I had therapy this week, and my therapist asked me a question I haven’t been able to put down since. What was I afraid would happen if I stopped calling myself a professional pickleball player?

I sat there for a while, because the honest answer was embarrassing. People might care less. The story might get smaller. The ostomy might lose some of its power if it wasn’t attached to a comeback.

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That last one is the one I’ve been avoiding. The ostomy was a proof point. Look what I can still do, even with this. As long as I was playing pro pickleball, the bag made me more impressive. If I stop playing, it’s just a bag. And I used that proof point on myself more than on anyone else. Turning the surgery into a comeback meant I never had to grieve what it took from me. Why would I grieve something that was giving me an identity?

Then two days ago, a PSA I filmed for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation went live. We shot it back in January. In it, I’m Rob the pro pickleball player, proof that you can have Crohn’s and an ostomy and still do all the things you want to do. Watching it launch this week, I realized it’s another piece of me holding onto that story. Because that’s the story people like. You can have a bag and still compete. You can be sick and still win.

And the story is true. That’s what makes this hard. I can still play. I can golf, train, travel, do almost everything I could do before, and most of it with less pain than I’ve had in years. The surgery didn’t end my pickleball career. If anything, it made one possible again. For the first time in a long time, I could actually train and practice without my body punishing me for it. I could not only get back to where I was, but get better than I was.

So the question was never whether I can. The question is what it would cost and what it would be for. When I’m honest, the answer to “what for” is mostly to show people I still can. I’m still one of the best players in the world. I know that. Most people watching from the outside have decided I’m not. That gap, between what I know I can do and what people think I can do, frustrates me more than anything else in this. I can’t control what they think. I know that too. I was still hoping for one more run at showing them.

But I know that thinking. One more tournament. One more project. One more yes. It’s run my life for years and it’s never satisfied. I could keep going, and that’s the problem. I can keep going when I shouldn’t.

It’s been seven months since my last pro tournament in India. People ask me all the time if I’m going to keep playing, and I never have a clean answer. That bothers me more than I’d like, because pro pickleball player is the best answer I’ve ever had when someone asks what I do. It came with a ranking, sponsors, a schedule. Now my answer is long. I live in George, South Africa. I’m married. I have Crohn’s and a permanent ostomy. I’m building a hydration company, I write a weekly newsletter, and I’m rebuilding my health and my income at 41. All of it is true and I chose all of it. It just takes three minutes to explain instead of three seconds.

The truth is I don’t miss the answer itself. I miss the certainty and credibility that came with it. Nobody questioned my ability when that was the introduction. Which means the whole thing was built on what other people thought of me, and I have to get okay with not caring about that.

I’ve written before about growing up feeling like nothing I did would ever be enough. That feeling didn’t go away when I turned pro, and it didn’t go away when I won titles. The wins never gave me much, honestly. But the label did. When I said pro pickleball player, I didn’t have to prove anything else. I’ve been chasing the feeling of being enough my whole life, and that label helped me feel closer to it.

I won’t pretend money isn’t part of this either. During the same season as the surgery and recovery, my biggest sponsorship ended. So I’m working through this while rebuilding income in a new country, knowing sponsors mostly pay for who’s playing and who’s winning. Some nights I think the smart move is to keep acting like a full-time touring pro because that’s what sells. But my audience has grown more since I stopped touring than it ever did while I was on tour, and most of the people who follow me now don’t care whether I play pickleball at all. They’re sick, or they have a bag, or someone they love does. They know what it’s like when your body changes the plan. I believe the right brand will see the value in that. Believing it doesn’t pay anything yet.

I’m still playing, to be clear. Later this year I’m going to Tanzania for a tournament, and I’ll play others when they make sense for my health, my family, and my income instead of costing all three. That’s not retirement. But it’s not the same life either.

Because when I picture what a real return would look like, I don’t want it. Three tournaments in three cities on back-to-back weekends. Being in certain places at certain times all year long. Giving up the open calendar I finally have. Maybe down the road I pick one month and play that month. But the year-round grind isn’t a life I’m willing to trade this one for. Getting to the top of a sport is hard to do. Walking away while you still feel like you can compete at the top is even harder. And still, I have no doubt it’s the right thing for me. It’s just hard.

The thing that’s helping is golf, weirdly. I live on a golf course now, so less than a month ago I started hitting balls at the driving range, and I had my second lesson this week. Sports have always come naturally to me, so I’m picking it up faster than most. But golf is hard, and I’m nowhere near good yet. I like that. Being new at something, seeing how far there is to go, wanting badly to get better. I hate being bad at something I feel like I should be good at. That drives me more than almost anything, and I’d forgotten the feeling. I got to become one of the best in the world at a sport millions of people play. That happened and it doesn’t change. Now I want to find out if I can do it again in business with Flexara, where the upside is bigger, the toll on my body is smaller, and I get to start at the bottom of something again.

