The Real Me: Jessica Pegula | Modern Health x WTA | Part 1

I definitely had times where I didn't enjoy it I would say around the same age like my my teenage years where I was kind of like oh I don't know if I want to do this I don't know if this is worth it I think my love for just playing tennis always kind of came back very quickly it's kind of that weird thing where you're just slightly obsessed with it and even though you don't always love it you just kind of love the process of getting better and wanting to be better at something I mean every week it's the same right like you start back up a tournament you have to win the first round or second or third round so I think to me I always just look at every week as like a new week it's a new tournament it's a new chance to have you know try and have another good result it's always going to be a long journey and there's going to be a lot of ups and downs but I think as long as you kind of accept that things are always going to change and you can adapt and change your perspective in your mindset that you can always keep growing and stay in motion thank you all right there are my doggies this is Tucker he does bad stuff and he's not supposed to go in the pool Maddie come here Maddie come here 's Dexter they all love to go swimming it's got peppers are loud the single thing in the water and they actually all love to do something and that's Maddie and he'll probably jump in they're great I have three so much I mean I think they just everyone always happy to see you it doesn't really matter what you've done that day or how you did on the court or what you've been dealing with that they're always there to come home and greet you and they're super happy to see you so I think that they're just I mean they're like Therapies I love them I love taking care of them I love spending time with them now watch out okay I know you love so many I would say by the time I was 10 I was kind of like oh I want to be number one in the world it just starts kind of becoming a little bit more like a job I guess at a young age what has been would you say the toughest moment mentally for you that you've really had to kind of work through um definitely probably going through my hip surgery in 2017 uh that was like my last big injury basically I kind of got back my ranking you know into the top 150 and I was always on the cusp of like breaking into the top 100 and I could just felt like so far away I could just never quite get there kind of went through this a bad week right when I decided to have surgery where I was like I don't know if I want to do this you're trying to make the smallest gains like I remember picking up my leg like I I lost the feeling in my quad so I couldn't actually like do a leg lift and you're sitting there as like a professional athlete going okay this is really bad so I think you just have this moment of doubts we were trying to accomplish the smallest of tasks and then you're thinking about how am I supposed to go out and be dominant in a sport when I'm doing something so small it's sometimes it's hard to kind of keep going and stay positive about the process the mental health Journey with a lot of ups and downs but once I was making more decisions about my coaches my team my training that I just grew a lot from that whole process and definitely became more comfortable running my own career well one thing I definitely did was a journal a lot I definitely liked to journal and kind of like jot down my my thoughts um to me I don't know it's therapeutic like putting it on paper the most rewarding thing I think is looking back and seeing all of the stuff I've written in the past and just seeing how far I've come from those moments especially when I was really really young to see like a little girl you know dreaming about all these things and then now going back and able to to see what I was thinking when I was seven eight nine years old so now is pretty found a journal like an entry that I wrote like my body's gonna be able to hold up like I'll see how this goes but I feel really good and we'll see like how playing the year goes and it was and I'm like wow that was like five six years ago so it was cool to see that my body did hold up and that I've had success since then and that I I stuck through that but it's pretty cool when you read back and you see where your mindset was then and where you are now tennis is only you know a small part of your life and I think you have to keep like a healthy mindset for the rest of your life because it's that's just the way it is like you're not gonna be a top player for you know your whole life