This year of swimming has been especially challenging for me. Though I may have been focused more on the physical aspects of swimming throughout the year, I wasn’t too focused on my mental aspect towards it. Throughout this year especially, I hadn’t been enjoying the sport as much as before and I felt that it was difficult to go swimming. Not only has my love for the sport been dying out, it was also difficult to maintain a consistent commitment to the sport because of academic stress and pressure. Being at the end of grade 11, where academic pressures are high, I had to ensure that I got the grades I wanted to apply to the schools I wanted to go to. This was an example of the challenges that I had faced throughout grade 11. However, throughout these hardships, I was able to persevere and get through the year not only maintaining my swimming commitment and academics but also with my happiness. This helped me develop by understanding myself and how to balance my happiness with my commitments. I feel that this has shown growth as I had to make adjustments to my schedules for my sake which meant that I cut down on swimming and spent more time relaxing and destressing, because what was once a stress-reducing activity (swimming) had actually started inducing stress as a result of the expectations and performance requirements in swimming. In general, I was quite pleased with my performance at the end of grade 11 and being crowned SEASAC champions as a team again was also quite gratifying as the hard work that had been put in had paid off.
