Just days after Christmas, Serena Williams will be flying down to Australia to play the Hopman Cup and the Australian Open. I have high hopes for her at both tournaments (Hopman is more of an exhibition, but still). I feel strongly that Serena will get her 24th Slam title in the coming year. I feel that way because… Serena won’t stop until she gets #24 AND #25. She wants to be the all-time Slam leader. Will #24 come in Australia? Or Paris? Or Wimbledon? I don’t know, pick one. Because she’s going to win one of them (New York can eat it). In any case, to promote her upcoming season and to just talk about being an icon of womanhood, Serena sat down with Teen Vogue for a cover story. It’s a good read – you can see the full piece here. Some highlights:
How she juggles so much, with tennis, motherhood & all her side projects: “Honestly, I don’t know. I go to bed every night thinking, How did I get through this day? I’m sure a lot of people out there can relate, right? It’s like, this day is over, it’s 10 o’clock, I got through it. How did that happen? That’s kind of how I am. Between… I just started training. Yes, I’m still playing. So, that has been… OK, now I’m training on top of running this fashion company, on top of being a full-time mom. I’m super hands-on as a mom. I just take it as it is and realize that everyone goes through the same thing.
How to be confident, even when you’re not really feeling it: “I think it’s really important to realize that no day is going to be perfect. For me, that’s really hard because I strive for perfection, and I feel like everything I do has to be great and has to be perfect, because I am a true perfectionist. But that’s impossible. That’s not reasonable. Then I realize that, OK, I had a rough day today, let’s do something to make it better tomorrow. I think it’s important to expect to have some really rough times when you’re going through something, but always know that you can overcome it.
Elevating women of color: “…It’s just about having the conversation and starting. If you are just reading about it or maybe not knowing about it, then you can’t make a change. It’s definitely important to have that conversation, and then encourage people to support each other. Especially as women of color. We really have to support each other. I always like to say that women really should support each other, because the success of one woman should be the inspiration to the next. If we look at it that way, there would be so much more that we can accomplish.
One of the most moving moments of Serena’s HBO docuseries was when she went to France to train at Patrick Mouratoglou’s academy, and she was working so hard to “get back” and it still wasn’t enough. Patrick sat her down and told her, flat-out, that she needed to stop breastfeeding and Serena basically had an emotional breakdown. She thought she could do it all, she thought she could nurse Olympia and lose the weight and train hard and be a wife and when she couldn’t do it all, it was like she ran into a brick wall. My point? She knows this intellectually – “I strive for perfection, and I feel like everything I do has to be great and has to be perfect, because I am a true perfectionist. But that’s impossible. That’s not reasonable” – but in practice, in real life, it’s something else for her. Anyway, I just love her. I hope she plays forever. Also: I totally believe that she AND Venus will play the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
Cover courtesy of Teen Vogue, additional photo courtesy of Avalon Red.
it doesn’t. next.
…lol…
It sucks being a trailblazer, expectations are high and so many people are chomping at the bit to criticize everything you do. I wish she didn’t feel like she had anything to prove, but maybe it’s to herself.
Her top/shirt on the cover on the magazine is everything! The color on Serena is gorgeous!!
She puts a lot of pressure on herself, and you don’t get to be “GOAT” without having these perfectionist tendencies. I hope one day she will sit back, relax, and truly relish in all the wonderful, amazing accomplishments she’s achieved in her life–and give herself a pat on the back for what’s she’s done. I know that’s hard for perfectionist, Type-A people–to keep striving for more and better is what makes them tick.
i am this way too. I had planned to have a second baby this year and i miscarried twice and I lost my sh*t for a while because in my mind, my body would never do this. i felt like i should have control over this and it was just unacceptable that my life wouldn’t happen per my plans. i took every medical test possible and a bunch of copays later, everything is normal and the miscarriages probably had nothing to do with my physical health.
Because i felt this way about control over my body, I had projected this on other people in my life and I thought that they would see me as flawed, tragic, or pitiful (especially if they were pregnant).
I think i will struggle with this my entire life but this year was an exercise in focusing on:
1. only the things that i can control and learning to remind myself that it is anxiety speaking in my head and not the truth. Whenever i have a negative thought i cut it off by saying, “that’s just anxiety talking. be gone” at first i did this 100 times a day and now it is maybe 5 times. Negative thoughts have lessened a whole lot. my next goal is replacing with some positive messaging.
2. learning to worry less, recognize envy, and focus less on people who make me feel envy. Avoiding social media has helped immensely but some days i really have to fight a strong urge to stalk people’s pages.
mental health is just as much work as physical health…sometimes more.
Escondista, sorry you’ve had such a rough year. But I’m glad things are going better and I’m going to steal your idea of identifying and cutting off those negative/anxious thoughts. As for Serena – she is amazing, the GOAT, and has to deal with so much crap, pressure, and prejudice. I don’t know how she does it but I am rooting for her to get at least one more grand slam in 2019!
Thank you so much for this. I appreciate and will try this advice! 🙂 <3
You can be the most elite tennis player ever, a great athlete, rich, famous, beautiful, a champion multiple times over, a great spouse, a gorgeous little one, and loads of supportive friends … yet have several chips on your shoulder.
She still thinks she is an underdog who continues to struggle against the world despite the FACT that she is sports royalty. Just stop with the near-constant “woe is me” routine.
Shh, I suspect interviewers may be asking her this question often and not printing other parts of the conversation, but I do agree that the narrative is very tiring. No one will ever be respected by everyone. You could be the local librarian and someone will treat you like trash for no good reason. We all deal with it. She gets critiqued at a different level, but, as you appropriately pointed out, success comes with big perks and big detriments.
Please spare everyone the “oh, angry irrational black woman who’s got no reason to have a chip on her shoulder” crap. Black women are under way more pressure than most to be perfect, period. It does not matter how accomplished, knowledgable, skilled, or morally good we are—we are never _enough_. We are always being weighed to see if we are living up to an ever-changing irrational racist “standard of worthy.” We better deliver/be perfect all the damn time, because making mistakes like most normal humans means proof we’re secretly the failures society believes we are. Serena has been told from day one she and her sister weren’t even human enough to play, much less be good at it, so she had to be brilliant 24/7 just to exist. That is not conditioning you ever shake off, because you fear that any slip will lose you everything.
being a black woman or any woman of color or even just a minority of any sort you HAVE to be perfect….
and the only way to break that is to develop a tough skin and live by your own rules.