I’m not blowing my friends off with an excuse that doesn’t exist. I wish I wasn’t so busy. My time is always preoccupied and I hardly have time to do my work with 11:59 am due dates. I wake up every morning at 4 AM to get ready for my sunrise practice. By the time it is over, I have 30 minutes left to get ready for school. Sometimes in the afternoon, I won’t be home until 6:30 pm and maybe have a light dinner with a side of homework. I’m constantly being drowned with everything I have to do, have to attend. But funny enough, the drowning helps.
I’ve always loved swimming since I could open my eyes my dad was giving me swimming lessons, not to train me to be a swimmer but to increase my quality of life. But, as fate would have it, I’ve become a member of a D1 swim team. The weightless feeling of the water, how hard I get to focus and push myself to make my goals and times, the friendships and bonding I make with my teammates from breakfast, after we have been practicing in the cold water for hours on end. Everything I do in the chlorine helps mold me into the person everybody sees and loves. Another connection I can make with swimming is reading, they both help me live and take a break from due dates.I get to space out and enter a mind space where all that matters is to breathe and concentrate. It is freeing in a way that people who don’t understand just don’t get it. I’ve realized that I have connections in which music affects both my reading and swimming.
Right now, while reading and writing this, I’m listening to music to zone out and help me dissociate while enhancing my performance in swimming because it makes the throbbing pain of my lungs against my ribs from butterfly stroke less intense.
I’m so dependent on these somewhat ordinary hobbies because I want to relate to others and create semi-friendships where we can talk and bond with each other. Although I enjoy my alone time, I cannot live and breathe without a hint of chlorine in my nose, music in my ears, and a hidden library inside my book bag.