WP3 REVISED: The Void of Lost Identity
PURPOSE: After all the work and personal exploration this semester, when it comes to the discussion of mental health in athletes, my contribution to the discussion is my personal experience as an athlete who has had to lose their identity through injury.
My experience with creating WP2 came during a very interesting time in my life. I set out to create a comprehensive view of mental health in athletes by combining the experiences of some athletes in my personal life as well as those that have been published about professional athletes. I knew that I could bring an interesting perspective as a Division I NCAA athlete since I am connected to so many high-performance athletes who could chat with me about their perspectives. In WP3, I intend to conclude my research and interviews, as well as touch on my own experiences with mental health as an athlete, especially this semester. Those not in the collegiate or professional athletics world likely don’t see how closely identity and sport are linked, as well as the severe effects that the loss of this identity can have on mental health. As much as this will shed light on the dark side of college and professional athletics, it will also allow me to document how this environment has affected me. In this way, this work has become very therapeutic to me, almost like a journal.
When athletes are asked about their experience after leaving their sport or having to stop temporarily due to injury, the main narrative I hear is that they feel that they have lost their identity. From a young age, competitive sports are geared to make kids passionate about their sport by making it their main personality trait. When I think back to my friends in middle school, I remember a lot of the people by their sport- if they were the swimmer boy or the soccer girl. This is only magnified for young adults who continue into college athletics. All of my closest friends are athletes, and the majority of them are on the track and field team with me. Social events are limited to only athletes, networking events are geared towards athletes, I eat with my friends in the athlete dining hall, wear athletic gear in my classes, and spend my days lounging around the athletics facilities. As a result, my sport is intertwined with every part of my life. So when you can’t participate in your sport anymore, its absence is much more noticeable than simply missing practice.
I have seen athletics ripped away from different people in a few different ways in the past few years. Senior year of high school, I started to see friends who had been passionate about a sport their entire lives begin to learn that they didn’t have the skill to play at a higher level or realize that their bodies couldn’t take it anymore. Last year, I watched my friend get unexpectedly cut from our team, abruptly ending her twelve-year track and field career. I watched another friend medically retire from swimming as her nerve damage had gotten too severe, ending the journey she had begun when she was four years old. This year, I watched my teammate win indoor nationals, just to tear her hamstring and end her outdoor season and 2024 Olympic hopes two weeks later. And, after eight years of painful training and multiple herniated discs, I watched my track and field career slowly end two months before it was supposed to.
Injuries are one of the most devastating ways to lose your ability to compete and what makes you feel like you. When meeting with my friend and past teammate, Olympian Isaiah Jewett, he spoke about how these injuries can affect your mental health.
“There is definitely a direct correlation between injuries and depression depending on how long the injury is, and how you got the injury. It’s more likely that the longer you are out for an injury the more you question if could you do [well in your sport] in the first place. This leads to feeling like you are not capable of doing the sport you once were so good at. It’s hard to not be depressed when you can’t even do what you feel like you are good at. Sometimes when you get a career-ending injury at the top of your game or at a highlight moment, I feel like you lost a part of yourself in seconds and now the world forces you to operate like you were never that athlete. That’s what creates the loss of identity. Taking away the hours spent on your craft and telling you essentially that it was all for nothing.”
- Isaiah Jewett
Humans intrinsically crave routine, and when something disrupts this routine, like injury, you can feel as though there is a hole in your everyday life. On top of missing the feeling of competition and training with your teammates, you have to reevaluate how you spend your days, most of which are in the training room. The training room is one of the most lonely parts of elite athletics, but if you want any chance of getting back to your season, you need to spend multiple hours a week alone doing exercises. This often will happen during your normal practice time, causing you to feel more left out of regular team activities. I spoke to my friend and teammate Josh Ligas about how being confined to the training room can affect your everyday well-being.
“I have definitely seen injury play a major role in my mental health. When you get injured, you have to change the daily training routine that you have gotten so locked into. This causes you to have to work alone, without your teammates, and can leave you feeling left out of the team atmosphere. Also, you have to change your expectations drastically for the rest of the year or season, which can get upsetting. A lot of the time, an athlete’s sport is their entire identity and how they define themselves, so losing the ability to do what you are great at can send you in a bad direction mentally.”
