Cabot’s got no hustle.” I was 10 years old when I overheard the coach of my girls’ softball team utter these words. I could see Coach standing in the bright sunlight of the ball field, but she couldn’t see me – I was huddled deep in the cool shade of the dugout, where I admittedly spent most of my time during practice and games. She had no idea I was listening to every word she said.
“I’d play Cabot more,” Coach complained to our assistant coach, who was standing beside her with a clipboard. “But she just won’t hustle.”
The conversation moved on to who, out of my fellow players, Coach was going to substitute for me, and I leaned back into the dugout, shocked by what I’d heard. Me, no hustle? How could anyone think that?
It’s true I didn’t really like softball. Oh, I loved the part where you went up to bat to hit the ball. That was fun. But the rest of the game – where you had to stand out in the field hoping no balls would fly your way because then you might have to catch them – was less thrilling to me. Worse, I was terrible at it, to the detriment of the team. Mostly I just stared at the treetops past the field, thinking of whatever story I was writing at the moment. This is how I was often hit in the head with balls, and ended up sitting in the dugout.
But did this indicate a lack of hustle? This seemed harsh, even to my 10-year-old, probably concussed brain.
True, the only reason I stayed on the team was because my best friend was on it, and I liked hanging out with her on the bus. Then there was my professor father who’d gone to college on a basketball scholarship, and was very proud that I’d finally expressed an interest in anything other than reading or writing.
I’d been writing stories for as long as I could remember. I had already written pages and pages of Star Wars fan fiction – not online, of course, because back then online didn’t exist. No, I’d handwritten them, for fun, along with dozens of short stories and even novels, one of which I was particularly proud of, about the princess of a foreign land who needed the help of a handsome, lonely knight to save her throne.
I knew better than to tell anyone, especially Coach, that I wanted to be a published writer when I grew up, though. For one thing, living in a college town, nearly every adult I knew was a published writer. They were all very serious and depressed. I’d watched them struggling over their work, taking years to produce a single textbook that would end up being bought by no one except their own students.
This was not the kind of career I meant when I thought about being a writer.
And for another, no sane parent is going to support their child’s dream of making up stories for a living. Even Shakespeare’s parents had to have told him at some point that being a playwright wasn’t a very realistic career goal. Mine let me know at an early age that while my stories about princesses were cute, I needed to be prepared to support myself some other way, with a “backup career”.
That’s why, in addition to softball, my mom enrolled me in typing class. At the very least, she said, I could be someone’s secretary when I grew up. And since I was learning to type my books about princesses at 50 words per minute, instead of handwriting them, I wasn’t complaining.
So while I couldn’t say my commitment to sports was ever very strong, for Coach to say I didn’t have any hustle? I was flabbergasted. I had more hustle than any other 10-year-old I knew!
It took me until the end of the bus ride home after that game (which of course we lost) for me to realise that Coach may actually have been on to something. I spent the long, dusty ride cheerfully filling my teammates in on the latest chapter of Princess and the Lonely Knight, soothing them after our terrible loss, and giving them something to look forward to: not our next game (which we would surely lose), but the next chapter.
They weren’t alone in their anticipation. I couldn’t wait to get home to write it!
That’s when it hit me: Coach was right. I didn’t have hustle. Not for softball, anyway. I had all the hustle in the world for things I actually cared about, like writing and typing and my friends. But sports? Not so much.
So I realised I had no choice. I broke the news to my dad (and later, to Coach and my best friend) the next day: I was quitting softball. My heart wasn’t in it.
And because my heart wasn’t in it, I was only hurting the team – and myself – by spending time doing an activity I didn’t enjoy, when I could be doing what really mattered: hustling at what I loved.
Meg Cabot is the author of more than 90 books for adults and children, including The Princess Diaries. The Quarantine Princess Diaries is out now, with 10% of her English-language royalties going to support Vow for Girls, which campaigns against child marriage
