Playing it safe

[_just_a_phase]

Whenever my volleyball team started to lose a game, my coach would always say, "don't play safe." This is because most of us would hit to not miss, just get it in the court. We'd psych ourselves out to the point where we couldn't even lose with pride. We'd already lost the instant we played safe, because when we made the conscious decision to do so, we had given up and half-assed our way to the next moment of defeat. How is this relevant to life now? Well, I feel like I'm playing it safe. I feel like I don't want to disturb anything in my path, and I want to work to just get the ball in the court. It's not that I feel entirely defeated, but I'm finding myself in a learned hopelessness trap of inconsistency and loneliness. And then I think to myself, if I pass it inside the boundary lines, maybe it won't hurt as much to lose this game. It will help it linger on, until the loss is anti-climatic and seemingly unimportant.

I need to learn how to win. I need to learn how to let go.