Garrett Smiley

I planted left, then pow—the ball went flying into the back of the net for another goal. This wasn’t my first four-goal soccer game, and I began to think of forgoing college and heading straight to the MLS. In my first twelve years, I experimented with many sports and excelled at them all: from AAU basketball to club soccer to a black belt in taekwondo. But one day, while playing pick-up basketball, I felt a sharp pain in both of my hips. Little did I realize that from that point forward, any remnants of my athleticism would forever be in the past.

After a few months, the pain became unbearable. Doctors didn’t know what was wrong, and the pain continued to spread from my hips through my spine. I had to sit out the whole basketball season in the fall, the soccer season in the spring, and the taekwondo tournaments in the summer. I tried to workout with my teammates, but it was demoralizing to discover that I couldn’t even kick a ball twenty yards. Every day I drifted further and further away from anything that resembled an athlete. For a year, doctors incorrectly treated me for a broken back: regularly strapping me into contraptions that resembled something out of the horror movie, Saw. Desperate to reassert myself athletically, I endured the pseudo-torture throughout middle school until ninth grade when the doctors realized the correct diagnosis– arthritis. That single word, that unassuming word represented all of my fears. The doctors didn’t know if it would ever get better. Ankylosing Spondylitis, a disease that slowly fuses the hips and spine, stole my athletic prowess, which, at the time, felt like my whole world.

After my bedroom floor had been completely engulfed by ice-cream sized containers of sadness, I figured that I had to do something. Video games seemed repetitive. My art never evolved past stick figures. Fiction was too unrealistic. I was bored by everything—that is, until I read “An Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene, an introductory physics book covering everything from relativity to quantum mechanics. Dr. Green didn’t force the inculcation of facts and formulas, so much as he professed his love to a beautiful universe. I stopped seeing learning as something I had to do for a grade and began to see it as an adventure.

I was no longer concerned with throwing spheres into circles or kicking a truncated icosahedron into a rectangle—I now saw the opportunities of the universe and wanted nothing else but to build and explore. Beginning with an interest in quantum mechanics, my intellectual curiosity quickly spread to everything from computer science to philosophy. Knowledge became my currency: the more I accrued, the more I could do. My work ethic was already in place, I just had to redirect it. Instead of running miles to improve my cardio, I ran through the words of brilliant authors and physicists, and, in turn, their thoughts enriched my insatiable bank of knowledge.

Although my chances of getting drafted by the San Antonio Spurs have significantly diminished, I am glad that my DNA rebelled and killed my athletic career. Although I don’t look like the old, graying men in the Humira commercials, I like to think that my ailment, as unfortunate as it may seem, has taught me to live and act beyond my years. I don’t feel invincible, as I once did, because I am constantly reminded of my mortality. And while I am tremendously excited to study the real-world applications of engineering and science over the next four years, I am more excited about the unexpected avenues of learning I will discover along my journey through the beauty of this universe.

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