The Building Blocks of My Life

For years and years of my youth, I would spend time building my world with legos. Thinking about my early life, my mind is flooded with the image of thousands of these small plastic bricks. The bricks that stretched my imagination, the bricks that would cover every inch of my floor, the bricks that were my freedom. I would never build what was supposed to be of the bricks, I would create what I wanted to create, I would make something unique to me. The pieces rattling on the floor was a sound that meant I could truly be who I was, and that I could be free. I loved the way that I could never make two of the same creation. I loved that there were no limitations. I loved that I could create what I wanted and destroy what I disliked. Just like making a creation out of these bricks, I was building my life and shaping my personality any way I wanted to. I would try new things until I found what worked for me, I would stop doing certain things to stop pretending like I was something that I wasn’t. I was building my life brick by brick to get to the place where I am now and to become who I am today.

Today, my life is filled with something constant, something that I can’t take of my mind, something that has captivated me in the best way. Throughout the last ten years of my life, the sport of gymnastics has stuck with me and I can see myself in it for the foreseeable future. These things, “grips” we call them, help me grab the bar and keep me from falling. To me, these strips of leather embody the sport I love and everything that comes along with it, the flying and the falling, the accomplishments and the disappointments, the joy and the pain. All of this keeps bringing me back to recreate the highs and diminish the lows. Just like these grips help me grab the bar, they help me grab onto the idea of who I am. The sport has been engraved into my identity and has been changing me since the day I started. Just like perfecting a skill, the sport takes the best parts of me and gets rid of the worse parts to become a better person. The sport forced me to change what needed to be changed about me and my personality. Through the blood, sweat and tears that come with the sport, gymnastics has been and still does alter my identity for the better.

The past is written in ink, the present is constantly being written, the future is the story that is yet to come. Looking out to the future, it is hard for me to see anything. I can see the future I desire, I can see the unwanted future, but these are merely dreams, just visions of what I think I will be. My future can be represented by a blank piece of paper, a story of my life that I has to be written by my actions. This piece of paper implies the infinite possibilities of the future and the numerous directions my life can go in. All I can see in the future for me is the potential of what I may become. It is up to me now to become the person I want to be by writing the story that will get me there. My future identity will be the result of my present day actions for the next sixty years of my life. Like an author, I will write the story of my life on that blank piece of paper to create my identity and shape the person I will be. I cannot see what will become of me, but I will keep writing my story until I find out.