One Day You Wont be an Athlete Anymore..

Self Portrait

https://www.hudl.com/video/3/4169090/59b047b4da5beb0b64c8590e,

Flash Fiction

One day you won’t be an athlete anymore. You won’t have those long bus rides home after a game you lost or won. You won’t have those hyped up moments of catching people while going or hurdles on the blue oval. You won’t have those hyped up moments of you intercepting the ball and running it back for a touchdown. You won’t wake up early on Saturdays for film. You won’t get to post pictures on the Gram or Twitter. You won’t be sore from the track meet or football game and have all the cuts and bruises. You won’t do your pregame rituals anymore. You won’t talk to you bros or team mates anymore or have those laughs like you use to everyday. Eventually everything you looked forward to at the end of the week will fade away. That thing you’d relieve your stress with will end. All the memories and laughs will fade away. Capture it while you can and make the MOST of every moment. Make it as far as you can for as long as you can l, because one day you won’t be an athlete anymore.

Rationale

I feel like these two relate really well to each other and not just because they're both about sports. They relate so well to each other because they both have deeper meaning. Both have meaning of brotherhood and family. I wouldn’t have gotten to take those pictures without my brother’s parents taking them. I wouldn’t have made all of those plays without my team and coaches being there for me and bonding together. Some of us have been together now for 11 years playing that sport and putting our time and effort into making it the best we could. It was so hard accepting that it was actually over after all of that time. Our coach talks about not having regrets but its hard not to when you don’t get what you’ve been working towards basically you’re whole life. Even after it all were still together as a family and one unit. I guess you could say there’s somewhat of an unconditional love for what we do and you can see that if you went to any of our games. How much passion there is in every player on that field. When it finally set in my head that high school football was over it felt like the world stopped and I tried to make my image portray that by choosing a picture that I wasn’t looking into the camera. I also picked one where I was kind of tired and sweaty so you could see it’s not easy. My image is all about focus and bringing you in on myself. As is my video. In my video I tried to have it go with the music so if you did get bored of watching halfway through it’d bring you right back and capture your focus again. If you haven’t figured it out by now, to us football players football is way more than just a game like a lot of people love to say. Football contributes to so many things outside of just football.

I Say, They Say

Identities are formed through personalities. Personalities come formed by life experiences a person has. My own identity was formed through how I grew up and then later in my life actually chose how I was gonna go about things. I feel that when you’re younger you don’t really have your full identity because you don’t get to choose what you want to do. Some bias’s I have or at least the test online said that I “Prefer white people over black people.” Which I guess in my life is true because I’ve grown up around mainly white people. Yes there were a few other black people here and there. My best friend is black and we relate to each other more than anyone. People call us twins all the time and at first it was hard to tell what they meant by that, but now it makes total sense. When you’re around a certain person for a period of time you begin to act like them, talk like them, laugh like them, etc. That why people say you start to use your significant others language and jokes and other things like that. I’ve even heard that you start to look like each other I certain ways. After saying that I have to ask myself can personality change? In my opinion, yes. We as humans do like to believe that we are stable and are capable of living that way or “The right way.” Now in order to change yourself you have to first want to change because if you don’t truly want to change than you won’t. Second you must change the situation you are in. For example, if you’re trying to quit smoking you have to stop being in situations where people can offer you smoke or situations where you’re tempted to smoke. Basically saying that “by changing the way you live or your situation you can, in fact possibly change yourself. It may take time but eventually you will change if you want to” (The Personality Myth). The last reason I feel so strongly about the change of one’s personality is because I’m changing constantly throughout my life. Whether that being physically or mentally, I’m always changing. From constantly changing and personality being defined by traits, which are not permanent to an individual, then your personality can in fact change throughout your life. Which is why “personality is at the center of a lot of stories and is often how you find yourself explaining things” (The Personality Myth).

“Why is it that people have this automatic assumption?” Is it because of the way we’ve been taught history in school, or how people have shown or made black people to be through films? It’s interesting that 60% of black people who took the test preferred white people over black people. Another thing that’s interesting is that you do see a lot of these police brutality things on the news but you don’t hear about all of them and if you think about it all of the same things happen in all of our lives. Whether it’s big or small they still happen. Yeah sure, maybe someone doesn’t end up dead on the news but like they say in the “TED Talk” “Same stories, different people” (How to overcome bias).