ALOIS GRABER

Date: 26th january 2025

THE HAPPIEST YEAR

From the age of 15 through 19 were the toughest years of my life. What came before that was one of the happiest years of my life if not the happiest so far. How did that happen?

Confidence without clarity is catastrophic

Everything I wanted to be when I grew up was a good tennis player. Or ice hockey player. I thought if it had something to do with sports I wanted to be great.

When I was 14 after two years of struggle without visible tennis progression and a lot of questioning in my mind about what the meaning of everything was it clicked.

But let's look at what happened before. I was training three to four times a week at the age of 12 when my coach left me. He married a woman he now divorced and started training her kid, who had the same age and approximate level as me, all day and all night. I though whatever, that's okay new coach. People said he is younger and technically better. I was shy so I was a bit afraid. All in all it was okay.

From that point on to the time I was 14 years old my ranking dropped. I was unconfident and all I wanted was to win.

So my dad took me to a new coach who enjoyed the best reputation in the whole city. He would become not only a great coach but also a role model I could follow, a friend. He believed that tennis was rationally explainable not like 90% of the other coaches who say whatever their emotion tells them to say. And so he trained me to do the simple things correctly, and he knew what the simple things were.

So here I was at 14 years old having met this coach one year before, playing a match against a guy who was ranked way ahead of me.

My dad told me before the match that it was okay and indirectly that losing was to be expected, which was fine.

So I went out and just played without needing to win and I won closely in the third set. From that point on I was the happiest person on earth for a year. Every time something bad happened I though whatever happens it's fine I fucking beat that guy I am freed forever. Little did I know.

My father said I had changed in a good way.

But little did he know.

A year later I started coming back to earth. My mom asked me if I wanted to do a year in the USA and I accepted without anticipating or respecting it for what it was: A challenge.

Before I left I thought to myself what's the point? I started thinking: "whatever! next year I'll leave" when things got bad. And things got bad. They went from bad to worse.

• Everything should be heard and listened to. Everything one does deserves to be done good. The right way. Every challenge deserves to be respected for what it is.


• Additionally, it's important to not do what others tell you to do but to do what you want or have to do. It's important to follow your inner voice. While it is cool to listen, learn and observe other life trajectories copy some things but don't copy their wants because your wants will never be their wants and so following their wants is never going to be aligned with you and so you are not listening to yourself if you follow their wants.


• Don't sleepwalk through life. Keep yourself aware. Keep yourself challenged. Don't relax so much in good times that you lose the strength to face the bad times.
• Don't recognize patterns where there are none. In other words don't be schizophrenic. I think. Don't think: "oh if I now relax then this is going to happen" No! Shut the fuck up! You don't know what's about to happen. Focus on what you have to do now. Don't distract yourself with useless shit.

Well, I didn't know that then and when you are in a bad place for some time it's not going to change by going somewhere where your parents pressure you to become a better tennis player at all cost and where you have no friends and where you don't know the language. What was I thinking? Nothing?