Deep Cuts
My lifelong relationship with ultimate frisbee and anxiety
It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful place I’ve ever dry-heaved.
The UC Santa Cruz campus unfolds like a postcard that ends at the sea.
Flanked by redwoods, the intramural fields were perched on a plateau that jutted toward the horizon. We were floating above the Pacific, gleaming in the summer light piercing through the morning fog.
If I hadn’t been outside my body, swimming in nausea, I might have been able to appreciate the view.
Instead, as our first game crept closer, dread pulsed inside me like the clank of a roller coaster ascending a track I didn’t want to ride.
My face swung between too hot and too cold.
I needed to pee every fifteen minutes.
Even breathing felt impossible to get right.
I tried to hold it together, unsure if anyone else could tell.
Thankfully, tryouts meant enough chaos that maybe no one would notice.
This was only the second outing of the fledgling ultimate frisbee team I’d started with friends. From the ashes of the aptly named “Anarchy” came our public-transit-themed team: “AC Bandits.” My main contributions so far were cheers, relentless positivity, and panic attacks, though I wasn’t sure anyone knew about these yet.
I’d made it through warm-ups without trouble, but the nausea returned just as it was my turn to speak. We went around the circle introducing ourselves. I barely croaked out my nickname—‘Princess’—before another wave of nausea hit.
This was supposed to be fun.
Now, instead of looking forward to running around with my friends I was scouting which stretch of scenic grass would be most convenient to throw up in.
My worst fear was happening all over again.
One question was stuck on repeat in my head:
What was wrong with me?
I had my first panic attack at age eleven at a middle school dance.
I remember the disorienting terror of waking up outside my body mid-conversation. My voice sounded muted and detached, like someone else was choosing the dialogue. It felt like I was playing a video game of me. The feeling was so alien I briefly wondered if I’d been drugged. I then panicked harder when I realized that, since I’d never tried drugs, I had no idea what that would even feel like.
Then these panic attacks started happening in movie theaters, usually during a particularly tense moment in the film.
First it was the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), then Lady Deathstrike vs. Wolverine in X2 (2003), then the opening battle of Master and Commander (2003). I’d know one was starting when I tasted the familiar cocktail of dread: tunnel vision, shallow breath, racing pulse, and an overwhelming sense of doom.
In the darkness of the theater, my brain didn’t know that the danger wasn’t real. For five or ten hellish minutes I was sure my life was hurtling toward disaster. Yet because it was all internal, my friends sitting next to me had no idea what was happening.
By the end of eighth grade, I still had no concept of what these episodes were or what was causing them, but I prayed they were behind me.
Since I’m convinced that everyone tortures themselves with oddly specific counterfactuals from high school, I’ll share mine first: everything would have been fine if I’d only played volleyball.
I adored volleyball in middle school. My lanky frame gave me reach, my serves were reliable, and my jumpy instincts let me read the ball half a second early. Even without knowing positions or yelling about switches and side-outs like other teams, my eighth-grade squad went undefeated.
That summer I begged my mom to send me to a Cal volleyball camp where I was hilariously out of my depth. On day one a coach asked if I was a DS or a Libero; I stared, wondering if those were volleyball-themed astrological signs. (I also hadn’t brought knee pads.)
I wouldn’t need the knee pads. When I got to high school I learned that Marin Academy had just gotten rid of its men’s volleyball team.
So I pivoted to soccer, my second favorite sport, only to get cut from the JV team my sophomore year. To my fragile fifteen-year-old nervous system, this didn’t feel like a minor setback at a Marin private school—it felt like the town steel mill had closed and my family was suddenly out on the streets.
I was worried about what not having a sport said about me. My school had a PE credit requirement that suddenly felt threatening.
Seeing how crushed I was, my well-meaning advisor suggested I try crew across town at Marin Rowing. My friend Chloe was doing it, ironically because of a volleyball injury. Impatient to fill the void soccer had left behind, I dove right in.
I quickly learned three things. I didn’t enjoy rowing, I wasn’t good at it, and the schedule was as bad as the vibe. We practiced six days a week: after school every day and early Saturday mornings. Practices were far from where I lived. The other boys on the team treated me like an outsider at best and a pariah at worst.
