There's a moment on the padel court right before the point starts where everything goes quiet. Your partner is at the net. You're at the baseline. The other team is ready. And for a fraction of a second, you have to decide — not whether you're warmed up enough, not whether you slept well, not whether your backhand has been weak today. You just have to decide: are you in?
That moment has taught me more about showing up than anything else I've tried in the last three years.
I came to padel the way a lot of people come to things they end up loving: sideways, and slightly reluctantly. On my daily motorbike routes — out to get food, run errands, the usual — there were strange blue courts right on the side of the road, tucked between palm trees and banana trees next to a typical petrol station you can only find in Thailand.
I love my tropical home. But more than anything I love the ocean. I'm obsessed with it, actually. Blue is one of my favourite colours. I still haven't let go of the thought of moving to the seaside.
Anyway, I told my then-boyfriend about my discovery and we decided to try whatever sport is being played on those deep blue courts. With no luck, of course. We had fun, but we also didn't know what on God's green earth we were doing.
Two years later — now single, wanting to try new things — my friend dragged me to those exact courts in Chiang Mai. I even asked if I could just watch before I actually played in the Americano. Of course she wouldn't let me. I didn't know the rules. Blimey, I'd never played any racquet sport in my life. I'd held a padel racket exactly once. But I told myself it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be any good anyway, so there was nothing to lose.
That's a very specific kind of mental trick, by the way. Lowering the stakes to zero so the fear of failure doesn't get to show up to the party. I'd been doing it with other things in my life too — starting things quietly, hedging, leaving myself an exit before I'd even walked through the door.
What happened instead: I loved it immediately. Not because I was good. I wasn't. I was getting destroyed. But there was something in the nature of the game itself — the strange court, the beautiful blue of the turf, the glass walls, the rhythm of a real rally, the people on court — that made showing up feel like the whole point. And showed up I did. From then on, every week, multiple times. Alone — because that same friend had discovered her love for pickleball while I was diving deeper into padel and the community here in Chiang Mai. No need to worry, we're still friends, and closer than ever.
Padel has a short memory, which is one of the things I appreciate most about it. You can lose a point badly — swing at air, double-fault, misread a bounce completely — and five seconds later, the ball is in play again. The game doesn't care about your last shot. It only cares about this one.
That pace rewired something in me. I'm a recovering perfectionist, which means I spent a long time believing that the right time to do something was when I could do it well. The right time to post was when the content was ready. The right time to build was when I had a clear plan. The right time to come back was when I had something to come back with.
Padel said: no. The right time is now. Pick up the ball. Serve again.
I've been away from writing for a stretch. Some of it was burnout. Some of it was life moving faster than I could document it. Some of it was the perfectionist thing — waiting for the right frame, the right words, the right moment to announce a return. The longer I waited, the bigger the return had to be. The bigger it had to be, the harder it got to start.
Then I thought about the court. That pre-point quiet. The decision that doesn't ask you to be ready. It just asks: are you in?
I'm in.
What showing up actually looks like, I've learned, is almost never what you imagined. It's smaller. It's more specific. It's a Wednesday morning hitting session when you're tired and under-caffeinated and one player texts to say they're running ten minutes late. It's pressing publish on the thing you've been sitting on for two weeks. It's joining or starting a community in a city where you don't know anyone yet and trusting that the people who are supposed to find it will find it.
The padel court taught me that showing up is not a feeling. It's not confidence or readiness or having figured it out. It's a decision you make before any of those things arrive. And most of the time, the rest follows — not because you earned it by being prepared, but because you put yourself in the game.
We're back. The magazine, the community, the writing — all of it.
This is Week 1. This is Monday. This is the serve.
Welcome to the Rally.
An Americano in Padel
An Americano is a round-robin format where players rotate partners after each short game. Everyone plays with everyone. You don't need to arrive with a team — you just need to show up. Points are tracked individually across all games, so there's no hiding behind a stronger partner, but also no pressure to perform for one person's benefit. It's social by design. Competitive enough to care. Relaxed enough to laugh. For anyone coming back to sport, or trying it for the first time, it's the best possible format. You'll be mid-rally before you've had time to overthink it.