When I was 13, I moved to Singapore.
I attended a school called Chatsworth and it was located in the heart of downtown
Singapore—Orchard Road if you know downtown.
I had lived my entire life in Sri Lanka until that point, so everything felt quite foreign.
Slowly, I started making friends and the primary catalyst for that was one thing:
Basketball.
I made the Under-16 basketball team and that's really where friendships started for me.
I played basketball every day I could. In Singapore, the basketball season is year-round.
Training was something I looked forward to and it felt like training was something we had every day.
It helped that my coach was also a super inspirational person.
I remember the nerves of playing games that first season. My teammates and I were all somewhat new to the school—Singapore has a lot of expat kids that come and go—and as a fresh batch of Grade 8 students, we were figuring things out.
When we got into Grade 9, we continued to play together on the Under-16 team and at that point, basketball had really become life.
Basketball led me to my first kiss, basketball led me to much heartbreak, basketball led me to understand what great teamwork felt like. Basketball was life.
In that second season together, our team really clicked. We managed to make it to the finals that year against a team that we had never beaten before. In my recollection, we won the
Under-16 boys final by less than five points. It was an unbelievable feeling.
Our school mascot was a Phoenix.
In Grade 10, I left Singapore and moved to Canada.
As I was leaving, my coach said something to me that I didn't fully understand at the time. Cheesy as it sounds, he said, "Once a Phoenix, always a Phoenix."
As you might imagine, the first thing I did when I started Grade 10 in Canada was to inquire about basketball.
The high school that I ended up going to was called Resurrection and if you can believe it, their mascot was also, a Phoenix.
It was during pre-tryout practice for the junior basketball team that I met one of my best friends. As I found myself in yet another foreign space, having a new friend was a welcome feeling. We're still best friends to this day.
I ended up making the junior team in Grade 10. We had some highs and lows, and most importantly, I was back playing the game I loved. Unlike in Singapore, basketball has a season in Canada, so for the entirety of those few months, basketball was once again, life.
In Grade 11, I tried out for the senior team. So did all the friends I made the year prior.
I made it to the final round.
Then I got cut.
All my friends made it.
As I look back on that moment even now—more than 20 years later—it still hurts.
"Once a Phoenix, always a Phoenix."
What does that really mean?
What happens when the thing we build our identity around, suddenly gets taken away?
Answers to these questions, and the conclusion to this post will come next week.
