Since the age of six I had been forced to participate in competitive swimming by both of my parents. Prior to one of the greatest and worst year’s of my life, thus being 2020. At first, I loved to swim. Being able to race and win who ever I was racing, was everything I could have ever wanted. However, this turned out to be the main reason of my short competitive swimming career. After years and years of always having no one I felt who could compete with me in my same age range, I stopped caring and started to become bored. Up until 2020, when all public buildings closed down in my area because of Covid 19. Therefor forcing my parents to finally take me out of swimming, without being able to do anything about it.
I was thrilled, no more lessons, cancelling plans all because they landed on my swimming days and most of all, no more having to beg my mom not to let me go to classes! Nevertheless, it wasn’t all wonderful, as I had previously imaged. Without swimming I had nothing to do after school or even in general. As it was for many people, I started to spend an excessive amount of time on social media. Nine, ten almost eleven hours I would spend of my small bright blue screen given to me that very same year. It didn’t matter this was what I had wanted for so long. I still felt like there was a lingering feeling inside of me that there was something I should have been doing. After the lockdowns were lifted nothing had changed. I didn’t go back to swimming every week, and the feeling obviously never left my side till I got back into the competitive water five years later.
As I felt the cold smelly water dripping down my back as my coach yelled our lesson was over, I felt a sense of home over taking me. Before this I had never understood why people get so inflamed about different sports. They all looked stupid and greatly immature through my point of view, yet I had felt all different types of emotions within the span of two minutes. Angry, I hadn’t started sooner. Sad, I wasn’t as nearly as good as I had once was and lastly joyful I had finally learned to love to swim once again.