Every afternoon, from Grade 5 through the end of high school, I went straight from school to the golf course. Not because there was a trophy waiting at the end of it. Just because that was my routine, my one constant. I was not the best junior golfer in any local scene. I was just a girl who showed up every day and gave the game everything I had. And the game, without me fully understanding it at the time, was giving something back.

I would not understand what that something was until many years later, lying in a hospital bed, trying to remember how to find a way back to myself. Looking back on this chapter of my life and reflecting on everything, I realized that I had finally found it. Everything the game had quietly constructed inside me, still standing, still solid, still entirely mine.

Golf withholds reward for a long time before it concedes even the smallest one. What grows out of that, if you stay long enough, is a settled comfort with your own effort, independent of outcomes. I learned discipline not because it was imposed on me, but because the game made it the only viable option. I learned to hold my emotions without being held hostage by them. To feel the sting of a bad shot, acknowledge it, and release it because another one was already waiting. I learned that showing up on the days when nothing in me wanted to was not punishment. It was the entire point.

A golf course offers no shelter when things begin to fall apart. Opponents who outclass you do so in full view of the gallery. Coaches deliver corrections that can sometimes feel like a verdict. Onlookers offer opinions no one asked for.

And somewhere in that process, you begin to understand that none of that noise determines the outcome. What you build through the grind of competition belongs to you entirely. It is yours alone — inviolable. No critic, no competitor, no disastrous turn of events can take it away.

I came to understand that truth even more deeply when I suffered a stroke. Suddenly, the game I thought had taught me resilience was no longer happening on the course. The real test had begun elsewhere.

A ruptured AVM caused my stroke. An AVM, or arteriovenous malformation, is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels in the brain. Most people who have one never know it is there. When one ruptures, it bleeds directly into the brain, starving surrounding cells of oxygen. And brain cells, once lost, do not regenerate. Mine struck the way catastrophic events tend to: like a thief in the night.

The effects were immediate and brutal. I lost motor function on the left side of my body. My left eye went pitch black, and both eyes felt like they were being forced out of their sockets from the pressure of the bleeding in my skull. Translating a thought into a word became an ordeal. Walking was a hazard. What followed were two brain surgeries. The first was an emergency. Going into the operating room, I told myself I would fight with everything I had, while arriving at a place of peace with the possibility that this might be the end. The second surgery removed an aneurysm discovered postoperatively. Another life-threatening event. The life I had built did not pause during any of this. It detonated.

In golf, you cannot play all 18 holes at once. The game offers you exactly one shot at a time, and that is the only one that exists. Everything else is noise. Recovery taught me this same truth, stripped of all metaphor. Getting back to work was unimaginable. Getting back to myself felt further away than I could measure. So I stopped trying to play all eighteen holes from the first tee. I played the shot in front of me. The next hour. The next attempt to move one foot in front of the other by the smallest centimeter. The next day. The next painstaking effort to shape a thought into a sentence and release it aloud. The next week. One minuscule goal after the other, in a time when small felt like Mount Everest. That was all the game of life asked of me. And those, it turned out, were a gazillion little victories.

Bad shots are not evidence that you do not belong on the course. They are woven into the fabric of every single round. What distinguishes those who grow from those who stagnate is the response. Do you carry the weight of a misfire to the next hole? Or do you leave it where it landed and walk toward what comes next? Recovery is saturated with bad shots. I still have them. And when they arrive, I draw on what the game trained into me long before I had any use for it: the shot was bad. The round continues. Walk forward.

I have survived a stroke. I have survived two open brain surgeries. I came back. There is no professional setback that registers at the same scale as what I have already navigated. That is not arrogance. It is the perspective you earn when you have stared down something genuinely unsurvivable and come out the other side.

But I want to be direct with the younger women reading this. Let us be honest about something first: being a woman is already its own kind of endurance sport. Before any of life’s personal trials arrive, we are already navigating a world that was never designed with us in mind. We are asked to work harder to be taken seriously, to speak more carefully to avoid being labeled difficult, to prove our competence in rooms built long before we were invited into them. The bar is higher, the margin for error is smaller, and the critics are louder.

Which is precisely why sport matters so much. Competitive sport hands young women a set of tools that are almost impossible to develop anywhere else: The ability to absorb pressure without collapsing, to persist without immediate reward, to be underestimated and keep performing anyway, to fail publicly and return. These are not skills that make life easier. They are skills that make you harder to break. And in a world that will test you simply for being who you are, that is armor.

Your mountain does not have to match mine in size to feel impossible from where you are standing. Hard is hard. And the question that matters, at any scale, is always the same: What do you draw on when you need something that will hold? Consider sport as part of your answer. That foundation does not erode. It does not expire. It remains exactly where you left it, for as long as you might need it.

The scoreboard never told that story. It never could. But the commitment to the grind did. Shot by shot, day by day, it revealed what truly mattered.