“Keep your hands back,” my dad says, or “slow down, you’re moving too fast.” What many people think to be a simple or trivial task, is actually very difficult in the game of baseball. The constant ringing of the same few words over and over. Oh yeah, let me try that, cause I haven’t been trying for the past hour. Making me angry and stressed, makes it harder to succeed. My knuckles white and cracking while holding to bat, great ways to break a bat, or even bones.

Frustration.  I think to myself, Why are you doing this? Why can’t you just throw the ball to me? I’m trying to make the adjustment. Everything stuck in my head, for I cannot dare to speak them to my father.

Ignore. Despite the constant pausing and continuous talking, closing my eyes and sitting still works like a charm. Blocking out the words that have been said a million times.

Succeed. Throughout batting practice, he says the same words, and never stops, it comes to a point where the phrases stop. Happening only because I have succeeded, without the help of the words of course, rather just taking them in and reinterpreting them.

But, sometimes it doesn’t work out like that, sometimes I can’t figure it out by the end of practice, and the car ride home comes, constant negativity and yelling, the same words rattling in my brain. “Keep your hand back,” and “slow down, you’re moving too fast.”

No matter what, I always come back the next day, refreshed and feeling stronger, rethinking the phrases and with a new mindset, succeeding and hitting just the way I would have liked to, just maybe a day late.

All of the talking and negativity being thrown at me, and all I have to do is think about what he is saying and just turn it into my own thoughts, but both my father and I having very prideful and stern personalities, would never admit to actually listening and giving credit to one another, rather we continue arguing until the solution seems solved.