The Ending

As my first semester of college comes to a close I am seeing things in a new light. I am doing things in a new light. Yet at the same time with all of these changes I have still managed to remain myself through them all. I have learned a lot since I have been here at TLU, both inside the classroom and outside of the classroom. My time outside of the classroom has been just as beneficial if not more beneficial to my life at this point. Things that were once there in my life no longer come easy, and I no longer have my dad to just get me or buy me whatever I want. I have learned the responsibility of money and saving money every chance I get. I have also learned the value of my hard work. Between working three jobs in the summer and generous scholarships, I was able to pay off my first semester of college without the help of my dad. Though unimpressive to some, this task wasn't easy for me and it required a lot of dedication on my part to continue working. Though it would have been easier to allow my dad to pay for my education, I didn't feel right asking so of him. Since I have been here, my maturity level has gone up and down and right back up. I'll admit it, I have done some really stupid things since I have been here and there is no undoing something once it is already done. And because of the fact that I cant undo things I try to live my life without any regrets because there is no use wasting time pondering over the woulda, coulda, shouldas' in life.

I always told myself that distance away from my family would do me well, that the time would put my relationship with them into perspective and I was absolutely correct. As independent of a person I am, it takes distance and time apart for me to comprehend how much I relied on my family without even realizing it. The distance with my family has made me grateful for them and has shown me how much I miss them. As I write this final post, for the first time since I have been away from home I began to feel a little home sick. Its a weird feeling, especially when its coming from me. Its one that I don't like to admit ever because I feel like it would show weakness in me to rely on a person or a group of people. The matter of fact is that my family however irritating they may be are my rocks and foundation.

Blogging Even for Dummies

So blogging right? Funny I know, but never in my life would I have thought I would be "blogging" or have a blog of my very own. You always see people using blogs on TV as a sort of journal that they anonymously vent their feelings to at the end of the day! And in response to their anonymous feelings, an anonymous follower would reply back with "get over it" or "you'll get through it." As much as I was apprehensive about blogging, it has been very beneficial to me. The writing that I have done through my blog has helped me transition into college and has helped me to open my eyes in certain situations. Sometimes we don't see things for what they really are until they are written down in front of us and we see them with our own eyes. My blog allowed me to reflect on a very important time in my life and in a way I guess you can say that it became my very own personal journal except without the anonymous part!

I viewed blogs as something only funny people were allowed to have. I mean who wants to read some dull, uninteresting post on the internet?  I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't  So right off the back I was slow to get blogging in fear that I wouldn't be entertaining enough for the reader. The thing is I can make my friends laugh, but when it comes to trying to be funny it doesn't work out to well. So initially when I started my blog, my goal was to answer the question and hopefully have something funny to say along the way. Every now and then I'd put in a joke that I thought was good that went along with the prompt but for the most part I just wrote. As I picked up momentum in the blogging world my writing began to change. Instead of simply addressing the questions I began branching out and talking about my experiences. As I did this I realized that the required twenty lines of writing came easy and the words began to flow. My blog taught me to write, to start with an empty screen and to get started. Lastly my blog kept me in the school mind set. The blog helped me become more responsible with the due dates and taught me to be more independent inside and outside of the classroom.

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

Not everyone has a passion for what they do, some do things because they simply have to. I was always told that if a school is willing to pay for my college through a sport, take the offer. Today that is the athlete mentality on college. Depending on  what type of school you go to, they can offer athletic scholarships. A division one school can offer full ride athletic scholarships, division two can offer partial athletic scholarships, and division three can not offer any athletic scholarships, instead they give academic ones. Some athletes know that their grades are not good enough to get into school and some know that they can not afford college without a scholarship of some sort. Athletics have been a way out for minorities for a very long time and will continue to be their pathway into a better future. So fun is only a concept that some athletes truly know or merely remember. Now days with rising tuition costs, more and more people are going to rely on athletic scholarships to pay their way through college. So for many athletes we lose the idea of fun when it comes to playing because it becomes our job. We lose the feeling that we got when we were five years old just carelessly running around, having fun, and we become tied down and worried about how our play will affect our future. We lose the concept of fun.

I have friends who play sports in college and many of them have athletic scholarships that help them pay for school. For some of my friends they truly love the sport they play and would have played even without a scholarship. They play because they love the sport and have fun while playing. Others are playing the sport only because they are getting a full ride scholarship off of their talents. They simply play to get a good education and to better their futures. What ever their reason for playing athletics should be fun! When we look back and see how we got to where we are today, its because we had fun all those years as kids playing the games we liked.

Fun for the Young

From the perspective of a child who grew up with sports all around me; practice, competition, and winning have been apart of my vocabulary at a very young age. Even at a young age I knew the difference between winning and losing and the feelings that come along with each. The one thing that I remember more than anything at a young age was the concept of fun. As a child starting sports around the age of five my father always pushed me to have fun. You see at age five, fun is the only thing that mattered because if you weren't having fun you wouldn't play the sport long enough to realize that you might actually have an act for it. My father never pushed me into any sport that I didn't want to do, instead he would suggest things that I might be good at and as it turned out he was right.

