ANXIETY DEITY

Imagine this scenario for yourself. Your practice session starts at 7:00AM but you're accidentally one minute late. Nobody cares that it's because you spent last night studying for the exam that you STILL don't feel prepared for. Your head doesn't feel right but it doesn't matter, so you take a deep breath and tell yourself that you'll get through it. As soon as training gets over, you rush to 10:00AM class. And right as you enter class you realize that you've left your homework on your desk back at the house. So you sit there at the back of class, worrying about what else you could have possibly forgotten. Your starting to overthink... Class is finally over, so you quickly grab something to eat and drive off to your training centre, which just so happens to be forty five minutes away from where you live. You're early, so you have a thirty minute break time, but you don't consider it to be a break because you need to complete the pending assignments that you didn't get time to do last week due to the tournament you went for.

Practice begins, and you have to forget about everything that's bothering you and practice. Because at practice, you can't not perform. There's someone better then you and there's someone who just committed themselves to BE you. So forget about your pending work, forget what that girl said about you, forget the friends you haven't met in weeks, forget the argument you had with your parents. Play well, practice well, perform. I am a student athlete training for the sport of fencing. I've experimented from inline skating to gymnastics and a variety of things in between. But I never connected so well with any sport as I now do with fencing.

As a child, I didn't know what mental illness was, because its so hard to understand something you can't touch or see. I'd never even thought I'd be struggling with these issues. After about two years from the time that I had started to fence, I was overjoyed. Every little happy moment I had, was somehow linked to what I did and achieved in fencing. But after a while, I started feeling differently. I grew anxious. I had six alarms to make sure that i was never late but I'd never have to use them because I'd be up by 6:15 due to my constant anxiety over being late and I worried about my athletic performance. During my matches, I'd worried about whether I'd play well or what would happen if my coaches would give up on me due to the mood swings I faced and would choose someone who's not so difficult to handle.

I was so afraid to make mistakes because with the amount of training I've been lacking lately, mistakes are costly. And on top of everything, I had school, exams, extra curricular activities and a social life (which I don't have now hehe) and it just piled up and became too much for me. I battled depression for a year without even knowing it. I'd go to school, study for six hours, go for three hour classes and four hour training sessions. And I'd do this again and again and again.

It was draining me and so I told myself that I had to buck up, that I had nothing to be sad about. I have a wonderful family and I have good friends. So I decided that I'll mask my emotions and just 'fake it' but after a while I got tired of acting like nothing bothers me. Truth is, everything does. The difference between the old me and the new me is that the old me was empathetic and the new me is just sensitive. I remember times I would run to the bathroom and just cry because for five seconds, I just wanted my day to stop. At this point, your probably thinking why don't I just quit. I can't stop fencing because fencing is WHO I AM. It's not a hobby or something I do on the side. It's my life, just like most athletes would quote and what that means is, I have to learn how to manage my lifestyle and you better bet that I want to win the upcoming tournaments of 2019.

The problem with playing a sport while going through a mental illness is that people consider depression or anxiety and automatically link it to weakness. To appear as weak is the last thing an athlete wants. Our culture makes it so hard for athletes to differentiate between what is hard work and what is pushing yourself too far. What happens when a push through a workout becomes a push through a phone call, a push through a day and suddenly, a push through your LIFE!

I hate missing practice, it sets me behind my competition, behind on my team and ask anyone who knows me, I cannot sit on the sidelines and just watch. So I've begun to see a doctor once a week and I'll be honest, it feels weird and I can't open up but I've been on medication and I find myself stabilizing ever so slightly. I love my team, they are a special set of people and I love the sport of fencing and that is why I can't let it go. But as I continue and hopefully succeed over the next few years, I hope this conversation gets louder. I hope mental health stops being stigmatized and I want everyone out there to know that your not alone. You are loved, it may not seem that way, but you are. Let the courage, determination and passion you have inside you flourish and before you know it, you'll reach your dreams.

Vama Maniar