triskaidekaphobia

I guess I didn't realize how much I rely on and love being a part of a team in gymnastics now. Since I've been home and working out at my gym again, it's made me truly realize how much I appreciate how much each of us does for each other, from little encouragements to full-blown screaming your lungs out at meets, it all adds up and has made a huge difference for me. I think coming into college, I didn't realize how much of a team atmosphere had really grown at MIT, and how little I was doing gymnastics for myself anymore, and how much I was doing it for my team. As I was getting ready to vault today, the mats were stacked up higher than I would like, and the horse was slightly on the wrong setting for me, so naturally I was a little nervous. I was getting ready to go and it took me way more tries than it would normally take me to go for something, and I was trying to figure out why things felt different. It was then I realized how much I both loved having and needed in a way my teammates to be there to push me, because at that moment, the only reason I would flip was for my own satisfaction and benefit, and at this stage in the game, that's not enough for me anymore. No one was cheering like I'm used to, and it took a lot more of my energy to get myself to go than usual.

I guess sometimes it takes stepping back a bit to see how much of a good thing you really have! :)

I feel sort of like I just came out of one of those huge dust storms, where everything gets swept up, moved around, and there's chaos for a bit, and then there's the sort of eerie resettlement of everything that got picked up. There's that time when everyone sits and waits, making sure it's really over before they start going about their daily lives again.

I came into college sure of myself, of what I wanted, where I was going, and how I was going to do it. Last semester, I felt a lot of that give way to various things, mostly because I was faced with more choices than ever before. And I realized that what I thought was so simple and clear wasn't really. Now, I've noticed more and more me feeling like my old self, doing the things I used to do, the things I used to think, and my old dreams come back. I came out of high school wanting to go into the Peace Corps because that seemed to me at the time as the best way that I could help people the way I dreamed of doing. After last semester's putzing around trying to figure out what was going on at MIT, thinking about how people here are approaching the same problems I want to fix from a completely different angle, I still want to do the Peace Corps, but I have a sense of the fact that it's a very temporary solution to a deep-rooted problem. The question then becomes, I suppose, what am I going to do to change those tough problems? If I had the answer, I guess I wouldn't be sitting here writing this, first of all, I'd be out doing it. But, I feel like I'm back on track again. Except, I feel like I'm walking along the same path I've been walking all my life but with my eyes open instead of closed.