Carrie Soto Is Back

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

He believed in the beauty and simplicity of doing something the way it has always been done but better than anyone else has ever done it.

“Because we aren’t members here?” I asked as I put my things down. My father stopped in place. “Because we are winners. Do not grow a chip on your shoulder, Carolina,” he said. “Do not let what anyone says about you determine how you feel about yourself.”

People act like you can never forget your own name, but if you’re not paying attention, you can veer so incredibly far away from everything you know about yourself to the point where you stop recognizing what they call you.

Some men’s childhoods are permitted to last forever, but women are so often reminded that there is work to be done.

My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy—it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.

I keep thinking, I don’t cry on the court. I don’t cry on the court. But then I think, Maybe it’s a lie that you have to keep doing what you have always done. That you have to be able to draw a straight line from how you acted yesterday to how you’ll act tomorrow. You don’t have to be consistent. You can change, I think. Just because you want to. And so, for the first time in decades, I stand in front of a roaring crowd and cry.

We live in a world where exceptional women have to sit around waiting for mediocre men.

“Siempre supe que no hay montaña que no puedas escalar, paso a paso.” I have always known there is no mountain you cannot climb, one step at a time.

Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you yourself die. But that is the mirage. That is grief’s dizzying spell. The fall isn’t never-ending. It does have a ground floor.