Off the blocks

A tough thing for me to write about....

The Olympics are coming up, which I look forward to every 4 years. I always cry during the medal ceremonies and when someone wins. There’s just something so moving about watching someone literally realize their dreams and be the best in the world! Right now, the Trials for swimming is going on and it’s bringing back a lot of nostalgia and otherness for me.

Swimming shaped so much of my life and the nature of the sport makes it somewhat all encompassing. I started swimming for fun when I was 5. I loved it. I started doing two-a-days in middle school and then it was like one big long season for the next 10 years as I moved on to high school and college swimming.

Competitive swimmers are at the pool every day except Sunday for 4-5 hours a day of very physical and mentally challenging work. The seasons go from September to March and April to August. There isn’t really an offseason.

When I look back, I find it a little bonkers. I used to think “it taught me work ethic!” and yes, it did. It gave me many positive things and friends, but I think it also taught me a deranged form of what I thought was work ethic. It taught me that if I take more than two weeks off a year, I am lazy and will lose all the efforts of my hard work. It taught me that if something feels like an injury or doesn’t seem right, I better just power through it and if I can’t, I am just not good enough. The worst thing that came out of swimming for me is that I derived my self worth from my results in competitions.

The act of swimming is something I love, I think it’s the competitive landscape and my inexperience with how to handle it that broke me.

I’ve spent decades contemplating this, trying to move on but always still felt like something was sitting there in the back of my mind, pestering me. I wasn’t sure what, but I knew I wanted to excavate it. If you read my last post, you’ll remember that I’ve been working heavily on personal growth and am currently in the middle of a 6-month mentorship with Catherine.

Catherine introduced me to a concept called Journal Speak, which is like inner-teenager, therapy + journal work wrapped up into an exercise. If you want to dig deeper, Nicole Sachs gives a great guide and explanation here.

When I think about my dreams and fears, I get this deep sense of shame and that I am not good enough or strong enough or worthy of stepping fully into a room. I think about all the self-centered or embarrassing things I’ve done in my life and all my shortcomings and weaknesses.

I keep asking myself who I think I need to answer to and what I need to do to move on. I used Journal Speak to continue to dig. I went through layers of shame and triggers. I kept coming back to this thought where I didn’t feel like I could sustainably move on until I understood better what happened to me.

A few days ago I was doing a Journal Speak stream-of-consciousness and I wrote down “I was sick and needed help.”

It was something I had forgotten about.

My freshman year in college I started feeling really sick around November and couldn’t get better. My coach told me it was because I was out of shape. I believed him and started going to the gym on my own on Sundays to do cardio. I still felt awful. I would wake up in the morning and the thought of getting dressed felt daunting. I would get dressed, do my two-a-days, swim like shit and spiral further downwards. The doctors found nothing wrong, but I was getting strep and my tonsils would swell so much that it became a joke.

I was prescribed antibiotics for 4 months straight, 1000 mg a day. I cringe now thinking about what that did to my microbiome and body. After I raced I would be tomato red from the effort and still was going slower than ever. My coach told me I should transfer and then started ignoring me. I wanted to be accepted more than ever. It was also so scary to feel so bad but be told the only problem is something inside of me. I started to seriously doubt myself and believe others over myself.

One day in December I was at the mall with my teammates shopping when my cellphone rang. It was our head coach calling. I answered and sat in one of those benches around those kiosks while my heard dropped.

The coach said he was calling to tell me that he thinks I am depressed and that I better get over it because he can’t have depressed people on the team. I had never heard that diagnosis before but knew it was presented as something that strong people don’t encounter. It was presented as if it was a choice. This random phone call diagnosis + all the physical pain I was feeling convinced me that something was seriously wrong with me and that I didn’t belong. My reaction was to shove that down as far as possible. If it was a choice to have something I didn’t even think I had, then it was a choice to not have it too.

Swimming was my whole identity, so the thought of losing it felt really, really scary. I made sure to be overwhelmingly happy and silly because I didn’t want to be the “depressed” person on the team. What followed was wanting to numb out whenever possible, which I’m sure was the result of severe anger for loss of agency that I didn’t even know I had. On Saturdays and Sundays, all I wanted was to be away from myself and enjoyed the moments at bars when my teammates and I could take shots, be among “normal” college kids and forget about life for awhile.

In April of my freshman year, I ultimately tested positive for mono and had surgery to get my tonsils removed. I never healed and went on the extreme workout, act carefree / numb path for awhile. It’s hard to write this and I’ve battled many thoughts on why I shouldn’t share this. I am not unique in my suffering. Many of my college friends and teammates have their own unique version on how that coach f’ed with us. We unfortunately had no idea what we were all going through and worse, who to turn to for help and how to break the cycle.

But I unearthed a scary thing that has haunted me for the past 20 years and feel some freedom. I take responsibility for all my actions, which is way easier when I understand them better. I look at my life now and see so many facets that make me feel fulfilled, things that I want to keep and things I want to drop. Writing this, as scary as it is, helps.

I started swimming on a team again this year in April. Every few practices, we work on starts and go off the blocks. I told my coach I didn’t want to do it and she couldn’t have been kinder about it. She told me from the beginning that everything was optional and I only had to do that if and when I wanted to. I have continued to avoid going off the blocks as it gets a little to close to competition, alienating myself at the end of practice when everyone gets out of the water to line up behind the blocks and I stay in the water. Last week I even told myself I would never go off the blocks in practice. Yet saying that showed me how I was living in my fear, making it more engrained in my life.

This morning I went off the blocks in practice and feel nothing but pride. It’s over.

If you have something keeping you from going off the blocks, I hope you feel empowered to look at what’s underneath. It doesn’t have to be immediate and it can be slow steps. I think time, Journal Speak, working with a mentor and giving birth to a baby I love more than anything has been the best combination of healing that I have ever experienced. We all go through hard things in life and grapple with understanding them and our reactions to them. Please know that I see you and don’t want you to suffer anymore if you are. Looking at it takes something, but the freedom is worth it.

XOXO,

Rachel