McGrath Institute Blog

Allow me to share with you a very real problem that I have been dealing with for my entire life. Self-esteem.  Confidence. Body image. These issues started to reveal themselves to me at an oddly early age, like when I realized that I was one of the tallest and heaviest boys in my third grade class or when I hit puberty before anyone my age. I don’t have an older brother so I really didn’t have an older guy to whom I could relate. Since I was often ashamed of the way I looked and clearly didn’t feel good about myself, I covered up as best as I could from others. For me, this hiding was a physical battle, and my shirt was my protective armor.

Winifred was faded: a ghost of a woman you vaguely hoped, rather than knew, had once existed in full color. She shuffled into church every Sunday about half an hour late, careful to inform bystanders of the reason, sure that they had been anxious for her. Her pale blue eyes were vacant, almost devoid of all color now, faded like the wisps of grey hair under the knit cap she perpetually wore.

Growing up, every night before bed, my mom read the Harry Potter books to me. This nighttime ritual of ours grew into a tradition that has been passed down through each of my siblings and has come to be a unifying factor in our family. Over the past couple of years, if I strolled through the living room at just the right time, I could catch a snippet of my mother’s soothing voice recounting the tales of Harry, Ron and Hermione or hear the animated gasps of my two youngest siblings, Noah and Reggie, as they listened in rapture. It was in those moments that I could travel the distance back to my childhood in a split second. Suddenly I’m seven years old again—scurrying into my pink-doused bedroom, worn blue security blanket rippling in my pudgy hands, bouncing into a nest of pillows as my mom cracks open our copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (SPOILERS AHEAD).

On Monday, I would go to Notre Dame, Tuesday, Saint-Sulpice, Wednesday, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Thursday, Sacré-Cœur, and Friday, la Madeleine... I had googled the most beautiful churches in Paris and planned on attending mass at each one during my first week studying abroad. And so every evening, I ventured out into the still unfamiliar city and hid myself behind the massive cathedral columns, peering around at the stunning architecture and struggling diligently to identify familiar French words. And each evening, I would stumble back into the apartment, exhausted but beaming with excitement and a sense of accomplishment.  

28 days ago, I pulled on my cap, adjusted my goggles and plunged once again into the depths of grace. On that day, grace took the form of the pool at the Rockne Memorial Gym for my first swimming workout in many, many years.