Growth could not feel less like a victory parade.
It mostly feels like turning the pages of a flipbook - one awkward frame at a time.
Pause on any single page, and it looks incomplete. A rough draft. A mess.
But when you keep turning them - page by page, day by day - you start to see it.
The arc. The motion. The point of it all.
The terrifying part is, of course, that when you’re in it, all anyone sees is the page you’re on.
Spring break for the kids this week meant taking my shirt off - in public, in March - to reveal a torso not quite yet ready for summer.
And all I wanted to yell, at a mountainside full of Icelandic strangers, was:
“I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF MY FLIPBOOK.”
Because I am.
We all are.
So this week’s piece is about the ones who keep showing up while the pages are still messy and incomplete.
The ones who stand in the room - mid-process, mid-humiliation - and don’t flinch.
Don’t disappear.
The ones who keep sketching their frames.
In your corner,
THE LEGEND
On March 16, 2018, the University of Virginia entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 overall seed - armed with a 31–2 record, the nation’s most suffocating defense, and the methodical genius of HC Tony Bennett’s pack-line system.
They were disciplined, deliberate, and dominant.
And then they lost. By twenty points. To UMBC.
A 16-seed had never beaten a 1-seed in the men’s tournament. And now Virginia stood alone in the wrong kind of history.
It was more unraveling than upset. The type that lives forever in meme culture, in whispered jokes across sports bars and broadcast booths. For 135 games, the math said it couldn’t happen.
And then it did.
THE MOMENT
The locker room afterward was a mausoleum. Kyle Guy sat in silence, a towel pulled over his head like a shroud.
"It felt like we were drowning," he would later say - not from the loss itself, but from the sudden collapse of everything they believed themselves to be.
De’Andre Hunter, sidelined with a broken wrist, could only watch from the bench as history caved in. And Tony Bennett - the system’s architect - stood amid the rubble.
“We got thoroughly outplayed,” he said that night, the words delivered with his trademark composure but weighted with devastation.
Outside, the world moved on. Inside, they carried something heavy and invisible.
A choice lingered in the wreckage: leave, hide, start over. But they didn’t.
They returned. Every single one of them who could - came back. Not to prove something. To face something.
THE WORDS
After the UMBC loss, Coach Tony Bennett began framing the season with a quote that stuck.
“If you learn to use it right, the adversity, it will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn’t have gone any other way.”
It wasn’t a slogan - it was a compass.
His wife had sent him a TED Talk that used those words, and he made it part of the team’s foundation that fall. Not as a fix. As a philosophy.
Ty Jerome saved every tweet, every insult.
A folder on his phone labeled simply: “Remember.”
Kyle Guy openly grappled with anxiety in the aftermath. As he later explained it, facing basketball again meant confronting it head-on:
“If you shy away, that’s when anxiety will come and haunt you. I won’t shy away. Being secure in myself, my faith, my family - I’m good.”
Bennett showed the team TED Talks on vulnerability instead of game tape.
What started in the film room showed up in timeouts - where Bennett coached with calm, not command.
Where the system was trusted, but humanity led.
They studied not just what had happened - but what it meant.
The pain became part of the curriculum.
Not avoided.
Embraced.
THE TRUTH
They weren’t chasing revenge. They were chasing wholeness.
The 2018–19 Cavaliers didn’t play like a team erasing a memory. They played like a team using it.
The defense was still elite. The offense, sharper.
They entered the tournament 29-3 - but no one talked about their record.
Everyone talked about UMBC.
In the first round, they trailed Gardner-Webb by 14 points. The ghosts stirred. But they didn’t panic.
They tightened their defense, trusted their system, and erased the deficit - not with fire, but with belief.
Against Purdue, they needed a miracle - a Diakite buzzer-beater to force OT.
Against Auburn, Kyle Guy needed to hit three free throws with everything on the line.
And in the national championship, it was De’Andre Hunter - the one who couldn’t help a year before - who tied the game with a corner three.
They didn’t run from the same moments that broke them. They stood in them. And won.
THE ECHO
Their redemption was mathematical - 85 - 77 over Texas Tech in overtime - but the emotion transcended sport.