That trade scares me. The old life came with clear income. Sponsorships, tournament earnings, appearance fees, a number I could count on. Now I’m in charge of my own destiny, which sounds good until you’re the one funding inventory and waiting out the months it takes a business to work. The real uncertainty is whether I can pull it off. Nothing is forcing this. My body could handle more. My game is still there. I’m choosing this while the door is still open, and that’s exactly what makes it hard.

I’m not at peace with it yet. The more I talk about it and write about it, the more okay I get, and this writing is part of that. I know it’s the right decision. I still want one more run. I’m learning to live with wanting it and not chasing it.

-rn

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I was lying on my side in a hotel room when it hit me.

Tender lump forming on my groin. Phone in my hand. Just reading. Trying to understand what had actually happened to my body a few hours earlier when a routine drain removal turned into a severed artery and an emergency vascular procedure.

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The word I kept seeing was catastrophic.

And I felt something unfamiliar. Because I realized I was terrified. Genuinely, deeply terrified. And the terrified feeling wasn’t about the procedure itself or the artery or the doctor’s face going solemn in a way that doctor’s faces don’t usually go. It was about how close it was. How close it was and how much I didn’t want it to go that way.

That was new. I hadn’t felt that in a while.

For a long time, if you had asked me honestly how I felt about dying, I wouldn’t have had a strong answer either way. I wasn’t actively hoping I’d die. It’s just that years of chronic pain changes your relationship with being alive in ways that are hard to explain until you’re not stuck in the thick of it.

I’m a professional pickleball player. My job requires me to travel 25 to 30 weeks a year and then actually perform when I get there. On court. Competing. While managing four pieces of gauze stuffed between my cheeks every day, three to four changes a day, every hard airport seat making everything worse, every long line adding to the pain, every flight a countdown.

And then a year ago I got my ostomy on top of all of that. Supplies that have to come with me everywhere. Draining an ostomy bag in an airplane lavatory on your knees by yourself, cramped, trying to manage something that most people don’t even know exists, while also preparing to compete professionally. Nobody around you knows what’s happening. You figure it out alone because you have to.

You keep going because that’s the job and that’s the life. You adapt so completely you forget you’re adapting and that suffering is normal. And somewhere in all of it you slowly lose the attachment to being alive.

That was just where I was.

I’ve been let down a lot over the last four years trying to fix this.

The seton drains in 2022. Biologics. The loop colostomy a year ago, which gave me the most hopeful walk I’d had in years. Half a mile from a condo to the beach, first time I’d done it without fistula pain grinding through every step. That walk felt like things were going to be different. And then a few months later the pain came back and it wasn’t the fix I had hoped it would be.

So I went into the proctectomy cautious. Tempered. I had adapted so completely to the pain that I didn’t even fully know anymore how bad it actually was. It had just become my normal.

Somewhere in those four years I stopped being that attached to being here anymore.

And then I was lying in that hotel room reading the word catastrophic on my phone.

And I was terrified.

Not in the moment of the procedure. I didn’t understand what was happening in the room. I was face down on the table, I felt a burning sensation, the room shifted, the doctor’s face changed, my mom gave consent in the waiting room. I got through it without fully grasping what it meant.

The grasping came later. Alone. In the quiet of a hotel room with a lump on my groin that hadn’t been there that morning.

And what the terror told me was that I had more hope than I knew I had. That somewhere underneath the four years of letting go, underneath the adapted expectations and the failed treatments, I still wanted to see what was on the other side of this surgery.

That shook me. That I didn’t know that about myself until a fifteen minute drain removal almost went completely wrong.

A few days prior I went outside for the first time in two weeks. Airbnb ten minutes from Mayo, just me. Cool air on my face. Sun. Just walking.

And the grip had loosened. That deep fistula pain that had been my normal for so long I forgot it wasn’t everyone’s normal. It was different. Quieter.

I’ve had a walk like this before. After the colostomy, half a mile to the beach, I thought that walk meant something definitive. It did for a while. Then it didn’t.

So I’m not calling this one anything definitive either. I’m cautiously optimistic in the way that someone gets cautiously optimistic after being wrong enough times. But I’m also aware now, in a way I wasn’t before the hotel room moment, that I actually want this to work. That I have things I’m moving toward. A partner. A home that’s actually mine somewhere. Friendships with more depth than a transient life allows. My body doing what it used to do on a pickleball court. The people going through their own version of this who need someone to show them it doesn’t have to stay this way forever.

It brings me to tears honestly, thinking about how bad my normal actually was. That I lived in that for four years and adapted so completely I forgot what I was adapting from. And now, even in recovery, even still on pain meds, I can already feel the difference.

Over the last four years I wouldn’t have cared if I died. Not really.

A walk, a hotel room, a phone screen and the word catastrophic told me that wasn’t true anymore.

That’s the most hopeful thing that’s happened to me in a long time.

-rn

Next post: Another four weeks of being still, doctor’s orders. Learning what I can control and what I can’t.

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