In the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I had no sense of direction. I had questionable priorities and lacked long-term goals. Getting enough sleep and spending time with the new friends that I’d made were the most important things on my mind and I cruised through the first semester carelessly. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my academics, but rather that I felt like I had all the time in the world to adapt to high school.
At the same time, I had just made it onto my school’s swim team. It was a sudden transition from swimming recreationally to pumping out hundreds of laps everyday, but I loved it. At every practice, I challenged myself to push harder than the day before; at every competition, I had an overwhelming need to swim a personal best time. While my school grades trembled early on, I held steady in my desire to become faster in the water. Once the first season ended, I realized that I needed other goals to accomplish. So, I transferred my focus to schoolwork. As the years progressed, I became a far more diligent student and I improved greatly in the pool. Swimming kept me grounded and I really think that it saved me from what could have been an academic downspiral.
Yet while I’ve learned to discipline myself both academically and athletically, I’ve also become more stressed over the years. Of course I expect to become a better-informed and more knowledgeable person as I continue through college, and I hope that I’ll quickly find that one subject or class that I love and choose to pursue—but I’m still concerned that, at the end of this semester, I’ll remain completely unsure of what I want to do in the future. I have more responsibilities now than just schoolwork and swimming, and I’m scared that I’ll never be able to find the perfect balance between all the things going on in my life. And while I hope to settle into a solid daily routine, I don’t want school to become tedious. I remember the weeks in high school when I felt completely run down, and I want to do everything I can to avoid that feeling during my next four years in college.