, nearly a year after his injury, he began to volunteer at his church as an adviser to junior high school and high school students. Being a mentor helped him take his focus off himself and his circumstances and turn his attention to other people who needed his help and wanted to learn from his life experiences. “It wasn’t until I started serving people that a light came on,” he said, “and I realized who I really am—today, I’m someone who tries to put other people first.” Two years after he began volunteering at his church, he went back to college. He graduated in 2015 and enrolled in a master’s program for counseling. Emeka is still paralyzed and does not know whether he will ever walk again, but he is confident that the life he is leading now is far spiritually richer than the life he was leading before.
In the months after his surgery, Emeka spent a lot of time trying to make sense of his injury—of the moment when the story of his life took an abrupt turn. Before his injury, he said, “I was climbing up the wrong mountain.” When he broke his neck, he fell down that mountain and “hit rock bottom.” Then he discovered another mountain—the mountain he was supposed to be climbing all along, the mountain that contained his true path. He has been slowly climbing that mountain ever since.
Could you be climbing the wrong mountain? Are you pursuing the life God meant you to pursue? Does your current life energize you? I have seen many people over the years make the courageous decision to completely change course and climb the mountain that contained their true path.
Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author. (Photo credit: Miller Knott)
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