all my homies hate ap chem
a.k.a. the time i broke my wrist because i failed a chemistry test
I’ve broken my wrist twice playing soccer.
A decade has passed since I last hurt it, but it doesn’t take much for me to remember it all over again. Just one odd twist or bump and an all-too-familiar sting sweeps across my wrist, a lingering reminder of past damage.
This pain is always accompanied by a dream-like feeling of warmth, nostalgia, frustration, and innocence, which, though present only for a few moments, never fails to take me back to the distinct episodes when I injured my wrist.
Memories are weird. We can remember the smallest details about meaningful events. The color shirt my mom was wearing at graduation. The dish I ordered at the Cheesecake factory after my last day of middle school. The exact sensation of summer rain cooling my legs in Southeast Asia. The smallest details.
Yet, it's not the details themselves that transport us back to the past.
Emotions.
The emotions we felt from those memories are etched deeper than scenes and details. Emotions are the vessels by which we are transported back in time.
Emotions breathe life into memories, making them as vivid as when they first happened.
The first time I broke my wrist was in middle school.
There were only a few minutes left in the soccer match. I don’t remember the score, but it was close, and I was dribbling towards goal.
WHAM.
I slammed wrist-first into the wet turf. As I slowly got back on my feet, I remember being fascinated at just how slack my wrist looked and felt. That's really all it takes to lose control of a limb?
I was snapped out of my daze by the sound of my coach screaming at me.
No, I don’t need a sub! I waved him off with my functioning right hand.
There was no way I was coming off—I was having too much fun. I finished the rest of the game with my left wrist limp and held close to my body like a T-Rex’s.
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Once the final whistle sounded, my dad and I went to Panda Express for lunch. I tried my best to hide my discomfort as I demolished my mushroom chicken, broccoli beef, and chow mein.
Somehow, I managed to convince my dad to take me to baseball practice instead of the doctor. Doesn’t hurt to test how it feels first, right?
We drove to the practice field, which conveniently enough, was in the same sports complex that my soccer game had just been in. I delicately slid my wrist into my mitt, found a teammate to warm up with, and jogged out into the outfield to play catch.
I caught one baseball and immediately hit the wet turf again, grabbing my wrist. My cheek damp with dew, I could see slivers of the soccer field across the parking lot through the blades of grass. There was another game going on.
Yeah my wrist is screwed, I thought to myself.
An x-ray confirmed a clean fracture and I was sentenced to a hard cast for a month. I tried to see if I would be allowed to play if I wrapped my cast in layers of bubble wrap. The referees, rightfully wary that I might knock a kid out with the bludgeon on my wrist, said absolutely not.
The second time I (damn near) broke my wrist was in a Vegas hotel room.
I was in Vegas for a college recruitment soccer tournament. It was the evening and my parents were out at a nice oyster happy hour. I, a sophomore in high school, was in my hotel room working through a mountain of homework.
Buzz buzz. My phone lit up. AP Chemistry Exam #3 has been graded.
To this day, even after having taken computer science courses in college that had an average workload of 30 hours a week, no class has even come close to the utter insanity that was AP Chemistry.
In high school, my club soccer practices ended pretty late on weeknights. I would get home around 10, eat, shower, and immediately pass out by 11. In an effort to keep up my grades, I started waking up early on weekdays to get my studying done before school started. On the days leading up to a chemistry exam, you could always find me (and my war-buddy JZ) in Mr. Ku’s before school office hours, trying to figure out this enigma of a class.
But it was never enough.
I opened the grade portal notification. I had gotten a D on the exam.
My head pulsed.
I slammed my left palm on the carpet. To this day, I don’t think I’ve struck anything with as much force. Pain shot up all the way up to my shoulder before settling back down to my wrist. I knew instantly that I had messed this wrist up again real bad.
I jumped onto the hotel bed and screamed into a pillow. First out of frustration with myself for getting a D. Then out of contempt at how dumb I was for hitting things like some middle-aged drunkard. And then lastly out of physical pain.
I slid down the side of my bed, squeezing my throbbing wrist with my right hand. Maybe if I applied enough pressure, I could massage my ligaments back into place. I don’t remember what I was thinking as I sat on the hotel floor, dead-silent, in the heart of Vegas. I don’t think I was sad. I think I was just tired of it all.
This pretty much summed up what high school felt like to me.
My parents would drive me to soccer tournaments that my team never had a shot at winning, to play in front of college coaches who would never take a genuine interest in me, to skip out on most post game hangouts with teammates because I was busy studying.
All this for what?
I was usually the best player on the team because I spent so much time practicing on my own, but that didn’t matter because I was never the best player in the tournament. Sure, I got good grades, but I would always be fighting for my life to maintain my 90% average.
I was always on the brink, barely good enough to get what I wanted, always one mistake away from it all crumbling.
I don’t think this was a case of “it's not good to compare yourself to others”. No, looking back on it, the question that haunted me throughout high school was always deeply personal: why couldn’t I ever be great at something?
Even being “good” at something wasn’t satisfying anymore, because “good” wouldn’t get me into the colleges I wanted to go to or land me a college soccer offer. "Good" became insufficient in a world where only "exceptional" could open the doors I wished to walk through. And I carried this baggage with me throughout high school and most of college.
Things were much simpler in middle school. A wrist cast was devastating to me because, for four weeks, I couldn’t do what I loved to do. Simple as that. I had nothing to play for, nothing to study for; the only thing propelling me to do anything was the sheer delight in challenging myself.
In January 2023, I entered my final semester of college. I decided it was time for me to grow up. It was time to take myself less seriously.
I’ve been working hard at it since. It hasn’t been easy, but these past few months have been the first in nearly a decade where I’ve approached life with a tenacity and vigor comparable to what I had in middle school.
To truly not care about repercussions, to try things out, to get hurt. To rub some dirt on what hurts, and to go out and try it again. And to be okay with doing things because you like doing it.
That’s what living is about.
My parents got back a bit later from the oyster bar than I had expected.
They were holding two bags: one was takeout dinner for me, the other was a bag from Puma… also for me? I was still a bit dazed from the mini breakdown I had in the room a few hours before. Inside the Puma bag were a pair of compression shorts: I guess they had noticed I had ripped through a pair earlier.
I wore those compression shorts the next day. It was a Saturday and we were ready to go home after playing a few games. We rarely got to play on Sundays because playing on Sunday meant winning on Saturday.
I got to the field and pulled some athletic tape out of my bag. I tightly bound my wrist and tore the tape free from its roll with my teeth. The tightness made my fingers go pale, so I wiggled them a bit, a sanity check to ensure they wouldn’t fall off. A few concerned teammates saw what I was doing and asked me what had happened.
I fell on my wrist yesterday and it's just feeling a bit sore now. I broke it back in middle school so I always just tape it when it feels a bit weak. I’m all good to play.