0
0
A young man with a broken heart.
That’s what I saw.
Caeleb Dressel, crying so much after not winning a medal in the 100-meter butterfly and 50-meter freestyle – two of the events in which he won Gold in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
It wasn’t comfortable watching him weep – an incredibly physically fit athlete – so sad hugging a coach, seeming to be searching for a way to stop feeling so bad about himself though I fully acknowledge I don’t know what he was really thinking.
It also isn’t comfortable writing about this. I have been low and felt really bad about my life and situation, maybe or maybe not as low as Caeleb felt yesterday but way down there in the depths of despair.
It may not be comfortable opening up about this topic but that doesn’t mean we should avoid communicating about it. That won’t help any of us deal with it better.
I don’t know what exactly has happened to Dressel these past few years and I’m not a psychiatrist nor psychologist. But I have spoken to them many times to help figure out what was wrong with my mind, why I felt so hopeless and sad.
I have been following his story for the past few years when he stopped swimming for eight months between 2021 and these Olympics to deal with his mental health. I can relate. I’ve spent months doing a similar thing.
Stopped going to work for months because I couldn’t get out of bed and, when I did, just wanted the day to end so I could go back to bed. I wanted to close my eyes and stop thinking negative thoughts about my life and situation. The only escape from the onslaught of self-inflicted insults was to fall asleep until the unwelcome arrival of the next morning when I had to start dealing with the negative thoughts again. Back to bed was all I wanted.
Dressel told the story recently about flying home from the Tokyo Olympics having won five Gold Medals and being self-critical about all the times he didn’t achieve and how he could have done better. He said he wasn’t satisfied with his performance. Stunning, but true.
This doesn’t seem to make sense. He won. He proved he was the best male swimmer in the world. Yet regrets.
In a similar sense, I may be a much better writer than I actually believe I am. What the truth is that everyone else can objectively see isn’t the same thing as what Dressel thinks about himself or me about myself.
The best analogy I can give is that when you can’t control negative thoughts it’s like there’s a tape recorder in your brain that keeps playing the same negative thoughts – “I should have swam faster, I wish I was more intelligent” — and you can’t turn it off. The tape plays so loud it drowns out more positive thoughts and objective assessments of how well you performed and how good you are.
It doesn’t matter what the truth is. It matters what the tape keeps playing and if those tapes play self-critical thoughts over and over you’re going to believe them.
You may say “Why can’t you turn the tape off?” The answer in my experience is you can’t. It’s a tape recorder out there in the wild sending messages whether you want them or not.
This tape recorder condition has very little to do with what’s actually true. It’s all about what your brain keeps telling you.
I’ve written this before and I’ll write it again because it’s important. Objectively in the views of others who know me, I may be an intelligent person. But the tape that plays in my head too often is that I’m not. The good news I’ve worked on stopping this tape. I am able to pause it and say “What a minute, how could I not be intelligent if I graduated from high school, college, and graduate school?”
This helps. After years of therapy, I am able to rationalize that my belief that I’m not intelligent doesn’t square up with objective reality. You can’t hold a job as a professional writer in the always-changing tech industry without being reasonably intelligent.
So for the most part I’ve overcome this errant thinking. I have been able to turn down the volume of the negative tapes playing in my mind and often succeed at ignoring them. Still, the tapes still play more often than I would like.
I wish this for Caeleb Dressel. That he understands what may actually be going on in his brain, that he needs to understand he has negative tapes running amok in his brain and he needs to know they are not playing thoughts about objective reality. The thoughts are insidious and biased and destructive and, most importantly, just not true.
He’s a world-champion swimmer. No getting around that fact. He’s won eight Olympic Gold Medals. Any of us can appreciate his greatness. This isn’t some stretch; it’s true.
You can overcome this, Caeleb. Your thoughts are not who you are; they are just thoughts. A technique that has helped me is to look at a TV set and pretend you’re seeing your negative thoughts there. This helps you realize that those thoughts are “over there” on the screen, not inside you. They’re only thoughts and nothing more.
You are not those thoughts. Realizing they’re nothing more than that is helpful. They’re not physical creatures dominating you; they’re just abstract ideas that can’t physically harm you, nothing more than that. This will help you adjust how you think about your thoughts and get separation from how they make you feel.
It takes courage to talk about mental illness and you’re one of the few brave people who has made himself vulnerable to the world sharing what you’ve been going through. Your contribution to the world in this respect is valuable to all of us, maybe more so, as the thrills you’ve given us with your super-fast swimming.
You are much more than a swimmer and medal winner. You are a servant to the world sharing the struggles you’ve endured being a human being, which we all can all relate to in different ways and with varying degrees of severity.
You, Caeleb Dressel, are and always will be an American hero.
For who you are as a person.
Know this: we’re all rooting for you.
You’ll make great and inspiring contributions whether in or out of the pool for the rest of your life.
Author Profile
-
Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out
Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page
Latest entries
ACCSeptember 7, 2024Pre-Game Pep Talk: Buck Hankmeier Zooms With Sportface
BonusSeptember 6, 2024UVA Studies Declaration of Independence En Route to Wake Clash
BonusSeptember 6, 2024Caitlin Clark Pumps Up My 24/7 Podcaster Posse – But Why?
BonusSeptember 5, 2024Downfall of Men, Rise of Women: WNBA Better Product Than NBA