My agent called.
I've got you a deal with the Houston Rockets.
I sat down on the curb of a Melbourne street. I didn’t know what I felt. It wasn’t joy. Maybe relief. But I knew this was the moment I'd been chasing my whole life.
I remember thinking: now my career will have been good enough.
Before Houston, life was full.
I was playing for the Jack Jumpers in Tasmania. Fab was my roommate. We'd play Jenga to decide who took out the bins. Beth and I would FaceTime watching Bones when we were apart. After wins, our team would raise the hammer and celebrate together. Real celebration. Enjoying each moment, together.
I was having success on court. I was surrounded by people I loved. I was laughing at work.
I thought I'd figured something out. I thought the inner work I'd done had cleared something up. That the feeling of not being enough had loosened its grip.
I was wrong about what was happening.
The feeling hadn't gone anywhere. Life had just gotten full enough that I couldn't hear it.
Houston stripped that back.
New city. New locker room. New faces. Beth came, but after two months she had to go home. And suddenly it was just me. Just the dream I'd chased my whole life. Just the pressure of trying to stay.
And the feeling came back louder than I'd ever heard it.
I started changing.
The ballhandling routine I'd built over years got shorter. Then disappeared. My specific weight room movements became traditional lifts. I stopped doing visualisation before practice. Stopped doing breath work after. Started wearing shoes to and from the gym instead of going barefoot.
Piece by piece, I abandoned the things that made me, me.
I told myself I was adapting. Being professional. Fitting in.
But that wasn't it.
I was terrified of being the one they didn't want. The one they'd cast out.
One day I walked past a mirror in Houston.
I stopped.
Shaved head. Big beard. Exhausted eyes.
I'd seen that face before.
I was nineteen, sitting in my car outside a college game in Nebraska. It was late. I didn't want to go inside. Didn't want to sit on the bench again. Didn't want to face everyone. I had prepared some alcohol in my team bottle so a couple of us could drink during the game. I just sat there, looking in the car mirror, alone and ashamed, too afraid to open the door.
That was 10 years ago.
And here was the same kid staring back at me while I was in the NBA.
I'd done the work. Read the books. Built the routines. Won the games. Found love. And none of it had touched the thing underneath.
The wound hadn't healed. It had just found somewhere quiet to hide.
There's a reason Houston made it so loud.
For 200,000 years, humans lived in small tribes of 50 to 150 people. Belonging wasn't a preference. It was survival. A person expelled from the group was a person who died.
So your brain developed an alarm system. It scans every room you walk into asking: am I valued here? Do they want me? Am I at risk of being cast out?
In Tasmania, the alarm was quiet. The tribe was warm. Fab. Beth. Teammates I trusted. A coach who believed in me. The system detected safety and stood down.
In Houston, everything that quieted the alarm was gone. New tribe. No established place in it. The system fired at full volume.
The alarm couldn't tell the difference between an NBA locker room and a prehistoric wilderness. All it knew was: new group, no belonging yet, danger.
So it did what it was built to do. Conform. Shrink. Abandon whatever makes you different. Fit in or die.
I listened. And it cost me everything I'd worked for.
At the end of the season, Houston didn't want me back.
The version of me that made the NBA did breath work when no one else did. Went barefoot when everyone wore shoes. Built routines because he believed in them.
That guy believed he was enough.
The one who abandoned him didn't.
And the painful truth I've had to sit with since: the desperation to stay is what made me get fired. I changed everything that made me valuable trying to prove I deserved to be there.
I'm still working through this.
The mirror in Houston was the first time I couldn't look away from it. Couldn't tell myself I'd dealt with it. Couldn't hide behind the wins or the relationship or the great life I'd built.
It was just me and the feeling. The same one that kept me in that car in Nebraska. The same one that's followed me through every locker room since.
I don't have a clean answer for how to make it stop.
But I think the mirror was the beginning of something. Not a solution. A seeing.
And maybe that's where it has to start.