There’s a version of me that still lives in that TV show. She’s up by more pins than she needs, walking to the line like the trophy’s already engraved, and she has no idea what’s about to happen to her.
I’ve taken a lot of losses in this sport. Enough that if you asked me to rank them, I’d need a minute. But there’s one that still sits differently than the rest: my first Queens show. I led that tournament from the very first game all the way through to the TV finals. By the time the cameras came on, I had already started celebrating in my head. I thought I had won it. And then I made every mistake in the book, live, in front of everyone, and watched it slip through my fingers frame by frame. It didn’t just cost me a title. It broke my heart.
I don’t say that lightly, and I’m not being dramatic for the sake of a good blog post. Heartbreak is the right word. Because that loss wasn’t really about bowling. It was about the story I had already written in my head about how that day was going to end, and then having to sit with the fact that it didn’t end that way at all.
What Winning Never Could Have Taught Me
Here’s the thing about winning: it confirms what you already believed about yourself. It feels incredible, but it doesn’t teach you much you didn’t already suspect. Losing, especially losing big, especially losing on TV, in front of people, after leading the whole way, teaches you something winning simply can’t.
It taught me that it is never “in the bag.” Not when you’re up ten pins. Not when you led every single game before that one. Not when everyone in the building already thinks they know how this ends. One game is one game. Anything can happen inside of it, and the moment you stop treating it that way (the moment you start coasting on what you’ve already done instead of staying present for what’s still in front of you) that’s exactly when it turns on you.
That’s a lesson winning can never give you, because winning doesn’t ask you to sit in the discomfort of being wrong about yourself. Losing does. And as much as it hurt, I wouldn’t trade what it taught me for a trophy I would have stopped thinking about years ago.
It Took Me About a Month
I wish I could tell you the lesson showed up right away, wrapped in some kind of instant clarity. It didn’t. It took about a month before I could look at that loss and see anything other than the heartbreak of it. A month of replaying it, of feeling the sting every time it crossed my mind, before I could finally set it down long enough to ask what it was actually trying to teach me.
I think that’s important to say out loud, because we live in a culture that wants the lesson immediately: the reframe, the silver lining, the “everything happens for a reason,” before the tears have even dried. That’s not how it works, not for me and probably not for you either. Grieving a big loss and learning from a big loss are two different processes, and you can’t skip to the second one just because you’re impatient with the first.
The Queens, Five Years Later
Five years after that heartbreak, I stood on that same stage again. Same tournament. Same TV cameras. Same pressure that had broken me the first time. And this time, I won.
I won’t pretend the two are unconnected, because they’re not. Every mistake I made on that first TV show became something I studied, something I drilled, something I built an entirely different relationship with pressure around. The version of me who won The Queens five years later only exists because the version of me who lost it first was willing to sit in that heartbreak long enough to learn from it.
That’s the part I actually want you to hear. The biggest loss of my life led directly to the biggest win of my life. Not a different win, not a consolation prize. The exact same tournament, the exact same stage, five years apart. If I had walked away from that first loss without doing the work, without waiting out that month, without asking what it was trying to teach me, I don’t think that second trophy exists.
If You’re Still Hurting From a Big Stage Loss
If you’re in it right now, if you’re the version of you standing at the line with the trophy already engraved in your head, and it just fell apart in front of everyone, I want you to hear this from someone who’s been exactly there.
If you let it, that loss could show you the way to your biggest win ever. I’m not saying that as a nice idea. I’m saying it because it happened to me, on the exact stage that broke my heart in the first place.
Not despite what it took from you. Because of it. The mistakes you made on that stage are the most specific, most personal curriculum you will ever get handed. Nobody else’s loss can teach you what your loss can teach you. The privilege of getting to play on the biggest stages is that when it goes wrong, it goes wrong loudly enough that you can’t ignore what it’s trying to tell you. Most people never get pushed that hard. You did. Let it change you instead of just hurting you.
I made every mental mistake there is to make on that TV show, and a lot of others since. I finally sat down and wrote them all out, the real ones, so you don’t have to learn them the same way I did: on live TV, in front of everyone, with the trophy still in your head.
It’s free. And it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever put together.
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