Therapy is great, but have you tried a clean forehand?
Throughout my life, like most of us, there have been moments that arrive with weight, requiring you to stretch yourself. That quietly decide whether they will shape you into something new or leave you holding pieces of yourself that will never fit together again.
I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, that both can be true.
I have also learned that something has always met me there.
Call it God.
Call it my ancestors.
Call it the universe.
Call it intuition.
For me, they are all speaking the same language. Just slightly differently accents.
Several years ago, I experienced what felt like my first real heartbreak. The kind that said I would never have the capacity to love so deeply ever again. The kind that makes you rearrange your whole life to make yourself forget.
And in that moment, something met me.
It was Dope Black Women.
The slow, intentional building of a space where Black women could arrive as they were and be seen without judgment. I watched us find each other. I watched us stay. I watched us soften in places the world told us we didn’t deserve.
More recently, I found myself in another moment of reckoning: This time with my own sense of worth. With the quiet decisions we make to remain in spaces that diminish us. With the work of leaving behind everything that shaped you .
And again, something met me.
This time, it was tennis.
I didn’t go looking for it. I was invited to a lesson. I showed up. And something in me recognised it immediately.
It felt familiar in the way that things meant for you often do.
Now, almost a year later, it feels difficult to remember a version of my life that didn’t hold it. Like people say when they have kids, I don’t really remember my existence before it. It feels like it’s always been there. Or at least like it always should have been.
Tennis is not gentle work.
It asks you to pay attention. To your body. To your mind. To the story you tell yourself between points. It sharpens your thinking. It slows you down just enough to notice what you’re doing when no one is watching.
It has become a place where I meet my anxiety differently.
I know it’s there. I always have. It sits with me like the small stubs on the pinkies of both of my hands —remnants of two sixth fingers my parents removed when I was a baby, to make me appear normal. Barely visible. Easy to forget. But the nerves are still there and so the awareness of their presence remains.
That’s how anxiety moves through me.
Present. Quiet. Known.
And yet, when I step onto a tennis court, that disintegrates.
My mind has somewhere to go. My body has somewhere to excrete what it’s holding. The noise rearranges itself into movement.
It makes sense. Movement regulates the nervous system. It increases endorphins, those chemicals that ease pain and lift mood. It supports the release of dopamine and serotonin, both tied to feelings of motivation and emotional balance. It lowers cortisol, the hormone that keeps the body in a state of stress.
Whatever it is, I feel present.
Tennis gave me somewhere to place my energy when everything in me wanted to retreat. It redirected me. It held my attention long enough for something in me to begin repairing.
It worked on my body too. In a season where depression told me to keep eating, to stay still, to disappear into comfort that didn’t sustain me, tennis asked me to move. Consistently. Without negotiation.
Slowly, I did.
And it opened me up.
I used to laugh with my friends about the sounds people make on court. The grunting. The volume. The unfiltered exposure of emotion to complete strangers.
Now, I understand it.
There is something visceral about letting your body respond in real time. About not editing yourself. About expressing frustration, joy, disappointment without asking permission.
I throw my racket sometimes.
I growl at myself.
I squeal when I miss something I know I could have reached.
I light up when I catch a forehand clean in my strike zone instead of wilding it up by running into the ball, and I high-five my coach like it’s the only thing that matters in that moment
It has made me more comfortable with being seen.
More comfortable with myself.
There was a time when my self-esteem felt like something that had been taken from me. Like it disappeared overnight without explanation. Like I woke up and everything in the house had been taken while I was asleep. Like the monster under my bed had slipped out quietly to steal it.
Tennis has been part of how I found my way back.
Because the thing about tennis is that it meets you exactly where you are.
You can’t perform your way through it.
You can’t mask your way through it.
I have stood in front of 6,000 people and spoken with a steady voice while my hands shook just out of sight. I have learned how to perform composure. How to deliver. How to handle nerves without anyone noticing.
On a tennis court, there is no way to hide any of it.
If you’re nervous, it shows up in your timing.
If you’re unsure, it shows up in your footwork.
If you’re distracted, it shows up in your decisions.
And you learn, slowly, how to stay with yourself anyway.
Because you cannot play this game without a certain kind of bravery.
The kind that asks you to trust your body enough to swing freely.
To commit to the shot before you know the outcome.
To believe, even for a moment, that the ball will land where you intend it to.
To risk it going into the net.
To risk it sailing out.
And to swing anyway.
That kind of bravery has everything to do with trust.
It has taught me that it is possible to show up fully without needing to pretend that everything is settled.
I don’t know if I am good at tennis.
I’m not sure that’s the point.
What I know is that it has accepted me as I am, while still asking more of me.
It asks for better footwork.
For precise timing.
For mental fortitude.
It asks me to understand my strengths and to name them without hesitation.
It asks me to see my weaknesses and to hold them without shame.
Some days I miss everything.
Some days I find a rhythm that feels like clarity.
Both belong.
And somewhere in that, I have learned to be proud of myself again.
Not only for the outcomes, but for the willingness to keep showing up.
There is something worth honouring in that.
In choosing to meet yourself where you are.
In choosing to stay long enough to grow.
In choosing to recognise that becoming is not a single moment, but a series of quiet decisions.
Tennis arrived, like other things before it, at a moment when I needed somewhere to place my energy, my questions, my healing.
And it stayed.
Long enough for me to remember that I can too.
