There was a saying on my old team that I swam for when I lived in Nevada. Our mantra was “Pain is temporary, victory is forever.” And while I experienced plenty of pain during long distance sets and grueling doubles, I never really knew what victory looked like. Was it immense time drops, first-place finishes, achieving new time standards, or collecting team records? Or maybe all the above?
While this was the way victory was quantified for me during my time in Las Vegas, its meaning drastically changed when I moved to Maryland in August of 2023. Suddenly, a successful day meant meeting a new person I would want to talk to the next day. A successful week would be staying on top of all my classwork. A successful month would be going to every swim practice and working my hardest without any friends or competition.
As I spent more time in Maryland, my swimming began to fall off. Due to a poor training program and no one to match my speed in practice, my times began to plateau, and then regress. Needing a reset, I switched teams, hoping better training would lead to better results. Unfortunately, health issues began to plague me consistently, resulting in inconsistent performances and sometimes being unable to compete fully at meets. With swim being more consistently a negative in my life than a positive, I needed another source of victory to draw from.
Going into senior year, I wasn’t known for participating much in school or social activities. It is true that swim required immense time and energy commitments, often leaving me unavailable or too tired for many extracurricular excursions. With the opportunities I could take advantage of, my social anxiety would often take precedence in my decision making, leaving me at home by myself instead of out with friends all too often throughout the week.
However, something clicked senior year. I knew that this was my last year of high school and I should take advantage of every opportunity possible. Therefore, I decided I wouldn’t turn down any social events and I would participate in all of the school activities I could. The results of this experiment couldn’t have been better.
It took over three years of high school, but I finally came into my own. Pushing myself outside my comfort zone led me to discover new friend groups and meet new people with whom I shared an instant connection. I found myself announcing flag football games, participating in the staff-student basketball game, and being a senior captain of the swim team. I know these sound like every-day occurrences, but to me, the happiness I gained from these small experiences was monumental.
And that’s how wins for me began to expand beyond the pool and into my everyday life. I began to see how rewarding the sense of accomplishment felt as I realized I was starting to figure out the type of person I was. I was in fact a person who wanted to be involved in announcing school events, going to three proms, and maybe a blind baking challenge with my friends on a random Wednesday night. I was someone who valued meeting new people, sharing my interests through writing or audio form, and going golfing with the guys on a random Sunday afternoon.
An enormous part of me rounding into full form this year was taking newspaper. I’ve always been passionate about journalism, but all of my previous experience was through the podcasts I started during junior year. This year, I was able to expand my repertoire of coverage through learning print journalism and all of the nuances that came with it.
Through newspaper, I was able to funnel all of the thoughts inside of my head into articles full of passion and the ambition to convey to the audience all of the information they needed to know about a topic. I desired to make my interests worth reading to potential readers, and that motivation catalyzed an even bigger passion for journalism as I took on the challenge of indirectly convincing readers why my interests were worth their time.
Newspaper offered me an escape from the real world into a land where it was just my thoughts and a Google Doc for 42 minutes at a time. Just having that time to work on an article of my choosing helped me focus all of my anxieties and problems into the best possible content I could offer. And that in itself was a huge victory for me every day.
Now, I am going off to college in Granville, Ohio, where I will pursue a career in journalism and a national championship or two while I am at it. I am excited to take the progress I have made in discovering who I am to have the most fulfilling college experience possible and set myself up well for success after I graduate.
To summarize, high school has been a period of tremendous growth and a redefining of what winning the day looks like. I now know that pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone extends far beyond the swimming pool. Henceforth, I am better able to perceive the small victories in life and realize that they are not nearly as small as I thought they were.
I also want to thank you Ms. Starr, for an incredible year and for opening my eyes to how to best deal with adversity. You are a huge reason that I’ve made this growth as a person, as you’ve taught me to not be too hard on myself and how to bounce back from crippling defeats; whether athletic, academic, or in my personal life. I am incredibly sad that my time in newspaper is over, but I hope your new students next year realize how special of an opportunity this class is and take full advantage of it. Thank you!
