Let me be honest with you about something. I have been playing padel for two years. I play twice a week, sometimes three times. I have had lessons. I have watched YouTube videos at midnight with the intensity of someone studying for an exam that will determine their entire future. I have read about footwork and positioning and the correct grip and when to go to the net and when to stay back.

I am still, by any reasonable measure, not very good.

Not beginner bad — I can keep a rally going, I understand the game, I know where I should be standing even when I am not standing there. But not good either. Not improving in any way that feels meaningful or linear. Not the kind of player who makes other players relieved to have me on their team.

For the first year, this bothered me enormously. I am a person who gets good at things. That is part of my identity, quietly but firmly. I apply myself. I improve. The normal rules of effort and reward have generally held.

Padel declined to follow those rules.

The embarrassment was specific. It was not about what other people thought — or not only that. It was about the gap between the player I could see in my head and the player I actually was on court. I knew what a good shot looked like. I could feel, in the moment before I hit the ball, exactly what I intended to do. And then I would do something completely different, usually into the net, occasionally into a neighbouring court.

The gap between intention and execution is one of the more humbling places a person can live.

I tried harder. I took more lessons. I did drills. I arrived early and practised my serve, which remains, two years in, the most unpredictable element of my game. Sometimes it goes in beautifully. More often it does not go in at all, and the three other people on the court maintain expressions of careful neutrality while I collect the ball and try again.

I cannot tell you exactly when it happened. It was not a single moment. It was more like a tide going out — the embarrassment receding so gradually that I only noticed it was gone when I looked back and realised it had been a long time since I had left the court feeling bad about myself.

Here is what I know now that I did not know at the beginning.

Being bad at padel is not the same as failing at padel. Failing at padel would be not showing up. Failing at padel would be letting the fear of being the weakest player in the group stop you from being there at all. Failing at padel would be making your enjoyment conditional on your performance, so that a game of missed shots becomes an indictment of your value as a human being, which is — and I cannot stress this enough — an absurd thing to do with a Tuesday evening.

Not improving is just a fact. A neutral fact, like the weather. Some people pick up padel and within six months they are playing at a level that makes you wonder if they have a secret past as a professional athlete. Some people play for years and remain cheerfully mediocre. I am in the second group. This is fine. This is actually completely fine.

What I am very good at, it turns out, is being there. Showing up. Laughing when the ball hits me in the face, which happens more than I would like. Cheering a good shot from my partner with the same volume whether we are winning or losing. Making the post-match coffee feel worth staying for.

Sport, as most of us experienced it growing up, was organised around improvement. The point was to get better. The point was to win. The point was to be selected, to advance, to justify your presence on the team with your performance. If you were not improving, something had gone wrong.

This is an extraordinarily limited idea of what sport is for, and most of us absorbed it so thoroughly that we never thought to question it.

Padel has, gently and without making a fuss about it, offered me a different idea entirely. The point is not to improve. The point is to play. The point is the ninety minutes on a Wednesday morning when my phone is in my bag and I am thinking about absolutely nothing except the ball coming towards me. The point is the woman on my team who has become one of my closest friends and who I met because we were both trying to figure out how to return a lob and failing in exactly the same way. The point is the feeling of my body doing something athletic and demanding, even if it is doing it imperfectly. The point is being tired in the good way at eleven in the morning on a weekday.

I have achieved all of this while remaining comprehensively average at the actual sport. It has not required improvement. It has required only the decision to keep showing up, which turns out to be the one skill I have mastered completely.

There is a particular freedom that comes with accepting your ceiling and making your peace with it. I am not going to play at a competitive level. I am not going to win a tournament. I am not, realistically, going to have a breakthrough moment where everything clicks and I suddenly become the player I always imagined.

I have stopped waiting for that. And without the waiting, there is just the playing.

Just the playing turns out to be very good indeed.

If you are a beginner who has been playing for a while and still feels like a beginner — this is for you.

You are not doing it wrong. You are not behind. There is no schedule you have fallen off. The people who seem to improve effortlessly are not better at being alive than you are. They are just wired differently for this particular thing, and that is interesting rather than relevant.

You belong on the court exactly as you are. Not the player you are planning to become. Not the version of yourself that will exist once you finally get your serve consistent. The actual current version, with the backhand that sometimes works and the volleys that sometimes don't and the absolute determination to be there next Tuesday regardless.

That determination is not nothing. For many of us, it is everything.

See you out there. I'll be the one apologising to my partner and then immediately missing the next shot. I'll be smiling though. I always am.