Pat Conroy on Loss

As he recounts in his non-fiction work My Losing Season, Pat Conroy had to first come to grips with loss, before he could come to believe in himself. First came the losses.

"There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss. The great secret of athletics is that you learn more from losing than winning. Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, set-back, and tragedy that you will encounter in the world, more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds, you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time. The American military learned more from its defeat in Viet Nam than it did in all the victories ever fought under the Stars and Stripes. Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home at the breakfast table. Loss follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word loser follows you, bird dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in, because you have to face things clearly, and you cannot turn away from what is true."

On the other hand, writes Conway,

"Our losing season inspired every one of us to strive for complete and successful lives. Belief in oneself, authentic, inviolable, unshakable belief, not the undercutting kind, is necessary to all human achievement. Once I began believing in myself, and not listening to the people who do not believe in me, I turned myself into a point guard whom you needed to watch."