Life is about being able to adapt to change, good or bad. How you adapt will be the catalyst to your success or failure. I have been able to adapt all my life. When it was basketball or track season, I was able to adapt my schedule and my body so I could perform at my best in the sport and in school. Yet It doesn't mean anything, if you can't defeat your bad habits . If you overcome the world and are not able to control yourself, you will never really win. When quarantine began it was after basketball season and the peak of my AP classes. My teachers were giving more homework because the test was coming up soon. Initially I saw quarantine as a blessing, but it was a curse in disguise. It allowed me to indulge in a state of laziness that would be difficult to break out of. 

When I first heard that we would be going into quarantine I thought it was going to be a week break and then we would be back. Then the school administrators added more weeks to quarantine and told us that they won't be grading our work. That was the exact moment I fell into the abyss. My day would start with me waking up at 12, but I wouldn't leave bed until one pm. I would take my breakfast to the room and eat while watching Netflix. During the school year I didn't watch TV unless it was on the weekend, and if I did watch it, it would be basketball while I'm doing my homework. In the abyss it was different. I found a great show to watch (for all the people who haven't watched Blacklist you need to watch it). I would spend the morning watching Blacklist, and the evenings playing 2k20 (a basketball video game). 

 After about two weeks of this rigorous routine, I felt slow and not pleasant. There's never been a time when I was out of shape fully. When I stopped playing football in the fall, I had basketball workouts instead, during winter I had basketball. In spring I had track, and the summer I was outside everyday and since freshman year I spent my summer at BU. So I was always active to some degree. I remember going to sleep one night and I saw my abs had been reduced to a little stomach and my arms were losing muscle. So I made a choice to start working out. I would workout from four to five pm everyday before our family prayers. The first day working out was a sad sight. I had never had such a hard time doing push-ups in my life, but I knew to get back in shape wouldn't just involve working out. I needed a way to fix my eating. So I adapted an eating style called Intermittent fasting. I would only eat from 12-9. After a week of fixing my eating habits and working out I started to feel better physically. 

The next step was to improve myself mentally. I set a time to sleep and wake up. I would sleep at one am and wake up at 10 am to get nine hours of sleep. When I woke up I would finally start doing the homework teachers were assigning us, and me and my family started a book club in which we read for 30 minutes every day. Soon after that I was feeling better and better. I was climbing out the abyss slowly and slowly every day. It was a devious task to cilb out, but every step I took was important. Life is about change, we have to be water like the great Bruce Lee said.

If we are put in a position we have to change our method to be successful in that situation. Through this process I was able to learn how to be resilient and to persevere essipcally on the bad days.