Personal Narrative: You Play Like A Girl

As a girl, the phrases, “you play like a girl” or “you’re a girl, you can’t do that” have always been words that are casually just thrown around, yet it causes flames to come out of my ears. Starting when I was about three, I was a sporty kid always running around. I liked to play soccer with the boys teams, since they were much more physical and would roughly push each other on the hard ground rather complaining when a nail got broken, or hair got pulled. I liked to play baseball rather than softball because I could throw a baseball with much more force than I could ever throw a softball, it was like a speeding semi truck on a highway. I enjoyed playing basketball even though I knew I was, and probably always would be, the shortest one on …show more content…
Being so young, I was so open to trying new things, and not categorizing anything as a “boys sport” or a “girls sport”. As I grew older, I stopped doing what I loved due to the judgements and generalizations of the peers around me. The cute boy in the corner would make fun of me because I would spend my time throwing around a football rather than putting my hair in buns or braids. I consider this to be one of my greatest failures since to this day I wish I was still running around the crisp turf, dripping sweat, and breathing so hard from adrenaline; I wish I was still running down the court and getting that feeling of pure joy after tossing the ball in the air, hearing the swish, and instantaneously hearing your teammates scream your name with huge excitement in their raspy voice that they just lost from cheering so loudly; I truly wish I never began caring what others thought of me since it ended up influencing so much of my life. From this, I have learned to do what I love. I may have stopped playing as many sports as I used to, but I have learned to put my incentives into other things such as schooling and