Unit 2 Assignment

 

Discourse is a very complex concept in which it presents a plethora of meanings behind it. Depicting countless experiences and life-altering occurrences in everyday life. Discourse shapes our culture and develops belonging in the world. Discourse presents us with our key values and shapes our views on the world. It develops our personality and forms our sense of individuality. I would consider my main sense of belonging and discourse to be in the hands of the sport that I have participated in my whole life. I have been cheerleading sense the young age of 5 and have shaped my life around my participation and involvement in the sport. Specifically, I had two discourses clash when I obtained a significant head injury my freshman year of high school. The clashing discourse between my pursuit of success in cheerleading and the inherent risk of injury underscores the need for a balanced approach that values my health without compromising my athletic ambitions.

              Cheerleading has morphed from a low intensity, sideline activity to a highly competitive sport that incorporates stunts, tumbling, intricate routines, and teamwork.  Cheerleading is growing in popularity, including millions of participants with emphasis on its athletic aspect. The respect and recognition for the sport has recently flourished throughout the athletic community. The evolution of cheerleading is evident as it morphs from chants and sideline cheering for other teams to a competitive endeavor. Athletes involved are required to perform physically demanding routines. Through this elevation of difficulty and competition within cheerleading it not only became my discourse and my source of belonging it became my passion. The increasing difficulty pursuing world championships has brought the sport under increased scrutiny regarding the safety of participants. A lot of these injuries are results of falls, collisions, failed stunts, and many other unpredictable occurrences.  With this newfound recognition there has been rising concern about its safety and the excessive injury seen within the sport. Cheerleading is ranked in the top 3 for injury prone sports in the world. Given all of the dangerous sports that are included on this list it shows the excessive injury that occurs and the lack of safety precautions that are able to be incorporated to improve the safety of athletes. Because of these circumstances cheerleaders have serious injuries daily. Head injuries such as concussions are extremely popular injuries among cheerleaders. After my injury I experienced a range of emotional and psychological impacts. I was toggling between frustration, depression, fear, and anxiety. I struggled with an overbearing worry that I would never be able to compete again.

              In my personal experience my head injury was a result of a mistake in a stunt. Flukes and mistakes are common in a routine but sometimes these mistakes lead to much more serious consequences. I was flying in stunt and doing the dismount and a combination of an incorrect throw and me starting the spin at the wrong time caused us to fall out of the stunt and I hit my head on my back spots shoulder. At first, I didn’t realize the severity of this fall and attempted to continue with practice despite my nose bleeding. It was an important few weeks as it was only three weeks before we left to compete at the Cheerleading World Championships at ESPN in Orlando. Therefore, any injuries would be detrimental for our team. Sense cheerleading is a very team-oriented sport where each person plays a specific individual role it is not an easy task to replace any individual that is on the team. I later informed my mom of what had happened, and she took me into urgent care to make sure I was okay. We later found out that I had a severe concussion, had shattered both sides of my nose, and had to get four stitches on my nose. Although these are injuries that can be relatively easy to heal with time, time was not in my favor. I was told I would have to have surgery and couldn’t practice for at least two weeks after the surgery. This was detrimental to hear, I didn’t want to let my team down or miss the arguably most important competition of the season. All 6 competitions leading up to this point in the season were mostly just practice for Worlds. Therefore, missing this competition due to injury would be devastating. The doctors had told me that if not given enough time my concussion could turn to brain swelling, permanent brain damage, or worse. For this reason, I sacrificed those two weeks of practice to ensure that I wasn’t making any life-threatening mistakes. Driven by my passion for the sport and desire for success I downplayed the severity of these injuries and what could happen if I practiced and competed only two weeks later. I had to make an extremely difficult decision of whether to cut my recovery short and risk further injury or miss the most important competition, letting both my teammates and myself down. I decided to hold off on practicing for two weeks and wait to get surgery until after the competition. This could have affected the permanent structure of my nose and led to further irreversible damage. Therefore, I was facing a major internal battle throughout making this decision.