But the real problem was a crossed wire in my brain. Rowing hard for more than 250 meters makes everyone feel like they’re dying, but my young brain actually believed it. When oxygen ran low, my nervous system sent me into fight-or-flight mode.
This is anxiety in miniature: a useful alarm system triggered by the wrong things. Like allergies mistaking pollen for poison, my body treated rowing as a fight for survival.
So not only was I too stringy to move the boat with real force and ostracized by my teammates, but my brain interpreted every erg test and race as mortal peril. I began dreading every practice and regatta.
Like fat clogging an artery, this dread only built up pressure around it. I obsessed over what I ate, how much I slept, and how hydrated I was. Yet trying to control my anxiety only made it worse. Worrying about sleep made me sleepless, and chugging water left me running to the bathroom every few minutes on race day. With anxiety, the castle walls you build for protection only end up imprisoning you.
Hindsight makes it painfully easy to see that I could have quit at any time. Instead, I made my parents drive me to Corte Madera six days a week for two years, stoically resigned to my fate, clinging to misery like a moral obligation. I missed out on other, better sports and time with my real friends, convinced that being a man meant suffering in silence.
One of anxiety’s cruelest tricks is convincing you that motion always equals safety. After getting cut from soccer, I couldn’t bear the silence of not having a sport, so I sprinted toward the first thing that looked like purpose. If I’d waited—if I’d sat in the discomfort of not knowing—I might’ve found a better fit. But patience was a muscle I hadn’t grown yet. Anxiety hates empty space, so I filled it with pain that looked a lot like productivity.
By senior year I’d earned more than enough PE credits to finally quit crew.
I joined my school’s ultimate frisbee club. Pickup games broke out at lunch with whoever showed up—five on five, eleven on eleven. Even my Spanish teacher Glen and music teacher Bob joined in. We had no tactics and no sense of the force—sorry, Luke Skywalker—but it didn’t matter.
At first, ultimate felt like a gift from the gods. I could use my volleyball frame to leap for spectacular catches, and best of all, the anxiety that haunted my rowing years was gone. I was convinced I’d left it behind in those claustrophobic carbon fiber boats.
I was in for a rude awakening when I got to college.
I still remember stepping out of the car at Oberlin for my first fall ultimate tournament. I’d never seen so many frisbees flying through the air in one place. It felt surreal, like an adolescent fantasy come to life. I might as well have arrived at Hogwarts.
The fantasy soured as soon as we started running. Our opener was against Michigan State’s B-team, Burning Couch. We set up in a clunky vertical stack. I got open and the captain threw me the disc.
I dropped it.
Then I dropped the next pass, and the next one.
Within a minute I was breathless and demoralized.
Every time I moved, I overthought and messed up. Easy passes skidded into grass; belly catches bobbled free of my grasp. Suddenly frantic, my mind started backseat-driving my body, hijacking every instinct I’d built in practice. It was a confusing and exhausting day— far from the carefree pickup games I’d fallen in love with in high school.
On the drive back to campus I was sore and silent. Not only did frisbee feel physically hard, it felt like it was mentally impossible for me.
For a while I thought it was just a skill issue. Ultimate demanded more physical intensity and strategic complexity than I had bargained for. As with volleyball, my earnest enthusiasm couldn’t overcome how out of my depth I was. I learned as fast as I could, but the more I knew, the more playing continued to overwhelm me.
Under pressure I felt physically unsafe in my own body. The self-reinforcing loops I dreaded from crew came right back: breathless fear layered over breathless exertion. The harder I pushed, the less oxygen I seemed to get from panic, fatigue, or both. Adrenaline flooded me until I couldn’t focus or calm down. Fun and flow gave way to trembling mistakes that drew criticism from teammates, coaches, and, worst of all, myself.
I became an expert archivist of my failures. I kept a file of every drop, mistimed cut, and errant throw—a lowlight reel proving my mediocrity. My inner voice barked at me not to mess up, then cursed me out when I did. The pressure deepened the anxiety and the anxiety bred more mistakes.
Soon, when captains called lines, I found myself hoping—then praying—they wouldn’t call my name. Not playing meant I couldn’t fail. For most of my freshman year, I got my wish.
Ultimate had seemed like the polar opposite of crew at first: a fun, strategic sport where I liked my teammates. Unlike soccer, I was pretty good at it. Yet to my nervous system it was another thing to anticipate with fear, endure in real time, and replay afterward with shame. Soon tournaments became something to dread, just as regattas had been. Anxiety had poisoned another joy.
