"The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot."
Michael Altshuler
Another milestone today! It has been 40 weeks of writing! It is amazing to be able to go back and see the journey I have made and I am so happy to be able to share all of it with all of you.
This week's recap is another one of wins and losses. As the semester progresses I am slowly seeing my team take their ups and downs and it has come to a point that it is pretty visible everyone is now tired. We have grinder out hard week after week and when we have school waiting for off the court it makes it hard to properly recover. This past weekend for our second match I felt that. As I was running and grinding to get to a third set after losing the first I felt my body. But it wasn't the pain of an injury or the pain of stopping it was a soreness that I feel as an athlete you feel when your body and your mind are contradicting each other. My mind was in and could have played forever but my body was asking to stop. I kept pushing and unfortunately lost in the third set tiebreaker 7-10. It was such a great fight after fighting four match points in the second set to come back and push for a win. My teammates were very supportive of me and another teammate was also grinding for a chance. After both us and the guys lost our coach brought up a great point which I hope everyone took to heart. As singular players on this team we have gotten a lot better, there is more fight in everyone and we can all see it. However, this is college and it is more important to win as a team than winning your match because without everyone winning it is hard to finish. The point was brought up that as a team we aren't working together, there isn't enough cheering, noise, and teamwork even when we are all on our courts. Slowly as the team grows and matures together I am hoping we find some semblance of what these bigger teams have, the cheers, chants, and teamwork. I am confident that we will find it and will get even better when we do. . . Go Braves!
SPOTLIGHT!
This week I wanted to spotlight self-talk. Whether it is motivation or doubt self-talk is something that can either be a negative or positive factor of our day. However, I feel that learning how to talk to yourself in a way that'll benefit rather than harm is something that can be very challenging to learn. We are our worst critics, we just are because we see ourselves every day, and because we most of the time don't see the whole picture it is hard to see who we are. Being able to look from the outside gives the people around us a huge advantage, they don't see the small things which means they don't sweat the small things. Every displaced hair, an ounce of bloating, a trip in the walk, and sometimes the failure isn't as big when it isn't them experiencing it, seeing it. That was a hard thing for me to understand and still tends to be a challenging thing for me to accept. For years I have been my worst critic, every compliment felt like someone was mocking me or trying to tear me down because I wasn't good enough for myself. I was never enough, no matter the achievement I still wasn't the best, and thought for some that could be a great thing to drive and make dreams happen it slowly broke me. Dreams I had slowly faded because they were too far, and too high, and when they came down to a height I could reach I pushed them higher because I could never be enough. It affected everything and still does. My tennis took hit after hit after hit because I hated my game. I thought it was ugly and I was never going to be good enough. When I came to college I was surrounded by genuine voices, girls who looked me in the eye and said that I was enough, I was good enough to be here. When the voice in your head switches from I can't to I can a lot of things happen. Your shoulders lift, you stop staring at the ground, your walk becomes more you and the world doesn't seem so scary. It all comes from within and sometimes needs a little nudge from outside.
love you, Z