I have a T-shirt from my senior year that says, “Mental health is health. Period.” I never really understood how much I resonated with this until my final two years competing in college athletics.
Being a student-athlete is difficult not only on your body but arguably, even more so, on your mind. Gymnastics in the broadest sense is a sport based on perfection, and you are judged from the time you are young until your last routine on how close to this mark you can get. More so than any of us realize, this mentality carries over into everything else we do.
As I started writing this, I began to think about how much I wish I could have told my younger self, “It’s going to be okay.” As hard as it is to come to this realization so many years later, I know I’ll never be able to go back; but, I can tell the people around me. Mental health is so deeply rooted whether you are aware of it or not, but my goal with this piece is to open up the conversation and show that it’s okay to feel the way you do, but there are ways to cope with these feelings.
In my own experience, I became the most aware of my mental health towards the end of my career. I know looking back, these feelings were always there, I just didn’t know what they were. There is so much pressure to…
