A Time When I Was at My Best and Wasn't at My Best

There is a time in everyone life that you have to do the best that you can to help a team or group of people reach the goal you had set for yourselves. This time always seems to fall in a time when there are so many things that are in need of your attention. My junior year of high school I had just such an experience.
It was the last week of rehearsal for our schools spring play. We were doing the show “Cheaper By the Dozen” and there were so many things that I had to deal with at the same time. During this week I part of many activities including finishing building and painting the set for the show, making sure I knew all my lines for the show, normal everyday homework and I also was driving half an hour to get to physical therapy twice a week because of my ACL surgery earlier that fall.
On Wednesday of that week I went up to Iowa State to attend an engineering work shop. While up in Ames I became sick because of all the stress I had been under that passed few days. So I ending up coming home early from the work shop, but I still had to go to play practice that night and work on finishing the set. So when I got home from Ames I had time for a short nap and then I had to be back at school.
Even though I still wasn't feeling well I went to practice and did the best I could. This became harder than I had thought it was going to be when my knee started to really bother me, but I went through the pain and by the end of the night I couldn't even bend my knee. There were many times during the night that I really wanted to just say, “Sorry that’s it, I’m going home. I can’t do this right now.” But I knew that this wasn't an option for many reasons. The whole cast was counting on me knowing my part for the show and they were also counting on me to help finish building the set. I knew that no matter how much I wanted to just give up and give in to the pain that I had to keep going.
I learned a lot about myself that night. I was still just learning how to deal with the fact that my knee wasn't what it had been and that night I found out that I could still do things that I had wanted to do before, it just took more work. In some ways it was one of the greatest things I could have gone through because it taught me that in order to do something right it takes more work, and that even though I had been through the experience of having knee surgery, I could still do the things that I had done before. It was just going to take more work on my part.