A Post About Diving

Hello!

Week Four of the Student Blogging Challenge is upon us, and the theme is Free Choice! This is very exciting, but also rather daunting. I have a hard time thinking up what to write about.

Last time I wrote about my dog, Barley. If you read this blog a lot, then I’m sure you are very familiar with Barley and have seen many random photos of him. You can scroll to the very bottom of this page to see one now.

That is not relevant. Right now I’m just stalling while I try to think of an interesting topic. I’m kind of unprofessional that way.

I also just completely defeated the purpose of the stalling by telling you that I was stalling.

Anyways.

Ummmmmm…

Aha! I know what to write about. Diving! You probably already saw the title and was just waiting for me to figure it out already. Oh well.

Anyways. Diving. That’s what I should be talking about.

There is a lot of things to go into here. I will not talk about all of it because I have a tendency to go on and on and on and on about stuff, and I don’t want this post to be 2000 words.

My goal is for this blog post to remain relatively short (in comparison to my other posts), since I have recently received feedback that my posts are too long. That makes sense to me, but I think I’m already failing.

Anyways.

I’ve been diving since I was seven or eight. Now I am fourteen. It’s been 6 or 7 years. That’s kind of insane.

Disclaimer: I recently quit diving. Technically, I don’t do it anymore. I still consider it one of my hobbies though, since it was such a huge part of my life for so long and I still enjoy it.

Let me tell you a story.

Eight-year-old Evelyn liked skating and gymnastics. She sucked at both those things. She did them anyway.

One day, she was invited for a play date at her friend Allie’s house. They played for a while. Then allie had to go to diving practice, and Evelyn decided to go with her and watch. Evelyn was fascinated with the (admittedly very simple) dives that Allie was doing.

After much thought, Evelyn decided to quit gymnastics and take up diving. After all, they are quite similar in that you launch yourself into the air and then do fancy tricks. She started diving lessons.

Here is a photo of me at my first competition. I’m pretty sure I got fourth place.

Evelyn liked to dive. She enjoyed being in the same class as Allie and chatting on the side of the pool as they waited their turn to dive. She had fun jumping off the board into the water and getting told to point her toes by her nice teacher. She did not like the 3 meter (high dive) board, but eventually she least partially got over that fear.

Later on, Evelyn moved into pre-competitive diving. Allie was no longer in her class, and they had to drive a bit farther to a different pool across town. Evelyn still liked it, but was a bit lonely since she wasn’t very good at making friends (she still isn’t, unfortunately).

Evelyn soon met a few people. She got to know them after laughing at the coach when he mixed up all their names. Soon they were friends.

She competed in a few competitions. Her proudest moment was when she came in second place by only a few points. Once, she and her dad drove for 5 hours to Kelowna for a competition. They listened to a lot of audiobooks that day.

Here is a video of me doing a front dive pike at a competition a long time ago. I went over a bit, and fell before I jumped. I also forgot to point my toes.

The next year, though, Evelyn showed up to diving and all her friends were gone. They’d all either moved up to a more competitive level, quit, or in one case, moved to England. Evelyn was a bit lonely.

Eventually she moved back to recreational diving when she felt stressed out and pressured to do things she didn’t want to do. She kind of wanted to quit, but felt that it was so much a part of her identity that she would lose herself if she wasn’t doing it.

Soon, though, Evelyn grew bored of demonstrating simple dives for small children. She was lonely and wasn’t learning anything, plus was getting very large amounts of homework. After much deliberation, Evelyn decided it was high time she quit.

That is the end of that story. Sorry, that was very long and possibly very boring. I don’t know because I’m the one who wrote it. Let me know in a comment if I need to work on making my long stories more interesting.

At least there were a few blurry photos.

What is the purpose of this post? I started out with a clear vision of what the meaning of this was going to be, but it kind of got lost in the mess of old photos of short Evelyns doing  bad dives.

I guess what I want to say is that you only live once, and you’re in control of what you do with that life. I felt like I couldn’t quit diving for the longest time since I was already in so deep. Now that I’m done with it, though, it’s just a happy memory and I can move on and do other things.

It’s a good idea to take a step back every once and a while and think about what you’re doing with your life. Is it a making you happy? Or are you just doing it because you feel like you have to?

That being said, though, I am still very glad I did diving. I learned whole bunch, I conquered my fear of heights, and I had a lot of fun. It was worth all the stress and bellyflopping.

This post is a little over a thousand words. I’m going to end it now.

That’s it for this week of STUBC! Please feel free to leave me a friendly comment. I will make sure to respond to you fast and check out your blog if you leave me a link.

Thanks for reading! Stay safe and healthy!

Cheers,

Evelyn 👩🏽