Greek Dodge and the Restless Heart

I was boy crazy as an adolescent. My first crush lived about a mile down the road — popular, charming, exactly the kind of boy a fourth grader builds a whole interior life around. I’d ride my bike past his house, hoping to catch him outside playing with his brother, just so I’d have an excuse to talk to him outside of school.

I developed my athletic skills because of him. He was good at Greek dodge, so I stayed after school and played until I got better — and I did. I became one of the best in the school, often chosen first for teams in gym class and at recess.

Still, he liked the other girls. I was the athletic one, awkward in that particular fourth-grade way, and he liked the cute, popular ones who looked nothing like me. That didn’t stop me from spending my days and nights dreaming about him — fantasizing about “going together,” disco dancing, playing Greek dodge side by side. When you’re in fourth grade, you don’t think much about marriage or anything past the daydream itself.

My crush eventually faded when his family moved to California. That’s when I started idolizing actors and musicians instead — magazine covers taped all over my bedroom walls, daydreams of some singer or actor falling in love with me at first sight. I was thirteen. Not exactly dating material for someone famous.

I followed this pattern for years — crushes on famous men, and sometimes on boys I actually knew in high school and college. None of the real ones amounted to anything. Most of the time we’d end up friends, though I always wanted more. I was always the friend. The athletic girl. Never the girl he wanted to date.

Honestly, many of those crushes were problematic. The daydreams interfered with schoolwork, with actual work. I’d fall asleep fantasizing about some grand shared life. And as it always is with a crush, I would get crushed — it almost always escalated into something close to obsession, and it always ended the same way: “I just want to be friends.”

So when someone asks why I never married, I don’t think it’s appropriate to explain any of this. If I’d actually ended up with the guy I was obsessed with, it would have been an unhealthy relationship — that much I know. The one “real” relationship I did have was with a guy who took advantage of my adoration. I walked away from it with my self-esteem in shreds.

And honestly, knowing how most of these guys turned out, I’m glad things didn’t work out. Clearly I had poor taste in men.

Now that I’m in my 50s, I genuinely can’t picture myself in a relationship. I haven’t felt a crushing attraction in about 15 years. In hindsight, I wonder what all of that was even about.

I suppose a decade of therapy and thousands of dollars might trace it to something in my youth — maybe something my mother taught me without meaning to. I can’t say it was Daddy issues—my relationship with my father has always been a good one.

But psychology can only go so far. It can’t touch the spiritual side of a life. My cousin, a social worker, has told me how confining that is for her — she’s not permitted to talk with her patients about their spiritual path, even when it’s clearly the thing underneath everything else.

At a young age I had a deep devotion in me — a powerful energy. I felt it on the Greek dodge court, in gymnastics. I could express it, too, when I sang or wrote. And yet I was branded a tomboy for the athletics, and my creative side was written off as “weird.” People are quick to put children into neat little boxes, especially when a child doesn’t behave the way they expect.

St. Augustine recognized this kind of restlessness. It’s a calling — a yearning for home. Most people push that energy down and spend their lives meeting someone else’s expectations instead: staying inside the lines, avoiding the label of “weird,” living by rules that were never their own instead of the path God intended for them.

At some point, though, that energy — call it the daimon — sabotages the stable structures we’ve built and demands we live our authentic path. Wildly, if it has to. Aiming the whole heart toward God: Take me, Lord, and receive all my liberty.

What I’m coming to understand is this: that romantic devotion was always searching for a vessel. I just kept channeling it into vessels that couldn’t hold it. And amid the heartbreak and the calamities, the answer was never to close the heart off. It was to collapse — heart open — and let God finally embrace me fully, maybe for the first time.

There’s a little frustration in that, too. A small urge to smack myself for how much of that energy went to waste on the wrong vessels. If I’d only known then what I know now.

But regret isn’t the useful part. Those heartbreaks built something in me — they sharpened me, prepared me. Even the choices I made trying to fit in weren’t wasted; they put me in the right place to meet the people I needed to meet, to hear what I needed to hear, to end up on this path at all.

Maybe I wasn’t ready to receive God fully in fourth grade, or at 13, or even at 34. Maybe the people I loved and the choices I made were only ever meant to give me a glimpse of God’s love — enough to keep me moving toward the real thing.

The point is to recalibrate — to make God my True North, not someone I think about on Sundays or when someone’s sick. That devotion, that creative energy, that life force, was always coming from God. And the invitation now is the same one it always was: to stay open enough to become a vessel myself — for God to pour through, spreading a little more love, peace, and unity into the world.