How I Balance My Life and Basketball Essay Example

As I have grown older there are always things I wonder about. Things ranging from how people’s thought process works or why in the world someone would eat peanut butter with celery sticks. Some things just do not sit right with me. I try and balance my thoughts and think about one thing at a time. However, it always results in me being distracted and overthinking about every single thing all at once. I have never been good at balancing the things in my life. I believe that is why I have trouble balancing my life and basketball. I feel as though I have two different lives, my basketball life and my regular life. Somehow I need to figure out which one is more important, which one is more valuable.

As I live in the present, I always reminisce about my past. I do not know a specific time or day that I started to have an unbalance between the two lives. But as I look back and watch how the two progressed, I still wonder about some things. I try to figure out how all of it became unbalanced. But regardless of how I look at it, it will always be a part of me. Yes, I do wish I could change how I live both lives, but for right now I need to improve both and eventually make them one.     

Earliest I can remember having a balance between the two is during the times I first started to play basketball. During that age, I did not have to worry about anything due to my lack of knowledge. I was more worried about which color crayon I was going to use to color my house. I was clueless about the major political events and global warming epidemics. My days would be filled with laughter and the silliness of five and six years old picking their boogers. I can remember laying down on the hard, freshly placed wood chips while looking at the sky and just closing my eyes. Times like those are where I realized that I was taking my time. I was calm and peaceful. When I got home I knew I would have time to do my homework, eat, and take a nap before I go to practice. I was never in a rush because I knew I had time to do both things. 

Basketball practice was normal. It was one of the best parts of my day. During practice, I would play around and shoot every time I get a chance. I was careless about my mistakes and did not care what everyone else thought about how I played. I would dance during practice and laugh at the corniest jokes my coach would tell. I would always wear these long shorts that went down to my ankles. My clothes were so baggy that sometimes I would trip over my shorts and everyone would see my Dora panties. This happened so many times that I just started to laugh because it became a tradition amongst the team. Practice when I was younger was always kind of faded in the background. At that point in my life, it was not as important to me yet. However as I got closer to the end of my elementary school career, I began to see basketball as something I can pursue. And from then on, I was focused on that one thing because I knew that it was my first love. 

When middle school came around, I was expecting my life to change. The school work hit me like a deer in headlights. In sixth grade, I was not hit with much but at the time I believed it was a lot. That year was very uneventful. I was more worried about how I was going to play during my games then what algebraic expressions were. Seventh grade is when I started to struggle between my two lives. I carried my habit from sixth grade of focusing on basketball over to that school year. I began to believe that basketball was the only way I am going to get a scholarship or even go to college for that matter. My grades were affected so much by basketball that year that I began seeing that I was losing myself in a void filled with only orange circular balls. 

Finally, my last year of middle school came. I was expecting that year to be filled with careless actions and stupid pranks throughout the hallways. But all I got was stress and a lot of it. I was confused about what was important and who was important. When I finally figured it out, something else popped up making me confused again. Basketball at the time was the only break I got from the place we call “school”. It was my haven. So I began going to basketball training more, playing more games with my summer ball time, and going to weight training more to try and feel safe and relaxed like I used to. 

In high school, my basketball life has begun to determine how much I interact with my other life. Receiving a bunch of homework and then going to practice everyday drains me. Most times I do not feel like doing a whole study guide filled with math that I will never use. I try to keep up an appearance making it look like I have everything under control when I am screaming inside while going crazy. I have not felt like myself in a while. I feel like I am always expected to make straight A’s and be this perfect person all while trying to be this all-star athlete. Trying to make sure everyone is happy around me and not taking care of myself has become a regular thing. I have always been a selfless person.

The facade I keep up with helps me cover up how I feel about not being able to figure out who I am or what I was put on this earth to do. I always think that maybe I was put here to be a smelly homeless person on the side of the road asking for change. Although I know I could be more than that, I do not want to get there by being unhappy and not being able to be a teenager for other's approval of what I want to do with my life. Living my life should be my choice based on what I want and if that involves having two lives for right now, then I am perfectly fine with that. Both lives are what make me, me.