- Josh Ligas
As I interviewed my friends and researched professional athletes regarding their perceptions of mental health in elite athletics, I unexpectedly embarked on the toughest mental health journey of my long athletic career. Beginning my senior year, I knew that this would be the last competitive track and field season of my life. I had worried about how my identity and how I viewed myself would change, but I knew I had one more season to prove my ability to myself. This would hopefully culminate in a trip to the final Pac-12 Championships in Boulder, Colorado, and a place at the Nationals West Regional Qualifier in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Throughout my javelin career, I have dealt with a grocery list of injuries, including two herniated discs in my lumbar spine, a UCL tear, a hip labrum tear, a shoulder labrum tear, severe hand nerve damage, and a partial tear in my knee. Although it sounds like my career should ended years ago, “pushing through the pain” is one of the main components of javelin culture. So, I have thrown and lifted through the pain of various injuries over the past eight years. However, this spring, my back injuries began to affect more than just my ability to practice comfortably. I couldn’t do the hobbies I love to do, like surfing and hiking. I would have trouble sitting for long periods in class, which greatly impacted my ability to focus. I started to think further than the time of my track career for the first time and became worried about my life quality after track. I decided that I needed to have some serious conversations with my coaches and trainers about taking a step back.
This was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. I couldn’t stop telling myself that I was quitting, that I was giving up. I’ve pushed through so much pain in my career, why is this injury finally taking me out now? Why am I giving up before the season is over? After four years of my life revolving around being a collegiate athlete, I felt as though I was rapidly losing my identity. I had known the end of my career was coming in June of my senior year, but I began to see the last few months of my career- that I thought were promised- being ripped away. I was faced with a crossroads- I either needed to figure out what could replace the hole in my life that track and field had left, or get ready to feel generally lost. This luckily came at an opportune time for me, as I had begun to get really involved in rock climbing. I had wondered for years what I would do for workouts or fun after I was done training for javelin, and I had found a passion in climbing. Although this was amazing for me, it became strikingly obvious that elite athletics cause a need for people to dedicate themselves exclusively to one activity. It isn’t necessarily bad to become obsessed with one thing, but this can lead to feeling lost if you can no longer do that activity.
When a sport becomes your entire identity, you also have to deal with its repercussions. For elite athletes, every thought during training and injury is situated towards being the best or winning the next competition. As I researched different athletes’ experiences with grasping how their sport has affected their identity, I was surprised by Michael Phelps’ comments. Phelps is widely regarded as the best male swimmer of all time, and one of the best athletes of all time. As a result, I was shocked to learn that he has felt lost at many points in his career. In an interview with Healthline, Phelps spoke about “post-Olympic depression” following his showing at the 2004 Athens Olympics where he won six gold medals and two bronze medals.
“[You] work so hard for four years to get to that point, and then it’s like you’re…at the top of the mountain, you’re like what the hell am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? Who am I?”
- Michael Phelps
Similarly, Simone Biles has commented on feeling like her love for the sport had turned simply into a race to the top. When the main focus of your career and personal is being the best, you can lose a sense of the journey, and the things that made you love the sport in the first place.
“It’s like, OK, get here and be done,” Biles said of her gymnastics career. “You want it to come, but you also don’t want it to end. At the end of the day, I’m such a huge athlete, but who am I? If you take off that mask, you know, who will I be? I’m still trying to find that out.”
- Simone Biles (via The New York Times)
After considering how large of a loss of identity can occur during an injury, it makes sense that mental health is a major concern among elite athletes. In a report recently released by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suicide was stated as the second leading cause of death of US college athletes after accidents. These numbers have more than doubled in the past 20 years, from 7% to 15%. There is a misconception that the support staff surrounding college athletes would enhance their mental health, which often causes people to not worry about them. In reality, harsh coaches, expectations from higher-ups, and toxic environments surrounding body type and nutrition can severely damage athletes’ well-being. The study also found that suicide rates were higher in Division I and II than in Division III, which correlates to the level of intensity that is expected from elite college athletes. The cultural stigma of toughness in athletics can also have a harsh effect on athletes. I spoke to my teammate Josh Ligas about this.
“Being tough is definitely an important thing in athletics. To make it far and to be successful, you need to have physical and mental toughness. So yeah, vulnerability is seen as a weakness a lot. But this has caused a lot of athletes to the point where they won’t admit that they are struggling until it is so bad that they have to quit. Stopping the stigma of toughness will actually help a lot of athletes compete harder and longer. I know that all athletes feel the mental pressures, so if it is talked about, we will definitely all relate.”
- Josh Ligas
Collegiate athletics, from the outside, are viewed as an all-around fun experience, with more perks than regular students, the spotlight, and glory. However, the way the system is organized puts high levels of pressure on athletes to do whatever it takes to win, usually by making the sport their entire life and identity. When faced with a pause or end in their career, athletes can feel a large void in their personality, leading to severe mental health problems. Coupled with the stressors from everyday elite athlete life, it is unfortunately not surprising that suicide is the main cause of death in US collegiate athletes. My generation is already doing better with shedding light on the state of mental health in athletics, but it will be hard to unravel the deep tie between sport and identity, and the harm that comes with it.