No matter how far or fast I ran, I couldn’t escape myself.
After graduating, I took a few years off sports while I worked in restaurants. When I returned to ultimate in 2015, the dread and acidic self-consciousness were waiting for me like smelly cleats. But now there were new symptoms. Where my lungs and heart once sounded the alarm, now it was my stomach. I lost my appetite on tournament mornings and felt nauseous in the huddle before the first pull.
I convinced myself that the problem was conditioning. I’d never been in the right kind of shape in college —now I’d fix that. I ran interval sprints at the park before work, did track workouts with teammates after, and started lifting weights regularly. But as my body’s capacity to work grew, my mind’s capacity to trust it didn’t grow with it. I became physically strong but remained mentally weak.
The one mental skill that was improving was my self-criticism, which was now sharper than ever. Every drop felt like ironclad proof I didn’t belong at this level.
My low point came at the end of my second season with AC Bandits. After a rocky first year, we’d rebuilt the roster to make a run at Regionals. At 27, I was approaching my physical prime. I had even rehabbed a summer hamstring pull in time to be back on the field for Sectionals. I was hoping to finally break through the cloud of self-doubt and become the playmaker my team—and my self-esteem—needed.
That’s when I met the walrus.
In ultimate, ‘bookends’ means forcing a turnover on defense, then scoring—bookending the point with your brilliance. Getting ‘walrused’ is the opposite: you turn it over and then get scored on.
Playing against a better team we needed to beat, I got open on an under-cut, caught the disc, and immediately threw it away. Sprinting back on defense, I caught up to my man, who was five inches shorter than me, only to have him sky me in traffic for the score.
I slunk off the field humiliated, wanting to yell, to cry, to do anything but feel this bad.
I had let my team down. We lost by a few points, crashed out of sectionals, and most of our best players left for more competitive teams. It felt like my athletic dreams had exploded on the launchpad.
I started to wonder if I just wasn’t built for sports. I envied anyone who could just run around and have fun, whose heart didn’t race and whose stomach didn’t do somersaults before every game. I wondered if I should put myself out of my misery and quit. Leaving my friends would be hard, but if I left the sport, maybe the anxiety would finally stop.
Here’s a heavily abridged list of things I’ve been uncomfortably anxious about in my lifetime:
Arriving late, arriving early, things I’ve said, things I didn’t say, the stove; the front door, driving, flying, and taking BART, packing for a trip, getting too drunk, whether friends in fact hate me now, random twinges of pain in my teeth, knees, and back, eating a fiddlehead fern, and accidentally liking an acquaintance’s old Instagram post.
As an anxious person, I can confidently and lovingly say that anxious people will find ways to be anxious about anything. Anxiety is like a sweater that snags on something in every room you enter, unraveling you in the process. The realization is as obvious as it is humbling: if everywhere you go there’s a crisis, you are the crisis.
Even more sobering is recognizing how the very strategies you invent to manage anxiety often keep you stuck in it.
High-performing anxious people can turn their fear into fuel—becoming hyper-productive, organized, and outwardly composed. Yet the more you control your environment, the more you believe that unless you personally manage every detail, disaster will follow. That need for control also makes relaxing or asking for help unthinkable. The result is the illusion of control at the expense of rest—a stalemate where your nervous system believes constant vigilance is the only thing holding the world together.
Anxiety is full of painful ironies, starting with this: your efforts to avoid stress often only create more stress. Until you face the demon head on you’re just re-decorating its various homes.
Frisbee taught me what younger me hadn’t yet understood: the problem wasn’t school dances, movies, soccer, or crew. These were just triggers, awakening the anxiety that lived inside of me, feeding on my confidence like a parasite. Even if I’d able to play volleyball, I would have found a way to be anxious about that, too.
The problem was inside of me all along, and the solution was, too.
I’ve spent a lot of time doing emotional archaeology, sifting through memories, trying to pinpoint when my sports journey first went south. One preseason soccer practice in August 2005 always feels like the place to start.
I showed up at a Marin County track with my soccer cleats in hand, only to be told to keep my running shoes on. We were doing a timed two-mile run, then interval sprints in the summer heat.
