For years, I thought that the work on the court was enough for everything, for every part of me.
An everyday imperfection.
Necessary, and it burns.

And the most intimate perfection.
Hidden, yet it brings peace.
Almost religious.

My whole life, until now, has been driven by two distinct and parallel forces.
One visible, the other not.
One accessible to everyone, with all its edges and all its harshness.
The other revealing itself only now, only in glimpses, even to me, one dawn at a time.
The dawns of when I’m happy.

If you had asked me a few years ago, or even just a few months ago, are you happy, I doubt I would have said yes.
Joy, maybe.
Happiness, no.
I doubt I would have been able to see myself, or to describe myself, beyond the court, beyond ambition.
Beyond my desire to be good.
To be strong.
Stronger than the day before.
Again and again.

Many people think it.
Everyone says it.
Especially when they speak to a coach, a manager, or into a microphone, because that’s what is expected from an athlete. From an artist, from a master.
But few truly live according to what that desire requires.
Very few wake up in the morning genuinely consumed—nourished and consumed at the same time—by the deep need to grow.
To grow. To learn.
To overcome the past. Even the one you put to sleep the night before.

Basketball, of course.
But also experiences.
Books.
Lessons.
To understand: I have always wanted to understand.
New things, as if who I am were not enough, as if I wanted to dig deeper and rise higher. Deeper foundations, taller skyscrapers.

I have always been like this, since I was a child.
Full of energy.
Curious about everything. Dependent on nothing.
I think I tried every single sport that was available in my town.

In my family there has always been, and still is, great attention to it.
I grew up with a sporting background, but this hunger to search, this desire to constantly test myself, is mine alone.

I have a very clear image in front of my eyes.
Those were kindergarten years, and the school had organized a special version of the Olympics. Children’s games dressed as the Games of the grown-ups.
I was standing on the podium, moving among the other boys and girls.
Five medals around my neck, maybe six.
Long jump, running, football with the boys, every discipline available.

It was my language.
My code.

Not only do I not know what I would have been without sport.
I don’t even know if I would have been able to tell it.

Metaphor. Vocabulary. Language.
Sport has always been my mother tongue.
And in wanting to master it, it forced me to embrace a necessary, everyday imperfection. One that sometimes lights you up.
And other times burns you.

As soon as we were old enough, my brother and I moved to Zagreb.
Or rather, as soon as he was old enough, he moved there.
To become a basketball player.
I followed him.
Younger, and less talented.
I followed him, leaving home behind.
Leaving volleyball, friendships, everything else.
Because I wanted to see what was there, waiting for me.
Beyond. I wanted to go beyond.
Driven by a thought I could not yet put into words, but that was crystal clear inside me.

Now I better understand what my parents did to make it possible.
I don’t know how many would have made that sacrifice: my mother came with us, while my father stayed home to work.
We were apart for about ten years. Day after day.
Held together only by mutual love, the kind that asks for less the more intense it is, and guided by that nameless spark we felt burning inside us as children.

Better than yesterday.
To be better than yesterday.

I don’t know why, but I have to be better than yesterday.

Without my family, everything that came after would not have happened.
Having someone who takes you to practice, who asks about school with genuine interest, who prepares dinner with a care that matters more than the ingredients themselves.
Without it, none of it would have meant much.
That is what made the difference.

So imperfection became a guide.
A source of opportunity.
It became the architecture of who I am.
The castle of my spirit, something that protects whoever lives inside it and keeps growing with me, more and more, convinced that improving is the answer, yet unaware that the sky is always higher.
Unreachable by definition.

I have not always been an easy teammate, or an easy player.
Not easy to manage.
Not easy to understand.
Not easy to be around.
And at a certain point, that reputation began to walk beside me.
“Good, but not easy.”

I was rigid, very protective.
As I grew, I changed cities and countries.
I lived in new environments that had to be translated and compressed into my own language.
I focused on becoming strong, to survive.

When I arrived in Moscow at 18, it felt like landing on a different planet, vast and overwhelming. Foreign in every shade.
I, coming from my small reality, closed myself off.
Closed at home.
Closed in the gym.
Closed to others.

If someone didn’t think like me, that was their problem.
Even on the court, I showed too much of my emotions.
I had a plan.
I had goals to reach, skills to refine.
I wanted everything, and felt like I had nothing.
Happy to be unhappy because I was imperfect.

I have never doubted the path itself.
Or the bigger picture.
But I have often questioned the value of a single step.

As a child, I had visions of greatness.
I truly felt that I was destined for something.
For success.
For something important.
Only now do I understand how thin the thread is that holds everything together.
How my constant dissatisfaction, my need to ask more of myself, again and again, made this journey possible.

Between America and Europe: travel, practices, games.
Some seasons never really began, and never really ended.
They felt like one long stream of consciousness.
They became, in reflection, my existence.

I still do it, for many reasons.
To understand how far I can go.
For my family, and their sacrifices.
To give something back to someone else.
Because it is my life.

But age has brought perspective.
Fatigue has softened the edges and, after loving imperfection for years, after making it the axis of my future, I have also learned to embrace what is perfect.
I have started to feel the presence of something vast beneath the surface of the everyday.
I have started to realize that I am alive, that I am healthy, that basketball is beautiful, and that it gives me unique experiences. And that it is perfect like this.
Even on the days when my knee hurts.
The ones when I miss shots.
The ones when I disagree.

I discovered, to my great surprise, that I too can be in the right place, at the right time. That feeling out of balance helped me grow, but it is no longer enough.
I discovered that I am hungry for more, that I want to study, that I want to step outside the gym, that I want to understand everything. And in doing so, my basketball has improved.
It has made me more capable.
More open.
More at peace.

The more I need simple things, the clearer it becomes that I can choose, every day, who I want to be. And the answer is still a basketball player.
Which is both what I do and who I am.
The synthesis of my entire experience.
My thirty-year-long experiment.
My way of bringing together human imperfection and the perfection of the cosmos.
My mother tongue.