What makes you happy when you are at the lowest of the low?

 

My year was busy.

My year taught me many things, one of which was to find the happy from the sad.

 

Imagine my life where I’ve spent the past ten years doing a sport I loved,

Imagine that the sport made me happier than I ever was.

Now, imagine how that sport tore apart my life.

 

This past year I became a senior in high school, focused on college.

This past year I realized something new.

This past year I knew I didn’t want to take my sport to the next level.

Not for the first time, this past year I broke my mom’s heart.

 

It hurt to tell my family that what I once loved, I now hated.

It hurt to face my coaches and teammates with my decision.

It hurt to be moved to a lower level group with little kids who I would never understand.

It hurt to look at my sport and realize that I would never belong there again.

But what hurt the most, was the burden I knew I now put on my family.

 

You see, college is darn expensive.

You see, my parents relied on me to get scholarships from my sport to pay for my school.

You see, my brother has a reading disability, our parents planned to pay for his school, not mine.

So now you can really see, what no longer made me happy, made my family happy.

 

Despite this time passed, and with time my mind cleared.

Despite this I didn’t need my sport to live because there was a whole world I’d yet discovered.

I knew that despite it all, there was a plan for me.

 

What is happiness I asked myself at the lowest of the low?

 

Happiness, for me, was found in accepting and loving myself, the one place I now learned.