Carrie Soto Is Back

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

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

Falling in love is really quite simple,” she says. “You want to know the secret? It’s the same thing we are all doing about life every single day.” I look to her. “Forget there’s an ending.

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. Today, I cry for so long that I finally feel the floor under my feet. I find the bottom. And while I know the hole will be there forever, at least for now, I feel as if I can live inside it. I have learned its boundaries and its edges.

My heart hurts when you hurt because you are my heart.

One of the great injustices of this rigged world we live in is that women are considered to be depleting with age and men are somehow deepening.

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.

My older self knows that you must stop—in the middle of the chaos—to take in the world around you. To breathe in deeply, smell the sunscreen and the rubber of the ball, let the breeze blow across your neck, feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. In this respect, I love the way the world has aged me.

Why do I have to be nice when most of the men aren’t?

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. Just because you want to.

Luckily, I did not need to be pretty. My body was built to wage war.

They can’t make us go away just because they are done with us

I have always known there is no mountain you cannot climb, one step at a time

I am no longer the greatest tennis player in the world. For the first time in my life, I can be...something else.

I am afraid of losing. I am afraid of how it will look to the world. I’m afraid of this match being the last match my father ever sees me play. I am afraid of ending this all on a loss. I am afraid of so much.

You are perfect, even in your imperfection.

When did I lose that? The delight of success? When did winning become something I needed in order to survive? Something I did not enjoy having, so much as panic without?

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.

The downside of perfectionism is that you are so used to getting it right, you completely collapse when you get it wrong.

I'm so grateful now, for every match and every win and every loss and every lesson that I have behind me. It feels so good, right now, to be thirty seven years old. To have figured at least some things out.

Because you are not yet who you will one day be.

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.

It was okay to win as long as I acted surprised when I did and attributed it to luck. I should never let on how much I wanted to win or, worse, that I believed I deserved to win. And I should never, under any circumstances, admit that I did not believe all of my opponents were just as worthy as I was. The bulk of the commentators... they wanted a woman whose eyes would tear up with gratitude, as if she owed them her victory, as if she owed them everything she had.

This is the tiniest beginning of a terrible, beautiful whole new life.

Good is the enemy of great,

No matter how good I was on the court, I was never good enough for the public. It wasn’t enough to play nearly perfect tennis. I had to do that and also be charming. And that charm had to appear effortless.

You left!” he says, his voice rising. And then he shakes his head and laughs to himself. “You hurt your knee, you lost a couple matches, and you gave up. That’s what you did. You’re saying we’re the same, but we’re not. I stuck around. I had the guts to try. I have the guts to lose. You, you just run. Well, guess what, Carrie? People who are actually playing the game lose. We all lose. We lose all the time. That is life. So we are not the same, Soto. I have courage. You’re just good at tennis.

I suspected the problem was that I was always the winner. But I could not for the life of me understand why that made people want to play with me less instead of more.

For decades, my talent and drive were utterly devastating to those who stood in my wake. If each person is blessed with an induvial gift, determination is mine.

Mick Riva’s kid?” my dad said. “I cannot stand that guy.