Just days earlier, in the twilight of summer break after my freshman year of high school, my dad announced he’d be sleeping at his office as my parents separated.
As I ran those miserable eight laps around the track, I remember feeling physically and mentally awful. I felt the coach’s eyes burning into my sweaty back like the August sun as I lagged behind my friends. Wanting to give up while my teammates kept going only made me feel weaker—like I carried some defect they didn’t. I feared and then knew that I didn’t have what it took to make the team. Under the weight of it all, I wanted to stop and cry. I wanted to tell the coach: “this is all too hard. My parents are splitting up. I can’t do this today.” Instead, I kept running and kept feeling bad.
I have such a clear picture of this day because for years I believed that there was a key moment I could have done differently, a switch I could flip to turn off anxiety for good. I reasoned that if only I’d been better at soccer, quit crew earlier, ran more sprints in college, avoided injuries in my 20s, started therapy before age 30, anything—maybe I could have changed the story.
Only recently have I realized that this line of thinking is unfair and self-defeating. Fixating on the choices of your past self commits the cardinal sin of anxiety management: obsessing over variables you can’t control.
Hanging onto regrets feels soothing, but really it’s just a clever way of outsourcing responsibility. Blaming your current struggles on your past self is no different from blaming them on other people. It feels like letting yourself off the hook, but it tells a fatalistic story where you have no agency.
As Michael Pollan noted in How to Change Your Mind, both depression and anxiety misplace the emphasis in time. Ruminating about the past or stressing about the future undercut the power and agency we all have. The past can’t be changed, and the future is mostly speculation. The present is the only moment we can live and act.
I can’t influence 15-year-old me’s choices, but I can visit that boy now—take him aside, talk to him, grieve with him, and comfort him.
This, at least, is how I started the process of forgiving him, of acknowledging that he did the best he could with what he had.
Life forced the break from ultimate I’d been begging for when COVID hit.
To pass the time, I played enough Spikeball to justify a five-part blog series. When I came back to frisbee in spring 2021, I really thought this time would be different.
I’d been in therapy for five months and doing CrossFit for a year— the perfect physical and mental tune up to finally crack my performance issues.
However, I had a lot of cobwebs to dust off. I hadn’t been on an active roster since 2018, my third year with AC Bandits, a season that ended painfully early with another hamstring pull. After that, I became a practice player on a team called Alchemy. Watching tournaments I had no expectation of playing in let me see them for what they were: adults chasing a plastic disc across various soccer complexes in California— hardly something worth losing sleep over.
After COVID, Alchemy reformed as Mango, and I started writing cheers, dreaming of plays that would warrant them.
Then, one practice, I rolled an ankle, tweaked my back, and took a hard pass to the finger, jamming it into a stiff, painful purple. Limping off the field, I wondered what I was doing this for, what I was so desperate to prove that I’d get this hurt trying to prove it. Now a very injured practice player, I assumed I was going to go out with a whimper, not a bang.
Then Alexis and I got invited to join a friend’s team for a party tournament in Hawaii. I decided this final hurrah was going to be the capstone to my career. To get back in shape, I ran interval sprints at the park down the street. To shake off the rust, I joined East Bay Winter League.
Coming back after eighteen months away felt like rekindling a conversation with an old friend. And then, suddenly, I’d run into my old nemesis.
What felt new was recognizing when my old insecurities tried to intrude—and politely asking them to wait so I could just enjoy the game. It felt like running after an injury and realizing I could trust my legs to carry me. That winter, even as one of the older players on the team at 32, I held my own on the field.
On the bike ride home from every game I tried something new. I talked to myself, praising what I did well and acknowledging what needed work without the name-calling and scathing criticism I’d used for years.
Instead of tearing myself down, I practiced building myself up. I coached myself gently, like a parent talking to a child—which, in a way, is exactly what I was doing. After acknowledging mistakes, I consciously let them go.
I started intentionally cataloging my highlights over the years instead of just my lowlights:
Scoring AC Bandits only point against master’s team SF Bridge Club—a flick to the back of the end zone where only Chowder, my tight-end-built teammate, could catch it.
Skying the most muscular man on my team in practice—and the most intense guy on the other team on the beaches of Santa Monica at Throwback.
Throwing a buttery, game-winning backhand in men’s spring league.
