It's been almost a year since I touched you, cried over you, picked you up, since you were my whole entire life, since I had fun with you, got frustrated with you, spent pretty much every moment of everyday with you, laughed because of you and got excited because of you. It's been almost a year since I played the sport I love and it still hurts just as bad as the day I let it go.
Giving up softball was probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do. When you're making the decision of whether or not you want to continue your sports career in college, you don't think about how giving it up will truly make you feel. You think about what you're going to lose. You'll lose the social connection your sport gives you, you'll lose being special because of how talented you are at your sport, maybe you'll lose some muscle definition or you think you'll lose your ability to stand out.
But you don't think about the good feelings you'll lose. You lose the feeling of joy you can only receive by the crowd cheering for you after you hit a home run. You lose the feeling of security knowing that no matter what your teammates have your back and love you. You lose the feeling of accomplishment which you received every time you finished a workout that literally made you cry. You lose the feeling of knowing no matter how bad your day is, you'll get through it and have something to look forward to at the end of the day, something to work for.
You lose your sense of purpose. This isn't to say that one day you won't find something else that makes you feel that same sense of purpose. But for a long while after losing a chunk of yourself, you feel an exceedingly deep hole. It takes time to cope with something you have never had to experience before, and for most of us, that's exactly what this situation is. It's new and unfamiliar. You suddenly have more free time than you know what to do with. You just lost what you worked the hardest for. You feel like you gave up in a way. You think maybe the past ten years were wasted on this sport. So many emotions run through your head and you doubt your decision.
Doubt consumed me for quite a while after I made my decision to end my softball career in high school. It wasn't that I didn't love it enough to continue, it wasn't that I didn't want to continue, and for a long while, I caught myself explaining this to countless amounts of people. As if I owed them an explanation, when really I was trying to justify my decision to myself.
Although the pain of losing something so important to me, still haunts me today. I do feel a sense of justification. In my heart, I know I made the right decision and I know that God has a very special plan for my life that may not always line up with my plan for my life. I know that through prayer and weighing my options, I made the right decision. I was happy at a school that hadn't offered me to play for them, and that was tough to accept, but I'm more than happy where I ended up. I can't imagine a time when thinking about softball doesn't make me hurt and doesn't make me wish that I was still playing, but along with those feelings of loss and hurt are some pretty amazing memories, lessons and feeling of fulfillment.
