We are here for the tournament, and I’m equally excited and nervous.
I got used to managing my emotions before tournaments, but sometimes the panic and stress manage to spill into my brain faster than I get to build the wall to prevent it from happening.
It’s the minus of it all. The thrill is great, but I also get scared.
The pressure sometimes gets to the point where I throw up before a game, and, as you can imagine, it’s not great for my play.
Stress gets so high I feel like someone is pushing my head underwater, and I’m slowly losing life.
We agreed to go straight to bed so we would feel fresh in the morning, but lying in this new hotel room, staring at a ceiling that’s too white, I can’t turn my brain off.
I hate when I lose control over my body. I feel trapped in this cycle of thought that changes every second, but each one is so complex that it feels like hours.
It’s like a cage where the bars become thicker and thicker the more thoughts come, and the more I focus on each topic.
I feel panic as the escape is slowly taken away from me, and I can’t do anything because all I can focus on is the past and the future. Never the present.
No one can save you from yourself.
I practiced for this tournament for months, but lately my head isn’t where it needs to be.
Every night I can’t sleep. I wake up feeling more tired than when I went to sleep. More stressed out, and more incomplete.
It’s an excruciating process of slowly losing yourself.
Most days, I act normally.
I train, I laugh, I talk, I imagine, and I feel fine.
The sun makes me delirious, and I manage to convince myself everything is fine, fine, fine.
But when the nights come, the weight of my mistakes presses down so hard I can’t breathe. Those nights aren’t pretty.
They’re just me, curled up in the dark, my phone light too bright against my face, my thoughts clawing at me until sleep feels like a joke.
What if’s that manage to throw me off track well enough that getting back on is impossible.
What if my real self isn’t worthy of love?
What if I’ll never be enough — not good enough, not pretty enough, not anything enough?
What if the second I stop pretending, everyone leaves?
It’s me versus me. My flaws versus my perfections.
I hate it.
Living inside a bad mindset is dangerous, especially in my career, but I don’t have a choice.
At night, I let myself crumble quietly, letting tears carve rivers down my cheeks, letting my thoughts claw at me like wild animals. In the morning, I put on my normal face, and everything goes back to normal until the sun sets again.
Myuglinessbelongs to the night. That’s when it spills out.
In shadows.
In whispers.
In the hollow spaces no one else can see.