Hearing a high-school kid I’d just scored on say to his friend, ‘Wait, how is that guy so fast?’
Alexis’s MBA got so busy that we had to bow out of the Hawaii tournament, but I wasn’t even disappointed. Preparing for a tournament I never played in took me on the journey I needed to go on without leaving California.
Ultimate was where I met the worst of my anxiety—and, eventually, where I learned to turn it around. The constant torment it caused was what finally made me take it seriously enough to heal.
Success in sports and in mental health is full of principles that seem either painfully obvious or annoyingly counterintuitive until you’ve lived them.
These usually center on the many ways you’re getting in your own way.
It took over a decade to see that I’d been holding frisbee in a death grip. The more seriously I took it, the worse I played. Loosening my hold finally let me play better and have fun again.
This is also very literal advice: to throw a big backhand in frisbee or hit a topspin forehand in pickleball, you need to loosen up. Only by relaxing the little muscles in your hand and wrist can you properly use the big muscles in your core and hips that generate true power and accuracy.
On a philosophical level, this is all about your attitude. My burning desire to be good prevented me from doing so because of what it did to my self-talk. Most of us talk to ourselves in unforgivably mean ways that we would never try with a friend, co-worker, or family member. Softening into compassion and growing my capacity to support, not just criticize, was the one thing I never thought to try and the one thing that I needed more than anything.
Holding on to bad outcomes didn’t help me avoid them; it made me repeat them. I hadn’t understood how much of being good at sports isn’t about grasping at future dreams; it’s about letting go of past mistakes.
Ted Lasso tells a nervous striker to “be a goldfish” on the field. Roger Federer puts it with the finesse of one of his backhands:
“When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world and it is, but when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point and the next point after that with intensity, clarity, and focus.”
The key to peak performance isn’t anger or criticism and it certainly isn’t anxiously hydrating; it’s presence.
There’s no single fix for anxiety, but this much I know: fighting it doesn’t work. The more you muzzle an emotion, the louder it gets. Instead, listen without handing over the microphone. As therapist Andrew Marshall puts it, anxiety can ride in the car, but you shouldn’t let it backseat drive.
The key to living with anxiety isn’t banishing it, but befriending it.
Buddhism calls this inviting Mara to tea, welcoming the demon of fear and doubt instead of pretending he’s not there.
I gave my anxiety a name: Critical Curtis.
This is classic parts work: I’m learning to hear the anxious protector without letting him dominate. Since he will control the conversation if I let him, I’ve had to cultivate other, more nourishing voices to compete with his.
I’ve also learned to set better boundaries.
When I started this blog, I decided that Curtis has to leave the room whenever I sit down to write. If he got his way, I’d never write a word, let alone share it publicly.
When I started CrossFit, it took months to get Curtis to stop fearing rowing machine workouts. Once I could stay embodied under stress, I realized that ironically I’m actually a good rower. I’m much stronger now—at 180 pounds in my thirties—than I ever was at 145 pounds in high school.
When I started playing pickleball, I’d catch Curtis diligently cataloguing my worst shots. I had to take him aside and acknowledge that he wants me to play well, but ask him to only share his notes after the game.
The biggest win is also the biggest irony.
After two decades and thousands of words tracing this journey, my anxiety hasn’t gone anywhere.
It’s still here. He’s still here.
The real victory is realizing I never had to defeat him. We just had to learn to play on the same team.
Now Curtis reminds me to stretch and stay hydrated while I remind him to breathe and have fun. He gets to care and I get to play.
When I’m staring at a barbell I’m not sure I can lift or facing game point in pickleball, I tell myself what I wish I could’ve told that young man kicking a soccer ball, pulling an oar, or trying to catch a frisbee.
“Deep breaths, one point at a time, I love you, you’ve got this. No matter what happens, you’ll be okay.”
Relax, release, and follow through.
Your vivid description of the UCSC campus, juxtaposed with the intense physical manifestations of anxiety, was incredibly powerful. It truely highlights your consistent narrative skill to so acutely capture the paradox of profound internal struggle amidst external splendor, a thematic resonance I've come to appreciate in your writing.
I am floored by your radical vulnerability and awed by your insight. What a courageous and productive inquiry into a lifetime of challenges most of us would jealously guard from the public eye. Thank you for inspiring all of us to examine ourselves with such candor.