Ambition-Personal Narrative Swimming

“I quit.” The phrase seems simple enough, yet these two words possess a powerful meaning behind them. Just these two words speak for themselves: “I” as in myself, “quit” as in giving up. People view the world as a place meant for engaging in opportunities and seeking challenges. And after several years of working to find certain tasks we fit best in, we perceive satisfaction. Months and years go on as we try to improve our skills and conquer our goals to be the best that we possibly can. We overcome obstacles and learn from our mistakes. This convoluted path of striving to be our best consists of a range of emotions: frustration to contentedness and hopelessness to ambition. We remain resilient throughout the hardships we face by keeping our

I developed a love and passion for swimming with both the support of my loving parents and coaches and the positive relationships between my teammates and myself. Then, the most significant change came around: high school swimming. Based upon the rumors I heard as an eighth grader, swimming was known to be the toughest, most time-consuming sport in high school. Although comments about the lack of sleep and the coach’s personality sounded intimidating, I did not let them affect my passion for swimming. With the help of upperclassmen as positive role models and constant reminders from reassuring posters with quotes such as “Every race is an opportunity to measure yourself against your own potential,” I retained a positive mindset. I consistently persisted through even the toughest practices at six in the morning everyday before school. Although the practices were grueling, they helped me to perform my best at meets and to qualify for divisionals and state. Through my first season of high school swimming, I fought hard to overcome obstacles, such as an awful case of pneumonia. After a tedious year of swimming, I began to question whether swimming was a sport I truly wanted to continue. I took into consideration the busy schedule that I would soon endure, consisting of SAT exams, AP classes, and extracurricular activities and clubs. With the hectic junior year just around the corner, I knew ending my swimming career before

The word is even defined as “to give up or resign; let go; relinquish.” But giving up is not always the case. All people, adults, children, teachers, and students, take on new opportunities and expect to encounter successes and failures. Once we reach a point of success or satisfaction, we look for other opportunities in the world to broaden our scope of life. Yet we let others see ourselves as someone with a weak mental attitude, someone that quits. I now realize that I did not quit swimming; I simply moved on from it. I hit my peak of success or a point of moving on to bigger and greater things. This simple phrase enabled me to see the world with a new perspective. It gave me license to act without worries about the negative connotation attached to the phrase “I quit.” I learned that I am a person of an outgoing mindset not a weak mindset. From that moment, I discovered that we should not let people constrain us to the question “you quit?” But instead, we should respond with the phrase, “I moved on.” And while this may seem like an insignificant semantic difference between the two phrases, the contextual difference between the two is tremendous. As a part of life, events allow humans to move on from aspects of life such as sports, hobbies, and even friends to take on new opportunities and perspectives, but this does not mean we are quitting; it is just