The gym is packed, and the anxiety and excitement are bubbling inside me. This was the vault to make or break my shot at state. As I launch off the vault, twisting as fast as possible, I find my feet and stick the landing. Perfect! Emotions are flying about in my head, and I’m trying to balance them all. With a final turn, the judges flash a nine. All of the hours of practice, frustration, and pain have paid off. Ecstasy flows through me as I know that I have made it to state. Through all eleven years of gymnastics, I have learned countless mental and physical balance lessons that I utilize every day. When I first started gymnastics, I learned basic skills like cartwheels and how to balance on my toes. The coaches made all the hard work seem exciting, especially the games and contests to increase strength and agility. Once I started, I could not stop. My teammates and I became family; we improved throughout the years together, succeeded together, and failed together. This community helped me learn so many lessons and skills that have developed me as a person. As I grew older and began competing, balance within gymnastics gained a whole new meaning. Competitions brought forth a new mix of emotions that needed to be balanced. There was always the lingering anxiety of doing well, stress, and pressure, not to mention the fear of falling. At an important meet, everyone before me had messed up their vault. I was last and watching those failures put a lot of pressure on my shoulders. I ran and overshot the board, flying belly first across the vault, and landed flat on the hardwood floor. Instead of dwelling on the vault, I cleared my head and went again and succeeded. Putting my vault behind me that day, I learned to balance the anxieties of skills or falls and control my emotions to succeed. Learning to balance all of my thoughts taught me coping mechanisms for failure, and how to move beyond it. By taking deep breaths to clear my mind of failure, I could continue with a skill and move beyond a bad fall or injury. Talking out my emotions to my teammates and coaches let me experience genuine fear or frustration, and to move beyond it. I learned to balance healthy fears with levels of stress, and to turn that stress into energy. Once I started high school and other sports, gymnastics taught me another lesson on balance. During practice, I got better at knowing how to gauge my time. This lesson has been incredibly important with school. I learned to manage my time for homework with my activities after school, allowing me to stay on top of grades, and take challenging classes, while still making progress in my other sports. Through routines on beam, I also learned how to block out distractions, a useful life skill. I’ve been able to use mental balance to be a leader for all of my sports, and to coach younger girls the same lessons that I have learned. I’ll use my time-management to balance activities and labs in college as I work towards my degree. It will help me balance a new social life, as well as the stress of living on my own for the first time. It will help me pursue groundbreaking genetics research, a PhD of my own, and the chance to change the world of genetics to improve the future. Like on the beam, whatever way I may wobble, I can always find my inner balance.