on simone biles, disappointment, + islands

TW: mentions of self-harm

 

Almost 10 years ago I sat first in front of a friend, then in front of a counselor, then in front of my parents and was asked to explain the cuts on my wrist. How did they get there? When did they start showing up? And, most importantly, why were they there? Almost 10 years ago I sat first in front of a friend, then in front of a counselor, then in front of my parents and tried to explain the pressure I had been feeling: the pressure to be perfect.

 

At the time, the Love Is Louder campaign was pretty popular. So I knew, in some abstract sense, that I wasn’t the only one feeling, and crumbling under, this pressure. But it is one thing to know that and it is another thing entirely to imagine that there might be something you can do about it, that there might be a way to stand up against it.

 

This month, this Olympics, Simone Biles helped all of us imagine.

 

“Society pays a lot of lip service to protecting one’s mental health”. It’s something I’ve witnessed us collectively get better at in recent years. We’ve grown more comfortable saying out loud that mental health matters. But, in my opinion, we haven’t been so great at giving examples of what this looks like. What does it actually look like to protect your mental health? What does it look like to protect your mental health when you’re a young person? When you’re a woman? When there are people watching? When you know that people will be disappointed?

 

“Every time you're given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.” – Glennon Doyle

 

Almost 10 years ago, the idea that I could disappoint anyone was entirely foreign to me. There were few role models to look to who were publicly imperfect. Who were, as Meg Fee writes in Places I Stopped On The Way Home, “human and flawed and better for it”. And even fewer, if any, who we praised or celebrated for standing in their messy humanness.  

 

We are, fortunately, in a different place today.

 

We’ll be talking for a long time about how the Toyko Olympics changed the conversation about athletes’ mental health. And I think that’s important. I think it’s also important that we talk about how the Toyko Olympics changed the conversation about mental health for so many non-athletes. I think it’s important that “everyday people” watched someone, on one of the biggest stages, protect their mental health. I think sometimes seeing someone do a hard thing gives us permission to do that hard thing ourselves.

 

Making a decision to do a hard thing often feels like it’s a decision to do a lonely thing. Because you don’t always know who will walk through it with you. You don’t know who will get stuck in the mud of disappointment. Pain can make you feel like you’re on an island. Like no one else understands and like it might be too much work for someone to swim to your shores and stand with you.  

 

And so I think we cannot overstate the power in seeing someone do a hard thing and be complimented for it, be supported in that decision. I think it shows us that there are people who won’t get stuck in the mud. I think it shows us that there are people who will swim to and stand on our island.

Pedal FastElle O'BrienComment