Media Room

Life Regrets

Think of a time when you made a decision that you later regretted. Was it something that changed your life or someone’s close to you? How would your life have changed if you did things differently? How would it be the same?

Growing up, I had a strong passion for playing baseball, and when I got older I switched over to playing softball with the girls. I loved every part of it, the weekend tournaments, the feeling of getting hits and making my team proud, the fact that I had the non-Spanish speaking girls on my team cheering for others in Spanish, everything. When I entered high school, I was eager to tryout for the team there, and I knew that because of all my years of experience I would have made it without a problem.

The day of the tryouts came, and after school I walked into the girl’s locker room with my softball bag over my shoulder but I was suddenly overcome with such an intense amount of fear, anxiety, nervousness, and doubt, that I made the decision to take my things and walk out just as quickly as I had come in. I never went back to try out any of the other days, and I never got to play on the high school team. I ended up playing for my town league once again, but once you reach a certain age, you just can’t play anymore.

After that occurrence in the spring of my freshman year of high school, I began struggling more intensely with my emotions. Things began to get more difficult to handle on my own, and I eventually left my school and began to attend a therapeutic school in the middle of my sophomore year. To this day I wonder if making the choice and taking the chance to tryout that one day would have led me to have created a safer sense of community and belonging at my school, and would have therefore not have led me down the path of everything that happened thereafter. Would making that team have made me realized I was able to succeed there? Would life have been different if I would have stayed at that high school playing softball all 4 years?

I will never know those answers, but I still do wonder what it would of been like. I am now part of a great team of awesome members, and although we do not play on a sports team, I wouldn’t have met them if I had decided to tryout that one fateful day back in ninth grade.