Ability vs Disability

As anyone who follows my blog will know, as I recovered first from my knee replacement surgery and then from my back operation – which was a major – my primary aim has always been to get back to bowls.

I feel lucky to be able to now play bowls again and I was able to start at the beginning of this season. When you are a member of a bowling club – especially so for our club – you can often have free membership for the first year as long as you agree to play in interclub games. I did not do my first season in full because of the pain issues generated by my back. So, I paid my subs and came back to play this year in September.

When I knew I was returning in September, I booked in to attend a coaching session with the view to improving my game on my return. I’m afraid though, that it did exactly the opposite. What I found was that I had the coach giving me advice, then some of the older more experienced players and a myriad of other well-meaning fellow bowlers. The result of all this kindly advice was that I ended up with so much information and so many different ways of doing all things bowls, that I could not process it all. I would get up on the mat when it was my turn and had all these voices in my head and I was trying to listen to them all. In the end, it through me so much that my game was horrendous. After several weeks of this, I made a decision to go back to trusting myself and doing things how they came naturally for me. It worked a treat. I feel that I have got my mojo back and am bowling – mostly – better than I have in a long time. I am more focussed and getting better results.

So, when we were advised that there were some tournaments coming up and to put our names on the board, if we were interested. So, I did exactly that. I put my name up on the list and a little later my friend came up to me and said, ‘I see you put your name up for …….’ and I nodded. She also said that she noticed Margaret had done too. She then went on to say that she felt that we both needed a bit more time to build our skills before we went to playing these particular games. I asked what timeframe we were talking and she said not till next season or perhaps even the one after that.

I was a bit taken aback by this and voiced my concern that if I left it too long, then I would perhaps have advanced with my condition and maybe not be able to play. She responded with a comment like ‘well, any of us could have something happen where we couldn’t play anymore’. To which I responded that I was more likely to have an issue and therefore felt I needed to go for things as much as possible rather than waiting and maybe never being able to do things.

I know she was trying to be kind, but saying things like ‘well it could happen to any of us’ or words to that effect, feels like she is minimizing my experience. That is my very real concern that I could quite possibly not be able to play these next level games due to progression.

So, I feel I must give it some more thought and see what I feel that I should do.

Here’s a podcast with a few more thoughts…