              This injury presented a major clash of discourses within my life. These discourses being the battle between my commitment to cheerleading and the second being the value of my health and wellness. This injury, if not properly taken care of, could have permanently altered my cognitive health and development. On the other hand, I did not want to lose a full year of blood, sweat, and tears that I succumbed to practice for this competition and my team. This was an extremely hard decision for me to make as I didn’t want to sacrifice my health, but I didn’t want to give up cheer for the season either. I decided to take extreme safety precautions but continue practicing before I was fully healed. I was determined to finish the season with my team and commit to the promise I made when I joined the team. Many aspiring cheerleaders are willing to embrace physical demands and often downplay the risks associated with cheerleading. This is how I felt in my experience. I was willing to accept the potential for further injury due to my passion and dedication to the sport. Vince Lombardi said, “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand” (Lombardi). I believe that this depicts some of the emotion I was experiencing, my team and I wanted to do well, and in order to do so we had to give everything we had into our practices and competition. I believe this shows my character and love for cheerleading. Although it may not have been the “right” decision, I do not regret it and am thankful I had the opportunity to compete with my team. Everyday athletes are faced with clashing discourses similar to mine. Often their future of playing their sport is questioned. It often leads to an extreme internal battle that leads to self-discovery and self-improvement. This decision led me to realize the true commitment and passion I had for cheerleading.

This clash of discourse surfaced many of my values and caused me to further evaluate my priorities. Being able to analyze what is important to me through a new lens helped me appreciate different discourses in my life more. It helped me realize how highly I valued cheerleading. It helped me realize that I had to continue to persevere through any difficult times and not doubt my commitment to the sport. This clash of discourse helped me throughout many decisions in my life. My discourse revolved around resilience, determination, and mental and physical recovery. It taught me a lot about myself as an athlete and as an individual. This experience taught me a lot about myself and who am as a person. It helped me learn about my commitment, values, and what I hold at utmost importance in my life. Before this experience I didn’t realize the discourse that is present in my daily life. I didn’t realize the value I held in cheerleading, teamwork, commitment, dedication, and more. It helped me understand more about my love for the sport I had competed in my whole life and how much it meant to me. This clash of discourses I experienced almost 5 years ago still affects my life and the decisions I make to this day. It not only brought my values to light, but it helped me see the other discourses that are present in my life.

In conclusion, the clashing discourses after my injury in cheerleading are the result of the complex interplay of physical demands and emotional challenges. Addressing these internal conflicts altered my life and the perspectives I hold. This experience despite its hardship presented me with the ability to grow and incorporate positive change. As contradicting as it may sound, I am very thankful for the injury that led me to an awakening experience and journey through self-discovery.

Reflection:

1)      I think the free writes were the most impactful in helping me learn more about discourses in my life. Some of them allow me to do more self-discovery and pinpoint things that have altered my perspective in life. Another thing that helped me understand the topic the most was going to the writing center. Rather than helping me with writing specifically, the individual I worked with helped me understand discourse and how it plays a role in their life. I used this as an example to form my discourse and how it has changed my life and what aspects led to this change. All of the work we did in this unit could signify discourse and show how we continued to learn about it throughout the course.

2)      I am understanding analysis/argument differently now than I was at the beginning than I did at the beginning of the course because I have seen the passion and dedication used by people in the media that we listened to/read. The podcast we listened to about horseshoe crabs helped me understand how to bring evidence and explanation to the claims we are making. The creator of that podcast had multifaceted evidence and reasoning to back up their claim. I believed that this helped me improve my ability to bring more evidence, reasoning and explanation to the claims I am making throughout my writing.

3)     The role of the readings incorporated personality and inspiration into the content of the unit thus far. The writings and work we have done so far incorporated passion and allowed us to write through personal experiences. While having reasoning to support our topic.

4)      I decided to quote the phrase from Vince Lombardi because it shows the dedication and commitment that is required for competitive cheerleading. And that although it is tasking and we might not always finish in first place, knowing that we tried our best and did everything we could was almost as important to us.

5)      I completely changed paths from the first time I was drafting this project. I started writing about something that I wasn’t passionate about and knew I had to change it to something that I could write about endlessly. If I wrote about something mundane in my life it wouldn’t depict my best writing abilities because I would be uninterested in the topic. I articulated injury and cheerleading and how this clash of discourse affected the rest of my life.

6)      I really like the emotional aspect of my piece, if I had more time I would work on the organization of my thoughts and how to better structure it.