Throughout my life I have been doubted. Doubted by some of my closest friends, family members, and even coaches. When I was younger, many people commented about me, a girl, playing baseball. "Why is she playing a boy's sport? That's what softball is for." I didn't focus on what sport I should have been playing at the time being. Instead I focused on the task at hand. I was laughed at, criticized by parents, and even cut playing time due to my gender rather than my ability.

As I grew older, I didn't realize what the definition of adversity was until it started to affect me in emotional ways. I never really had a specific person I looked to for motivation. I was just taught the overused phrase "never give up."

No matter how well you perform or how bad you fail, you'll always fall short for that one person. Not just athletes but people see failure as such a bad thing. I used to be one of those people, seeing failure as another form of letting myself and all the other people around me, down.

Within the past year, I grew to love failure. Failure is discovering another way of how not to do something. Its like when you're taking a test and you cross out all the multiple choice answers that don't quite fit, that's how I look at failure. You tend to figure out the pieces, even when you pick the wrong ones, you learn from it and you get it right for the next opportunity. And if you don't get it right, form a habit or routine until you do get it right and continue to get it right, so you'll never be able to get it wrong again. Failing has taught me how to appreciate success. Failure can give you more than what it seems to take. It will close a few doors, but open some new ones that you didn't see from the beginning point of view. It will give you a bigger purpose for what you are working so hard to reach.

And if you do not want to be better than the day, hour, minute, second before, you will not be successful. Do not listen to the side comments of others telling you that YOU CAN'T achieve your dreams, goals, ambitions because I guarantee damn well they say that only because they do not have that fire inside themselves.

I know it seems easy for me to say to keep fighting when the going gets rough, when it seems that the world is against you and you have nothing else but to be negative. I not saying this to try and encourage anyone or to even motivate someone. I want to be that girl who was the inspiration to someone else, because everything I just wrote I lived through, and it isn't the easiest thing to take in. Believe me when I say this, you are your own hero, be your own inspiration first so you can inspire others when you prove everyone else wrong.

I would rather fail 999 times and succeed once, rather than succeed 999 times and fail once. I was formed, shaped, and rebuilt by failure. And guess what... I proved them all wrong.