I pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine a full 30 minutes early. I sat for a bit, trying to slow my heart rate with deep breaths before going into the hotel and sitting outside the conference room, fidgeting like my chair was made of crawling insects.
I'd been fidgeting since I woke up, something that my dad had obviously noticed. I remember him looking me in the eye just before I walked out the door, and, in that calm, steady voice, saying the most simple phrase:
"You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be solid."
This wasn't just any interview. It was an interview for a scholarship that would pay for nearly half of my college tuition.
And I'm what you might call and "achiever". My own worst critic. Comparing my bloopers to everyone else's highlight reel.
So those words were big. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to have every single extracurricular activity listed on your resume. You don't have to have taken every single AP course offered. You don't have to be captain of the team and president of the club and valedictorian of your class.
You are solid. You are enough.
As it turns out, the seven people sitting around the table in that conference room thought so as well :)
But now, four years later, I find myself repeating that phrase my dad gave me. This time its about field hockey, not school. When I joined the Eastern Mennonite University field hockey team as a freshman, I was that obliviously happy kid who was thrilled to be part of a team small enough that I got to be a starter in my first year. Now, with a new coach and an even smaller team, we are in what you would call a "rebuilding period". We fight hard and work our tails off, but our record is nothing to get excited about.
And that is hard for me to handle sometimes. I want more. I want to win. So after each game, I zero in on my performance - good or bad - and wonder why it wasn't enough. I should be able to sprint just a little harder, play defense just a bit more patiently, take shots with just a bit more accuracy. I end up in tears on the sideline at the end of the game because I'm not perfect.
So I'm working on remembering that doing the best I can is what I should expect from myself. Remembering that success is about more than the scoreboard. Remembering that those words were about more than just a scholarship:
You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be solid.