I started off being a cheerleader, that's right a cheerleader. At age five I was introduced into the sporting world with a pair of pom poms in hand. You see my dad coached, my brother played football, so it only made sense that I was the cheerleader. Cheerleading I found fun and it was a way to make friends and meet new people and I did it for five years until I was about ten years old. After I reached the age where cheerleading became not so fun I moved on to my next sport, soccer. Soccer was more of a transition sport, one that got me out of the girl cheerleading phase and into the true mentality of an athlete. I played soccer for three years with a little basketball thrown in there, but soon enough with the coaching changes it also became not fun. Lastly I moved on to basketball where I have been since. I remember playing one season of basketball in elementary school and hating it! I played that one season and quit, so it surprised me when my dad tried to get me to play again in middle school. He told me to just try it again so I did; I played my next season at the local community center and fell in love with the sport. Not only was I good at it, but it was fun and it was competitive which I loved. Basketball was fun which is why I have stuck with the sport for so long and am now playing it in college. There were times in basketball that I just wanted to quit, and if it had been any other sport I probably would have, but basketball it just drew me in and captured my competitive side. I'm not saying that everything was easy, there were times when I would come out of games crying because I was so frustrated, but it meant that I cared. It meant that I wanted to work harder and do better so that I wouldn't have to feel the pain of frustration. It meant that I truly enjoyed the sport and had fun playing even during tough times.

Your Mistaken

Mistakes are an inevitable part of life that we all must go through; no one is perfect and no escapes the horror of mistakes! For the most part mistakes have little impact on our lives except the occasional embarrassment factor while other mistakes can cost us a great deal of trauma in our lives. Many of the mistakes that I have gone through in my life have resulted in embarrassment and self pity. Theses mistakes range from public displays of idiocrasy to answering a question wrong in math class. My mistakes have tough me to learn without being afraid to answer a question wrong and to laugh. Up until this point in my life my mistakes have not been detrimental  life altering events; instead they have helped me to grow as a person. They have helped me in the process of becoming more comfortable with myself and to accept myself flaws & all. My mistakes have also given me a more humble view on life. It has shown me that there is no such thing as perfection, yet we have to learn to live with other's imperfections.

Failures are a whole different story in my life. I have had too many failures to count; some small and some that really affected me. Some of my smaller failures include getting bad grades on homework assignments. My larger failures such as not winning a scholarship that would help pay for college really affected me. My larger failures in live have made me feel really sad and disappointed at myself. They have also cause me to reflect on my actions. For instance with the scholarship that I did not win, I thought about my essay that I turned in. I went back to a copy of my essay and thought about everything that I could have done better. Both my mistakes and failures have helped me to grow intellectually and have helped me to have a more open view on society. At times my mistakes and failures have hurt me and have made me doubt myself. Though failing is a part of life, it does not feel good and to many consecutive mistakes and failures can cause one to rethink themselves. Through everything my failures have helped shape me into the person I am today and I have no regrets because without them I wouldn't be who I am today.

The Ever Confusing Relationships

Ah relationships, the one area in life everyone is a pro at, that is until it comes to their own relationships! Half the time I wonder if people especially myself, knows how to have a positive, functional relationship. That's just the thing every relationship is disfunctional at some point in time. Some make it past the chaos of the disfunction while others perish in the mist of everything. Looking back I have had relationships die that I though would last a lifetime, but instead lasted only a few months. Relationships that I viewed as important at the time, I look back on now and realize that I was strongly mistaken. My family relationship is one that is difficult to describe and one that I prefer not to talk about. We have been through ups and downs that seemed life ending at the time. I reflect on the crap that I put my family through when I was to stubborn to listen to anyone else besides myself. You see, when your in high school though it sounds shallow, the only that matters is friends and fitting in. My senior year in high school, I guess you could say I was feeling a little (a lot) rebellious. I did things that pushed my family away that caused them to view me in a different light. I would stay out later than normal, hang out with people I KNEW wouldn't land me anywhere but in trouble. Yet I still did it because I was to stubborn and blinded by my own actions, thoughts and ideas of "fitting in." The thing is the relationships I had with my so called friends are no longer here, most lasted a few month then we went our separate ways. Now that high school has ended, I remain friends with two people that I use to hangout with. These two people are my best friends that helped me get through high school and ultimately helped me find what was important to me, so it makes sense as to why I still talk to them. The one thing I have learned is that my family means the world to me. They have caused me pain and I the same, but we always seem to be there for each other. I'm not going to sugar coat it and say my family is the easiest of  people to talk to because they aren't. They irritate me beyond words, but when I need something they are here.

Confident Yet?

Some people have an arrogantly high confidence about themselves, and others have a painfully low confidence to themselves. Personally, I have a confidence that wavers and changes. Some days, some weeks, my confidence is at a high, but other days my confidence diminishes. My confidence comes from myself and from how others view me. It’s one thing to boost yourself up and it’s another to have someone else boosting you up, increasing your level of confidence. With saying that, the opposite is true as well. When people bring us down, that tends to cause us to doubt ourselves, decreasing our confidence level. Though we say we shouldn’t care about what others think about us most do, or at least I do.

Through basketball, my confidence level has been ridiculed, dissected and has become intangible to me at times. In both sports and academics, to lose your confidence and to not know why or where it went is one of the worst feelings in the world. To be asked, “What happened to you, you use to be such a confident player,” will drive any athlete insane. To perform at a level of play that is below what you know you are capable of is painful for others to watch and painful to experience as a student athlete on and off the court. All we have now days is out confidence, so to lose it is scary to say the least. All the studying, all the tutorials mean nothing if you are not secure enough to sit down and truly believe that you can ace the test. So when we have a high confidence level how do we keep it; more importantly when we lose our confidence where do we go? For me it is as simple as believing the words that I say to myself. When my confidence is low I usually tell myself, “I can do this,” or “You’ve prepared yourself for this.” The trick is not to just say the words, but to actually believe the words that I tell myself! How do we know it works? For me when I truly believe the words I tell myself with every last fiber in my body, that’s when it will work. When I see my game or academics turn around for success that is my sign that I’m back! For any athlete or good student a loss of confident, just means we have to refocus and work harder. It means that we have to remember why and how we got to where we are today and remember that when push comes to shove we are good enough to succeed.