It was one of those rainy days of summer when in the afternoon, the sun was still bright but the water seemed to be playing in a slide down the sky. It was the beginning of my freshmen year, one of the most stressful couple of months of my life until then but specifically on that day, I was made out of stress.

Volleyball was proving itself to be really fun but hard to manage. We had around 3 games every single week and one more time, I had just gotten home and was rushing through my homework. Everything seemed tranquil, I was already adapting myself to this new routine of doing all my work at night and was actually making some quick progress until I got to my math homework. Math. One of my favorite subjects since I was a kid in first grade, was proving to be different in this new country I was living in. The stress that math class had been bringing me was unmeasurable. The frustration growing within myself for being able to ace all of the math tests in Brazil and not being able to complete a worksheet here was making a mess out of my mental instability.

While my deep breaths were being taken within 5 seconds apart so the stress would not blind me completely, my father got home from work. When I saw him, crossing through the doorstep and coming to ask me how my day was, an avalanche of tears came to my eyes. I was crying a lot and apologizing to my father a million times because ever since I was in Brazil, all I wanted was to get good grades to pay off for my parents’ hard work. They had kept me in a private school for years even though we couldn’t afford it because they wanted me to have the educational opportunities that they didn’t. They had moved COUNTRIES for Christ's sake so that I could have a new experience in school and I couldn’t complete one math packet!

My father began to talk to me for the millionth time. Soon my mom got home and joined the conversation as well, and as the conversation got deeper the stress was being bled out through my tears. That’s when I realized that I am not a machine. I am not perfect, nor constant, I am just a teenager in high school who was gouging her eyes out because of a worksheet. Either a quarter grade nor a test grade define me or my effort. When that realization came to my head it was almost like I had never had a breakdown literally 5 seconds ago. I was trying my best in a new country where I was, for the first time, being split apart between a sport and school and I was managing it pretty well. No trajectory is perfect and we all have bumps in life’s route, but I learned that when I fall down I have to get up, shake off the dust, pick up the shattered pieces and get ready to fall again.

Because of so much unnecessary stress, I was blind to the fact that my parents didn’t expect me to be perfect and was deaf to my mom saying “I am so proud of you ‘bebê’, I would never be able to make it if I was in your shoes.”

That was one of the best moments of my year. That was the time and place where I realized that I didn’t have to be perfect. It was the moment when I realized that no matter the time or place where I fell down, my parents would be there to help me shake off the dust and keep going. They had done it thousands of times already, I just couldn’t see it before.