Time & Perspective Quote by Karrie Webb

There’s a quietly devastating honesty in Webb’s “On one hand,” a phrase that sounds like casual conversation but actually signals a lifetime of competing narratives. As an athlete, she’s trained to speak in results - win, lose, score. Here, she speaks in ambivalence. The line is built like someone holding a trophy and a bruise at the same time.

The intent reads as measured gratitude: she’s acknowledging a long pursuit without letting the moment turn into a coronation. That restraint matters in sports culture, where public joy is often treated as a performance requirement, especially for women athletes who get punished for seeming either too triumphant or too emotional. “It seems like” adds another layer: not certainty, but a surreal, slightly dislocated feeling that arrives when a goal stops being hypothetical and becomes real. Achievement doesn’t always land as cleanly as the highlight reel promises.

Subtext: waiting is not passive. “I’ve waited” carries years of training, setbacks, near-misses, travel, and the low-grade loneliness of elite competition. It also hints at the politics of recognition - that some careers, however decorated, still feel like they’re waiting for the sport, sponsors, or the broader public to fully catch up.

Contextually, it’s the language of someone at the finish line realizing the finish line moves. The sentence gestures toward a second hand we don’t hear: the part of her that knows arrival is complicated, and that the cost of “a long time” doesn’t vanish just because the moment finally does.