Week 37

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."

E.E. Cummings

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In the words of our coach, it is going to be a crazy 6 weeks coming up. Between schooling, traveling, practicing, recovering, studying, and being a college student I feel time slipping through my fingers and in some ways I love it! I always tell people that I love to be busy because it doesn't give my brain the chance to think. There is no sitting still and thinking about what to do next there is only doing what needs to be done. My dad told me when I was in high school that I was going to love college because it is organized and I can safely put everything in my schedule. I didn't believe him completely at the time but my schedule on my phone has become my new bestie and more than a couple of people have called me crazy.

This week has begun to speed up a bit more. Classes have gone past introductions and syllabus readings and I have already taken several tests and I shouldn't say it but I love it. Even with all the craziness of doing everything that has to be done as a student-athlete, I have still found time to make friends. It is so fun to be able to walk around campus and have people know you, say hi, and be able to talk. As a social butterfly, I love being able to talk all the time and get to meet so many people, but as someone who thrives while being alone, I also miss the quiet. College is a lot of moving pieces in one day, and with all of it, I feel myself getting overwhelmed often. My challenge this week that I have been trying to get better at is noticing when I am getting a little too close to my tipping point and backing off. I want to do everything and experience everything in such a short time that I haven't realized how overwhelming it can be. Going from doing so much by myself to all of a sudden having a team, a group of friends, support from a real community and so much attention, I wasn't quite ready for it all to come in such a strong wave of emotions.

This post is posted a little later than I had hoped it would be because we had a match today and I was hoping to include it now and not have everyone wait another week. What was supposed to be a home match and the first one we have had turned into us going to McNeese in Louisiana. Four hours in the van with only the girls, a night spent and still we didn't play how we had all hoped. My doubles match went from being down 0-3 to coming back and losing 5-7. It was a good match but both my partner and I were a little disappointed because we knew we both could have won it. The singles was also a loss of 2-6 2-6 and it sucked because I knew I could have done better but unfortunately, my leg that I hurt earlier this week came back with a vengeance in the second set. The team did walk away with one victory as one of our teammates from Egypt got our first singles win! It was so fun to be able to cheer for all the girls and have what I would like to call the student-athlete version of a girl's weekend. Now we are back at school and are preparing for our first real home match with both the girls and guys. We have all been slowly recruiting spectators to come bring up the energy and I have some high hopes for tomorrow! Every match is so fun no matter the result and I am so excited about the rest of the season.

SPOTLIGHT!

I am going to be spotlighting something that I am learning now in college in a more in-depth way. Public speaking, who knew that it would be such an important part of people's lives? It is also something that is looked over by so many young adults and it shows. The class I am taking is called Oral Communications, our teacher is great and it has slowly become one of my favorite classes, however, one of my teammates who is in class with me wants to drop it. I know other people who have left the class that is a requirement to take until senior year. They don't want to do it. Public speaking is a piece of the world that is slowly getting lost, we call and we text and have the confidence to do it all over a screen. When you put these kids in front of an audience and ask them to say what they are writing how many stutters. When you take away the protection which screens provide they shut down. A good leader is a good public speaker, a good lawyer, a good doctor, a good business person, and a good scientist they are all good when they can share their ideas with the public. How many fields of work are going to be lost to AI simply because the ones who should have been doing them didn't want to step out of the protection of their screens?