The Hard Pivot
- Jess
- 21 hours ago
- 6 min read
I don't have cookies. But there is a Ted Lasso clip at the very bottom. Also, next one will be lighter. That's the goal anyway.
My partner was supposed to trip me.
It was a simple enough move we were drilling that afternoon. Stand behind your partner, put the side of your right foot against the heel of theirs, lock down hard on the same side arm as the foot you’re tripping, and then pivot hard toward the mat as you pull them back and over your own foot. But my partner got it mixed up with a different one. Instead of placing her foot behind mine, she wrapped her leg around my ankle, effectively locking it in place, before yanking me back and around toward the mat.
I instantly knew I was screwed as I realized what she’d done, but it was too late, as I felt my torso yanked in the opposite direction and towards the mat. A shooting pain ripped through my knee as my leg stayed locked in place. I lay crumpled on the ground as I held my knee, swearing and crying and not yet knowing that my MCL, a ligament on the inside of the knee, had been sprained. All things considered, it was good news as far as injuries went. It could have been considerably worse. At least it wasn’t my ACL and nothing was torn. All the same, it was my senior year and the injury ended up pausing my practice for several weeks as I hobbled around on crutches and watched from the sidelines.
I’ve thought about that a lot recently. Hitting the mat doesn’t feel good under normal circumstances, but to be able to properly pivot, whether by choice or not, you have to be able to move, or else it is much, much worse.
During lock down, there was a TikTok of some young twenty-year-old girl talking about how sometimes you just had to make a hard pivot. Just go in a completely different direction in your life. Pick up and move to a different city, find a new group of friends, or suddenly change a job if one or all of those things are no longer working for you. She wasn’t the first one to come up with the name, but she was the first person I’d heard use it. I’d done hard pivots before; I just didn’t have a name for it before then. For the most part, I agreed with her then and I still do now, but with a slightly different perspective than before.
Hard pivots are easy when you’re younger. It’s a bit of a different story when you’ve got kids and a mortgage and a lot more responsibilities. I think the mentality doesn’t necessarily change (easier said than done…I'll get to that later below), but maybe the changes that need to happen are a lot slower and harder. I think what has also changed, at least for me, is when I was younger, I got to choose when I pivoted in a new direction. It’s a bit more complicated now. Lately, the pivots I’m making seem to be equal parts choice and response to things I don’t have control over. Shit happens. Life happens. Sometimes things are my own fault–and I do my best to own that when it happens, and sometimes I walk in after shit has hit the fan and stand there in horror.
I have a love/hate relationship with the stupid adage that the only thing I can control is how I want to respond to those challenges. Granted, I’m starting to think people like to say that because I think having control of our lives plays a role in life satisfaction, and at the end of the day, when you strip everything away, how you respond to something really is the last and only thing we’re left with that we can control.
I think we’ve all watched someone fight like hell against whatever they’ve been hit with by life, while others embrace and roll with it the best they can. Sometimes people break from it, while others seem to come out the other side still standing. There’s a lot of talk in today's culture about resilience and what it means. I’m not a believer that everything happens for a reason. I think sometimes awful things happen because that’s life. And I think resilience is bending without breaking when those harder times hit. That doesn’t mean I won’t get bruised, sprained, knocked out of alignment, or hurt. But I don't want to break.
Overall, what I’ve learned about being resilient is that it is not gritting my teeth and pushing onward, though there are definitely times for that too. Being resilient seems to be a lot of things, including one concept that for some reason makes me want to brat out and say “no” to: radical acceptance. My therapist told me about it. The nutshell version: accept the reality of the situation, no matter what it is, in the here and now. People seem to misunderstand and think that means giving up, accepting the situation as permanent, or approving of what is happening. That’s not it. Things can always change and likely will. It can still be wrong, unjust, and unfair. But to radically accept something is to look at a situation and say, “Yes. Right now, at this moment, this is my reality and it really hurts.” It is what it is. Feeling and acknowledging the hurt can stop pain from becoming prolonged suffering. The best way I've heard to help view radical acceptance is to view it more as a mindfulness/meditation practice than a long-term strategy.
I’ve also seen what happens when my friends have tried to ignore their own pain. They’d deny and fight that something awful happened by putting on a smile anyway. It's hard watching when you know they are still deeply hurting underneath because the pain doesn't go away when you fight it. It just gets drawn out.
I think what I hear less about than the stupid radical acceptance concept is flexible thinking—though the two are tied together, I’m sure. Everyone has goals and dreams they have for their life, myself included, and it really freaking sucks when it all goes up in smoke. It hurts when what I thought life was going one direction ends up splitting in different directions, and either path you take absolutely sucks. Like, here: the choices are either a briar patch or a raging river. Have fun, and no, there isn’t a third option. You have to pick.
But I also know the path continues after the briar patch or river; I just can't see past them right now. The unknown is scary. Hard paths are overwhelming, and tossing your pack down the side of the mountain in a fit of rage, while likely satisfying in the moment, is ultimately a bad idea.
But I keep reminding myself that I have control over how I can approach something. Once I’m done crossing the river, I get to choose if I want to be curious or afraid. I think about the wave illusion I saw in Vegas the last time I was there. I wrote about it a while ago, but it’s been on my mind lately. A giant wall of water, threatening to crash down—the future threatening the present, but not here yet. And even if it does come crashing down, I think I’d rather see it coming and brace for it than pretend it’s not there at all (that never ends well).
But life currently feels like a really shitty “Choose Your Own Adventure.” I’m trying really hard to pivot in a new direction without mentally locking up, and right now that looks like letting the grief wash over me with what I thought my life was going to look like—but it’s also letting the pain subside and then creating new dreams of what it might be instead. I can make room for both. It still hurts like it did a month ago, but grief isn’t linear or constant. I know it’s going to take a while, but I’m also noticing that when the pain does hit me, it’s not lingering as long or feeling as sharp as it did before. Barely. But I’ll take it. And I think that’s part of being flexible with my own thinking.
As for resilience, I try to keep adding different things that can help, and the majority of the time they do. Like downward comparison, forcing myself to list what I’m grateful for, reminding myself this is a storm and those don’t last forever, or a dozen other things I’ve learned to do and try to remember to practice. I’m glad I have them.
Oh, and here’s a Ted Talk where a resilience researcher shared her own thoughts on the subject:
And Ted Lasso, because it’s my comfort show and I love this perspective so, so much:
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