In a culture obsessed with redemption arcs but allergic to the actual process of redemption, Virginia didn’t sanitize their story - they sat in it.
In the age of instant takes and TikTok ridicule, they stayed visible. And still came back.
Bennett refused to call it redemption.
“This is a resilience story,” he said.
And it was. But it was also something rarer: a story that didn’t deny the pain, didn’t pretend it made the joy sweeter - but showed that the pain was the point.
That growth doesn’t require erasure. Only return.
THE LESSON
Virginia’s journey is a map - not just for athletes, but for anyone who has ever failed in front of people and wondered if they could stand up again.
They didn’t win because they forgot what happened in 2018. They won because they remembered.
Because they said: We will not let this define us by hiding from it. We’ll define it by going back through it.
In a world chasing quick fixes and perfect arcs, Virginia showed us something slower and truer:
That healing is not always triumphant - but it is possible. That sometimes the only way forward is through.
And that if you’re willing to return to the place that hurt you - not to change what happened, but to change what it means - you might just find a version of victory that didn’t erase the past, but made peace with it.
Sometimes, you have to go underwater to remember how to breathe.
The Deep Dive:
In a culture obsessed with comebacks, we've forgotten how to sit with failure.
Our narratives demand the quick pivot, the elegant rebrand, the triumphant return. We celebrate the fall and rise, but rarely examine the messy middle - that long, uncomfortable stretch where real transformation happens, far from applause.
There’s a scene in The Social Network that captures this tension with unusual clarity.
Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) - Facebook co-founder - discovers his shares have been diluted to 0.03%. He storms into the sleek California office, confronts Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) with barely contained fury, and smashes his friend's laptop before being escorted out by security.
It’s a public unraveling, broadcast for all to see - the kind of humiliation our instincts tell us to hide from view.
In most narratives, this would be followed by a disappearance, then a triumphant return. Eduardo would vanish, reinvent himself, then emerge with a better company, a shinier success.
That’s the algorithm we’ve come to expect.
But part of what makes Fincher’s film so disruptive is what comes next.
We cut to Eduardo in a deposition room - spine straight, suit pressed, composed. His humiliation is still fresh, still public. Yet there he sits, not with a revenge monologue (which Aaron Sorkin surely could have written), but with a simple declaration:
“I was your only friend.”
Eduardo doesn’t hide from his pain. He doesn’t transform it into something marketable. He simply remains present with it.
This is what sociologist Erving Goffman might call the rarest social stance: refusing impression management in moments when it would be most justified.
Goffman’s work analyzed how humans constantly curate versions of themselves that will be socially acceptable. But after public failure, that curatorial instinct becomes almost compulsive.
We rebrand. We pivot. We post through it.
The blueprint says: Vanish. Reconstruct. Return only when shiny again.
But what gives Eduardo’s deposition scene its quiet power isn’t triumph - it’s presence. The courage to sit in a room full of lawyers, facing the person who betrayed him, without hiding his wound or weaponizing it. Just carrying it, visibly, with dignity.
Our culture has no grammar for this kind of redemption.
We need the 30-pound weight loss. The revenge body. The Oscar speech where you thank the studio executives and casting agents who overlooked you or counted you out.
We need transformation to be visible. Consumable. Complete.
But real redemption is never so clean.
Sometimes it looks like showing up to the exact place where you were humiliated - not to rewrite history, but to integrate it into a more complete truth.
What Eduardo’s character allows us to see is that healing isn’t spectacular. It’s not even visible most of the time.
It’s the quiet decision to steel yourself - not a better self, not a rebranded self, just the self that survived - in the rooms where you once shattered.
We’re so busy rushing toward rebirth that we forget the uncomfortable truth:
You can’t transform without first being exactly who you are - in all your humiliation, in all your failure, in full view.
And that’s likely why we avoid it.
Because it requires an interior life our social and cultural discourse doesn’t reward. Because it means accepting that some losses don’t get reversed. Because it means acknowledging that sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is not change at all - but simply just hang the fuck on.
That doesn’t sell tickets or rack up likes.
But it might be the only kind of redemption that actually heals.
To stay visible when everything in our culture tells us to hide - and to keep turning our pages anyway - that might be the bravest thing of all.