Personal Narrative: How Baseball Changed My Life

Playing sports beyond a recreational level can seem, well, not so recreational. In my senior year, I decided to leave what had grown to cause me so much pain, both physically and emotionally, in favor of producing/making music. Humans tend to have irrational fears about many things. From fear of the dark, to fear of people who are different than ourselves, we have trouble getting out of our comfort-zones, even with clear evidence that we should not necessarily be comfortable in those “zones.” For me, what I thought was my end-all-be-all comfort zone, baseball, when I first started high-school, slowly began to turn into the most depressing aspect of my life. Little did I know that this failure to achieve my original goal would be beneficial, …show more content…
Playing baseball at my school was, for those who had the talent, commitment, and love of the game, a great investment in their futures. Even though I would usually rather go home and play video-games after school than endure the torture-sessions that were my baseball workouts, I thought the three hours I put in each day would amount to something beyond life experience, and I found joy in that. However, each year after my eighth-grade season, injuries plagued my ability to reach my full potential. My coaches and teammates began to exponentially lose faith in me, despite telling me that I should just “keep at it.” After the first two seasons, this advice made sense; I still had a love for the game. However, as my promising talent in eighth-grade never evolved and out-maneuvered my injuries, I lost my …show more content…
Yes, I was a little bummed about not living up to my expectations. Fair enough. Though honestly, looking back, this was an amazing problem to have had. How could I be mad, when I, a middle-class American, have had more opportunity than 99.9% of the people who’ve ever lived on this earth? I still have endless opportunities to live a successful life. What makes me “angsty” is the ignorance I see in many people, including myself. “Poor me, my arm can no longer throw a ball adequately.” Meanwhile, there’s a boy in Africa who’s about to die simply because he drank from the one area that has water: the local stream. My friend was mad that his parents made him stay home on a Friday night. It’s just too bad that he had to stay in his boring $500,000 house that night, sending “Snapchats” to his friends on his iPhone (which is what has been distracting him from taking advantage of the $20,000 education his parents paid for). Maybe he should try trading places with one of the 12,000,000 people displaced from Syria. At least then, he wouldn’t have to worry about staying

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Personal Narrative: How Baseball Changed My Life