In many ways, this blog is a comeback of sorts for me. In college, my friends and I took a trip to Italy and France together, and took turns blogging about each day’s sights (and sites). Our main goal was to keep our parents informed about our experiences without having to keep constantly in touch. This blog has much the same intention, especially while I travel, now with my partner; we won’t be able to talk to our parents as much as we usually do throughout the week(s) we’re away, but want to keep them abreast of our happenings (with a slight delay in posting only after we’ve left a location – safety first, as they say!). So writing about travel won’t be exactly new to me, but it has been a decade or so since my last attempt.

Additionally, I miss being able to write. Not that I literally can’t write, obviously – I’m doing so now – but I miss the ease with which words used to flow from my metaphorical pen. I write extensively twice a year for work, and I’ve found in the last few years that the words are harder and harder to conjure. The siren call of generative AI, to help me put my words into coherent thoughts for the consumption of others, becomes stronger each time. I can feel my ability to write, once a point of personal pride, slipping away. Hopefully writing with some frequency will help me have words more readily available when I need them. Like training anything, you use it or lose it.

For the last month or so, I returned to rowing, the sport that gave me opportunities I never could have imagined as the awkward eighth grader that first entered the boathouse with hopes of someday having a sport I could be good at. Since COVID, I’ve been almost entirely lifting weights, so there was a hard adjustment to cardio. Luckily, I was practicing for Masters racing, which is half the distance I was accustomed to for most of my career. This made for an easier shift from the power-focused training I’ve been working on for the last six years. Much in the same way you never forget how to ride a bike, you never forget how to take a rowing stroke. Despite the changes in my body over the last six years, the stroke felt natural, like I had last picked up an oar only yesterday. Unfortunately, I also quickly remembered all my old injuries. My hand still goes numb partway into practice; my trap still tenses up and causes tightness around my shoulder blade and into my neck; my ribs still start to shift around; and of course, my back still starts to complain after each session. There’s almost something comforting about knowing exactly what I’ll feel in my body during and after every practice. They may not be exactly positive feelings, but it makes me feel as though I never really left.

Rowing still builds bonds unlike any other sport I’ve known. In the short month I rowed with this group of women, I’ve made several new friends. I’ve proved to myself I haven’t lost the ability do physically hard things. We raced together, earning silver. As it turns out, rowing is still hard.

But things are different. I have a lot more opinions about how the boat should feel, how practice should run, what’s an appropriate amount of work for my body. More than that, I’m much more willing now to voice my opinions. Rowing in high school, in college, and in graduate school was about synchronicity, allowing yourself to be subsumed into the needs of the team over the needs of the individual. It was about embracing that loss of individuality, yearning even for the flow state that came with giving into the team’s goals and becoming part of something bigger than yourself.

Now, it’s about autonomy.

So, what is a comeback, exactly? Things can never return to the way they once were; they never should. But maybe I can select the things I things I loved about my life pre-COVID, and apply them to the life I live, the life I love, now. I can return to maintaining strong bonds with the people with whom I surround myself, this time without the automatic infrastructure of childhood forcing you to keep contact. I can return to writing, not academically, but conversationally, still working to be better than I was yesterday. It may take time to became as good at writing as I used to be, but I’ve been there before, and I can become better than I was. Maybe I’ll keep rowing, not because of the inertia that makes it easier to do the hard thing than to quit it, or for my own pride, but because I genuinely enjoy it again. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

I am certain of one thing. Whatever this is, let’s not call it a comeback.