You're It! Play Isn't Just For Kids

I am the most non-sporting, non-athletic person you could ever meet. If we lived in a world where we were still chased by tigers, I would have been lunchmeat long ago. I'm pygmy short, legally blind, and I have the reflexes of a grazing bovine. In school, I was the chubby kid in glasses, the last one picked for games, who provoked a groan of agony from the team captain. For me, playing sports with others was torture, not pleasure.

Then I grew up and moved to San Francisco, where full-grown men and women try to live every day like Peter Pan and Wendy, and women (usually) aren't made to feel ashamed of their variegated shapes. Emboldened, I joined a fitness outfit for women called Urban Recess, where twice a week myself and other bookworms play games like kickball, hopscotch, and even football.

We met at my neighborhood Boys and Girls Club, and sometimes the kids would even join our teams and hang out with the "big girls." The whole experience was more "play" than "workout," and in all my years of gym memberships, I'd never laughed so hard while getting sweaty and fit. Sure, it felt ridiculous to be jumping rope like a 10 year old, but no one could deny that the experience was pure pleasure.

In some ways it went even deeper than that. In childhood, we invent ourselves through play. In adulthood, I discovered, play gives us opportunities to reinvent ourselves.

Though the Urban Recess version of play meant kicking a ball across a field, it also meant being a part of a team. This group of girls and I soon became boisterous drinking buddies, bonding as we learned the strategy of sport's most basic games. In the company of like-minded women, play became a safe form of learning, where we could let our inner jock run free without fear of locker-room ridicule.

And so when we played at Urban Recess, we could try on identities like a new pair of shin guards, and we could write new stories for ourselves—just like those books we read as kids, but now we were the protagonists. The sporty new personas we created allowed us brief escapes from our desk jobs, and as our skills improved we became more adventurous, escaping farther into our fantasy lives.

At Urban Recess, I was suddenly The Girl Who Could Shoot Three Baskets in a Row, and I reveled in the accolades of my peers. The proverbial cup was raised to each of us for our physical accomplishments—the fastest, the strongest, the great runners, and the quick-handed. At Urban Recess, we played at being jocks as if we were actors on a stage, pretending to be sporty, daring, powerful, and coordinated.

This had the ironic effect of putting a bit of distance between me and myself, so that I could see my adult life from a new perspective and find parts of myself that had been sitting unused in the attic of my brain. My boosted self-confidence manifested itself in my daily life. I carried my own bags of heavy groceries the long way home. I walked alone down streets that I might have previously avoided.