People hear my story, the lupus diagnosis, the chemo, the highs and lows of softball, and they reach for the same word every time: resilient.

They say it like it’s something I was born with. Like it’s a cape I put on one day and never had to think about again.

But resilience is one of the most misunderstood things we celebrate.

People see what I’ve overcome and assume it comes naturally to me. They see where I am now and miss what it cost to get here.

But resilience is hard.

There are days I don’t want to be resilient. Days when quitting would be easier. Days when I wish things came without the fight.

Resilience isn't a trait you're handed.

It's a choice you make every day, sometimes every hour, to keep going anyway.

I grew up very Type A.

That’s part of why I fell in love with pitching. I liked controlling the pace of the game. I liked that every pitch started in my hand. In a world that often felt unpredictable, the circle gave me something solid to hold onto.

Softball has carried me through a lot of change. The game has asked me to adjust, compete, and keep trusting myself. But pitching has always been the part that made the most sense to me because it gave me somewhere to focus.

Over time, the circle became more than a position. It became the place where I could slow down, breathe, and feel steady when life outside of it felt uncertain.

But some of the most formative parts of my journey were happening away from the field.

When my health challenges began showing up in high school, I spent a lot of time around doctors, nurses, hospitals, and treatment plans. At an age when I was still trying to understand myself as an athlete, I was also learning what it felt like to be cared for in moments I could not control.

The nurses who cared for me weren’t just treating my illness. They were providing comfort, reassurance, and stability when I needed it most.

Watching them changed me.

It gave me a different understanding of strength. On the field, I was learning how to compete. In those hospital rooms, I was learning how much it matters to make people feel seen, supported, and safe.

Long before I knew exactly what I wanted to do professionally, I knew I wanted to impact people the way they impacted me.

What I’ve Faced

For a long time, I thought the hardest part would be the diagnosis, the treatment, or the physical toll of going through it all while still trying to compete.

And those things have been hard.

But one of the hardest things I’ve had to navigate is the part people do not always see: the expectation to make hard things look easy.

I’ve been in situations that were genuinely a big deal and watched the reaction around me shrink because I had already survived something “bigger.”

The stronger you appear, the less support people think you need.

And even when people do care, I have had to fight the instinct to manage how much of the weight they see. This past fall, when I told my team I was doing chemo again, the entire locker room broke down. My teammates were crying, and I was the one going around saying, “Guys, it’s fine. It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”

Part of me meant it.

Part of me was protecting everyone else.

That is where the pressure comes in. When you become the de facto spokesperson for overcoming adversity, there is pressure to make it look easier than it is. To be unbothered. To make everyone else feel okay by pretending you are.

Nobody told me I had to do that.

But when people look at your story for strength, you start to feel responsible for giving it to them. There are little girls watching. There are people looking for hope. And I feel the weight of that too.

That’s the part I’m still working through. That’s what people most often misunderstand about resilience. It’s not that the hard things stop being hard. It’s that you get very good at making them look that way.

How I’ve Navigated It

I’m still learning that strength does not mean carrying everything by myself.

Over the last four or five years, I’ve had to learn how to let go and realize that letting go is not the same thing as giving up.

For a long time, I thought strength meant holding everything together. Controlling what I could. Keeping myself steady no matter what.

But I could not get through any of this alone.

I had to learn how to trust my teammates, lean on my coaches, and accept the support being offered to me. I had to learn what it really means to be a team player, not just on the field, but in life.

My faith has been a big part of that. For me, faith means doing everything I can to prepare for the next pitch, the next treatment, or the next challenge, then releasing the outcome. Not because I stop fighting. But, because I stop trying to control what I can’t.

Outside of softball, I live in my relationships.

I’m the person who packs stationery and stamps for every road trip because I believe in writing actual letters to the people I love. I schedule intentional one-on-one time. I spend time at the farmers' market with my friends. I am present.

That instinct to care is part of who I am. It is the same instinct that drew me toward nursing: the desire to show up, to care well, and to make people feel less alone when they are vulnerable.

People showed up for me when I needed them most.

I want to spend my life doing that for others.

What I Carry Forward

When I think about the advice I’d give my younger self, it comes down to this:

Don’t accept “no” as the final answer.

Don’t be afraid of the challenge in front of you.

And, don’t confuse strength with doing everything alone.

You are capable of more than you realize, but you do not have to prove it by yourself.

Maybe that’s why the pitching circle still means so much to me. When I step into it, everything slows down. The noise disappears. The distractions fade. For a few moments, it’s just me, the game, and the opportunity in front of me.

It’s still the one place where I can simply be.

Beyond Her Story

Maya’s story reveals a powerful duality many high-achieving women in sports know well: the sanctuary found in performance and the silent burden of being perceived as invulnerable.

In the circle, Maya describes a place where the crowd fades, the noise quiets, and time seems to slow. What she experiences is closely aligned with what psychologists call flow: a state of deep focus and absorption where an athlete becomes fully present in the task at hand, often accompanied by a loss of self-consciousness and an altered sense of time (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Research on elite athletes suggests that flow often emerges when the challenge of the moment meets an athlete’s level of skill, creating what many describe as an optimal experience (Swann et al., 2012).

For Maya, that concept is not abstract. The circle is more than a place of competition. It is a sanctuary. A pause. A rare space where her fast-moving thoughts can settle and the next pitch becomes the only thing in front of her.

But her story also reveals another reality: peace in one space does not erase pressure in another. That pressure is what we might call the resilience paradox. Maya has learned that when people see you as “good at being resilient,” they can start to minimize the weight of what you are carrying. The hard things do not always look hard from the outside, especially when someone has become practiced at making them look manageable.

Research on the social ecology of resilience challenges the idea that resilience is simply an individual character trait. Ungar (2011) argues that resilience is shaped by context, relationships, resources, and the support systems surrounding a person. In that sense, resilience is not just about how much someone can endure. It is also about whether the people around them help carry the weight.

That is the deeper insight Maya’s story offers.

Strength should not make support disappear. Resilience should not make struggle invisible. And the women who carry their stories well should not have to carry them alone.

Maya reminds us that resilience is not a superpower. It is an everyday conscious choice, one made easier when community, care, and support are present. For the next generation of women athletes and leaders, the charge is twofold: find their own circle of peace, and build support systems that remember to ask if the load is heavy, even when someone carries it well.

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Sources

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Swann, C., Keegan, R. J., Piggott, D., & Crust, L. (2012). A systematic review of the experience, occurrence, and controllability of flow states in elite sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 13(6), 807–819. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2012.05.006

Ungar, M. (2011). The social ecology of resilience: Addressing contextual and cultural ambiguity of a nascent construct. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.2010.01067.x

About the Series

Through Her Eyes is a storytelling platform dedicated to giving a first-person voice to women in sports across Middle Tennessee. Each story is developed through conversation and shaped into a first-person narrative that reflects the lived experiences of athletes, coaches, and leaders. The series goes beyond traditional profiles to explore how women navigate identity, opportunity, and value within systems that do not always provide equal visibility, support, or recognition. Through Her Eyes is committed to reflecting on the broader landscape of women in sports. By centering perspective and lived experience, this platform creates a deeper understanding of what it means to move through the game as a woman today, through her eyes.

About the Author

Dr. Carolyn Adkerson is a researcher and founder of 227 Advantage, a strategic consulting firm focused on building structure, developing strategy, and creating scalable growth for entrepreneurs, athletes, and organizations. Her work supports clients in translating vision into clear positioning, partnerships, and opportunities. Her research and practice sit at the intersection of sports, identity, and access, with a focus on how women navigate and experience the systems that shape the evolving sports landscape.