I tend to acquire labels from my hyper consistent routines and mannerisms. My dented, half-gallon blue water bottle sums up my personality in three stickers: “Hold on, let me overthink it,” “Contains feelings, FRAGILE, handle with care” and my personal favorite: “Think deep, squat deeper.” They pinpoint me as an overthinking, emotionally fragile gym rat.
Halfway through my senior year, I was the girl in the tree on the quad. My tree-dwelling habits have been shared on the anonymous campus social media app Fizz, and that “squirrel mentality” makes me proficient enough to take Zoom calls and read for my next class while sitting there. I have seen strangers point their cameras at me without asking, and others have walked by wondering how I got up into the branches. Part of me wants to say I flew just to gauge their reaction.
I left the Wheel at the end of my junior year feeling lost. Unlike most seniors, I started my year with the same eerie unfamiliarity that plagued me as a freshman. I attended the club fair not as a tabling student but as a desperate senior knowing that if reinventing myself failed, I would just leave and forget.
After 16 years of swimming, I traded my suit for cleats and a disc and jumped into the world of ultimate frisbee, relearning an entirely new team sport that challenged my awareness of my actions and their effect on the people around me. I barreled into Emory’s Gender Expansive and Women’s Ultimate frisbee team (EGEWU) looking for lasting relationships and community while still doing everything I could to graduate early. But as it seems, life never goes as planned.
In search of a sense of belonging and identity, I fell in love with chasing after a disc as quickly as I got shin splints and with the same passion I once had writing and editing for this paper. Driving home every day after practice, I thought how I am forever indebted to one of our captains, Ali Barlow (24C), and the time she spent teaching me to throw last summer. I vividly remember her explaining ultimate gameplay to me with Chick-fil-A sauce packets and straw wrappers, lamenting how nerdy it was of us to analyze with as much zealousness as we were going off to battle.
I feel endlessly lucky to have gotten to start over and to feel as though I’ve lived two full transformations by the time I graduate. Since high school, I’ve taken myself so seriously that the goofiest and most unhinged parts (chocolate chip cookie mayo sandwich anyone?) of my life have remained largely unexplored. At the Wheel, my writing and Google Doc comments preceded my reputation as a human, and it often felt like there was a narrow gap for mistakes. I grew up quickly in regards to professionalism and maturity, but it cost me a lot of carefreeness and playfulness that I wish I gained earlier.
Now, you could adequately make the case that I joined EGEWU because it is jokingly called “Emory’s queer dating pool.” Only kidding. But in reality, the heavily queer-coded energy of ultimate frisbee — both in our team and the sport itself — can almost instantly be felt and uniquely insular to the queer community.
Because of this, I capitalized on my chance to redefine myself with a freeing comfort that seemed to radiate from every member of our team. Through EGEWU, I’ve been able to continue exploring who I am and gained an understanding that being queer encompasses far more than just sexuality or gender identity — it’s a shared perspective on the world that feels like many heterosexual or cisgender people will never fully comprehend. Queerness is inherently paradoxical and conflicting, but to be in a space where I don’t need to explain it over and over leaves me with inexplicable comfort. I might have found some of my people at the Wheel, but I found a community at EGEWU.
When I am at practice, I can let my guard down and walk into a bubble where I know my queerness will not be weaponized against me. I don’t have to wonder if it will be the reason someone questions my abilities as a player or demands I earn substantial achievements to ascertain my worth. Making mistakes and adapting has become a hallmark of my growth as an ultimate player.
But perhaps my favorite part of this team is actually how much we flirt with one another; not in an objectifying sense, but in a safe space to be genuinely appreciative of who we are. This could easily warp into an academic discussion of sexuality and womanhood, but seriously, why shouldn’t it be normalized to tell my friends I think they’re ridiculously hot?
Trying to describe EGEWU’s impact feels almost impossible. To only call it “happiness” seems to assign it both a sense of triviality and profoundness that I am not sure I will ever be able to explain.
My EGEWU experience is defined by the little, yet memorable interactions; the way I can walk through Asbury Circle or sit anywhere on campus and talk to at least 10 people I know. I have heard so much club music in the last five months that I finished writing my short story for class to “Club Can’t Handle Me” (2010) at 8 a.m., a telling moment for a girl whose most listened to song was “Exile” three years in a row. We are the loud laughs that echo from Candler Library to Convocation Hall on a sunny afternoon, the occasional stray disc flying way too close to someone’s picnic blanket, the “heads” shouts that go ignored, the meme’d photos of me in a tree or giving a tour.
With only two months of my senior year left, I keep thinking about the bittersweet. I don’t know if I would ever describe this as serendipity, but I remember memorizing this word as “surrendering the pity.” I pitied my unexpected departure from an organization so much so that I would have graduated early to escape. Right now, however, I know with a hearty conviction that EGEWU would not mean what it does to me without the Wheel, a positively impactful time in my life. They coexist uniquely in my Emory experience. So while I am bitter for the little time I have left, every moment is that much sweeter. In becoming my bubble, ultimate frisbee has helped me burst my own.
Sophia Ling (24C) is from Carmel, Indiana.
