Everyone seems to ask me why I'm home, and how I'm doing, and I think I finally figured it out.
I'M DEALING.
Dealing with what you may ask? Dealing with everything . . . friends, academics, athletics, etc. Pretty much just everything all at once. I guess the easiest way to put it is that I kinda got my feet knocked out from under me, and I just had to figure out how to get things back on track. I guess I could have got things back on track out at school, but then things that I probably would want to have go well wouldn't because I was so absorbed with other things. And I wasn't willing to put my academics and my athletics at that risk.
Okay, so how/when did everything become crazy? Well, I think everything started in March/April/May. Umm...I guess I should give some background info, huh? Freshman year I swam for UMASS. I had been swimming since I was 10, and I guess I was pretty good because I was the only freshman on scholarship. Well, the season didn't exactly go as I, or the coach, had planned. I swam significantly slower than I should have and I just wasn't having fun anymore. That was hard because swimming had always been everything to me and then all of a sudden it just wasn't fun anymore. It was, in fact, the last thing that I wanted to be doing at any given moment. Okay, when I finally realize this completely, it's March. I started competing in track in March also. In mid April I was given the opportunity to be given a scholarship for track, but I would have to give up swimming completely. So after a lot of thought, I decided that track would probably be the best thing for me to do because I was having fun with it and it was working for me. Ummm....in April, met wilson, which was probably the only thing that kept me from not going crazy with everything else. So, I went home this summer. I was away from wilson and away from swimming, and I guess that depressed me more than I was willing to admit at the time. It just kinda sucked throughout the whole summer. I was mopey, there wasn't really much going on here in WI, so I just had time to think about things that just depressed me even more. And, as I'm realizing now, not swimming hurt me a lot. It was hard to go to practice and not be able to do things that I had once, and I'm thinking that that just added to my mood and everything.
So I got out to school this fall, and I guess things all just kinda hit me at once. Nothing went according to plan. I found out some things that I didn't really want to know, and I had to figure out how to deal with them. And I guess I just figured it would be easier to deal with the depression that I was feeling and everything else I was dealing with around my family and my best friends where I would have no distractions to get in my way of figuring out how to stand back up. So right now I guess the best way to put it is . . . I'm standing. Maybe shakily, but I think with a little more time I should be able to stand on my own without support from the people that are giving the most. Yeah, I know I'll still need the support, but I don't want it to be what's holding me up. (Yeah, I know it's a stupid analogy, but it's the one that I thought would best describe how I'm feeling and what I'm doing. Maybe it's just that it makes sense to me because I know all the minute details, but I guess it's just gonna have to do for now.)
I know you're probably all thinking that the whole swimming/track thing is kind of an immature reason to take a semester off, and I know from what I've said it sounds like that's why I took off, but it's just the tip of everything. Everything else just builds on that and makes things seem bigger and it just got so I had to deal with them.
Well, that's my story. Think of it what you will.