It was a beautiful night in the summer of 2018. I got to the pool at around 7 P.M with the rest of the team, right about when practice started. Once we dove into the pool I felt relaxed under the calm, cool water. This was just like any other practice, we would swim many laps until our arms ached. The practice seemed normal until I noticed something. What once was relaxing calm water began to feel freezing. I didn’t think anything of it and just decided to ignore it. I started to work harder to keep my mind off of it. However, when practice finished I normally felt like I could keep swimming some more. However, this time was different. I felt as if I could not get out of the pool faster. Even though I loved swimming, I just didn’t want to swim anymore. 

I felt that I was swimming way too much. I was wondering if I was just being lazy. I can not describe how much I did not want to swim. What I noticed was that I started to not want to go to any swim practices, and I just wanted to stay at home. I would do anything to stop swimming. That was when I realized  that if I put too much energy into doing something, and if I feel some pressure to do it I begin to stop wanting to do it. It felt like swimming was stealing my life. 

Eventually I stopped swimming completely, and decided I would instead take piano lessons. In the beginning, I loved to find different songs to play and learn. It was so nice to hear the sounds of the piano float off the pages and into my ears as I read the notes. But then I started to hate playing the piano. Playing too much piano caused the same effect of swimming. Piano was taking over my life. I have found that if there is something that I really want to get good at and I love to do it, but not all the time, I won’t hate doing it. Personally for me, it is parkour. I love doing parkour because it is exhilarating to run around and soar through the air like a hawk. I do parkour  1 day a week and that is just the right amount of time. I go to a gym with a lot of high walls, bars and other equipment, with people who love to do the same thing as I do.

         This is a complicated issue for me. If I do something too much and I feel pressured to continue I usually don’t like that activity any more. This pressure mostly comes from my parents and myself. I keep pushing myself to get better at things which eventually causes me to overwork myself. This causes me to feel like it was impossible for me to work anymore. For me, no matter how much I love to do something, focusing on just one activity too much, I find boring. I like doing different things. I feel that I now have a balance of activities that are fun and interesting. 

  I have spent  a lot of time thinking about why I stopped doing activities that I once loved. I feel that I understand myself better having looked at my behavior about swimming and  piano lessons. What I learned about myself is that I need to keep a healthy balance of  different activities to find enjoyment and stay interested. I realize that I am not lazy when I want to do something else, I want the opportunity to try lots of different activities and experience all kinds of  new things. This is an important lesson for me to have learned. In the future, I will be more mindful of my tendency to jump into something and put so much energy into it that I burn out. This is what happened with swimming and the piano. These activities took up all my free time and so I felt trapped. When I stopped doing them I felt relieved that I could do other things. It is important to me that I gained some understanding about myself. Even though I get burnt out from doing something a lot I can still focus a lot on mastering one specific skill. For example: I want to study law. I know that this will take a lot of time and energy. My plan is to balance this out with a variety of extracurricular activities that I enjoy. 

Prompt: The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later

success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it

affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?