By Jed PierreNothing could have possibly prepared me to travel 10,000 miles over two completely different cultural spectrums, but little did I know, I was already fully equipped to survive in the foreign land of Taiwan. I was equipped with a language that would help me learn about Taiwan, understand the Taiwanese culture and most importantly understand Taiwanese people. That language was not Mandarin, rather it was the language of sport and in my case table tennis. However, as the saying goes, all coins have two sides and the teams were no different. Playing for the team required at least 8 hours per week for training and weekends whenever we went to play a tournament. But last semester I decided to take a break from the school team and focus more on academics. Entering my final year, I felt that successfully completing my degree was most important and I could always play table tennis after. At first it felt weird to have so much free time that I completed assignments days in advance and had more than sufficient time to study for exams. Eventually I got accustomed to this and slowly began to be less and less productive. In no time it felt like once again the semester’s workload had me cornered with nowhere to run. My old habits of sleeping late, eating irregularly and feeling exhausted all day had all resurfaced, this time without table tennis to be blamed. My life became a lot less structured without having a need to consciously schedule my days to make time for training. Consequently, not only did my grades suffer tremendously, I also gained weight to a point where I couldn’t recognise myself.
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May 2024
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