The Scapegoat and the Loop

When you play overseas, you learn real fast that everything can change in an instant. One week you’re untouchable. The crowd screams your name and the team is throwing bonuses and fancy dinners your way. You walk around town and people stop you for pictures or buy you a coffee just for being amazing. Then you lose one game and suddenly you’re the worst thing that ever happened to the club. Same player, same work, same numbers, but none of that matters. You’re the one they point at when the sky falls.

I’ve had seasons where people called me family and treated me like a local hero. I’ve had seasons where a guy in a suit came into the locker room, screaming at me until he was red in the face, because we lost one fucking game. Both versions happened to me. Both versions live inside the same career.

That kind of instability felt familiar, because my brain had always done the same thing to me. Overseas crowds scapegoated me for losses I couldn’t control. My ADHD brain scapegoated me for everything else. Same feeling…same blame…same chaos

ADHD made my head feel like my childhood bedroom. In one corner sat my sister’s old static TV with rabbit ears that I refused to turn on after someone let me watch Poltergeist at the ripe age of nine. Next to it, a VCR blinking 12:00am because I had no clue how to set it, beside a stack of Nintendo cartridges that only worked if you blew the dust out until you were about to pass out. (That was a hard sentence to write.)

That cluttered mess remained twenty years later, after announcing my retirement. A message would pop up from someone important. I’d see the name, know I should respond, and my brain would say, not right now, you’re tired, you’ll say something dumb. Put it down and answer later. Later turned into tomorrow, then into that awkward moment where you see the person in real life and pretend you were about to text them back. I hate that shit and did it way too often.

ADHD means I’ll miss a message from someone I respect and then spend the next day beating myself up over it. Or opening an email while I’m working on something else and already stretched thin, then ducking it because I need to finish the task I’m on. People think it’s a lack of care, when really I care so much it jams my entire system.

When I got overseas, that chaos doubled. The noise in my head met the noise outside. There were new countries and new coaches yelling in new languages I barely understood. Fans deciding in a week if I was a savior or a complete waste of money. Being the outsider made it easy for them. I wasn’t from their city or even their country. I was the hired gun...i.e. disposable.

That kind of environment colliding with my ADHD brain could’ve been the perfect storm, but it ended up sharpening me. I built routines that kept me grounded, like walking to the same coffee spot every morning, or stretching in the same place before practice. I started carrying a notebook and wrote down everything that mattered. If I didn’t, it was gone. Groceries, plays, bills, phone numbers. That notebook kept me sane and, later, gave me an advantage when I sat down to write my book Overseas Famous…which, by the way, is still on sale at Amazon and worth the money. (Winky face emoji.)

I also started to realize that checking my phone too often was killing me. With no stable time zone, messages always seemed to come in at the worst times. I’d be in the middle of something, open a text, and my brain would stall. The reply I owed would sit there for days. I can’t split my focus like that. If I’m locked on a task, I leave the phone. When I mix the two, it adds to the chaos and guarantees the response comes late.

Now I try to sweep through old texts and emails at the end of the week so nothing slips too far through the cracks. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than pretending I’ll answer later and then dealing with the crippling guilt when later never comes.

Basketball drilled into me the one skill that’s kept me from drowning…the reset. If you fuck up in the first quarter, there’s still three more to play. You don’t get to sit there and sulk. You give up a bucket, you sprint your ass back and get the stop. You make the next play. That rhythm becomes second nature after years of practice and games.

I’ve had nights overseas where I airballed a shot in front of a packed gym and wanted to crawl into the floor. The only thing that saved me was the reset. Next possession, run the set, take the right shot, move on. You don’t erase the mistake, but you don’t lose the rest of the game because of it either.

That same instinct is what I’ve had to build into my everyday life. Acknowledge a mistake, reset, send something simple like, Saw this, buried right now, will hit you up tomorrow. It’s not perfect, but it moves the ball forward instead of letting me sit in the mistake.

My biggest struggle was what stuck with me after all of it. Being scapegoated so often overseas made blaming myself part of my identity. I got used to thinking every problem was mine to carry. I had to learn to separate my actual mistakes from the story I tell myself about them. I was taught to expect blame. ADHD made me believe it. Growing out of that has been harder than any workout I ever went through.

Still now, when life gets overwhelming, the old version of me shows up. I stare at a message, stall, and tell myself I’ll deal with it later. Later always tries to disappear. The difference now is I catch it more often and reset faster. I own it instead of hiding or tell people I’m at capacity instead of ghosting them. That shift saved me so much effort and time.

Progress is the only stat I care about now. Younger me let guilt build until it crushed him. Older me messes up, fixes it, and gets back on the floor...a skill I learned overseas in front of crowds who cheered for me one night and cursed me the next. ADHD taught me the same lesson at home. Both wanted me to be the scapegoat. Both made me believe I was the problem. I was never going to be perfect for them, or for myself. But if I could keep resetting and keep moving forward, I could conquer it. That’s what kept me playing pro for a decade, and that’s what keeps me steady now.

So if you text me and don’t hear back right away, don’t assume I don’t care. Nudge me. I probably saw it, froze, and needed a reset, or I was into something else and looked at my phone in the middle. I’m still learning when to choose the long game over the instant dopamine. Basketball taught me that…ADHD made me live it…and somewhere in between, I figured out how to survive both storms.