This is Not the End of Your Story

By: Lauren Hickman

My name is Lauren Hickman and I am a 24-year-old, former Division I collegiate lacrosse player at UC Berkeley. I completed my senior year of college from my family home just north of Dallas, Texas after the pandemic hit last spring and I graduated from Cal in May 2020, debatably one of the weirdest years to graduate from college. While COVID threw a wrench in many of my senior year plans, the disruption of my final semester at Cal was just one of the many twists and turns my life has taken during my four years in college. With the amount of challenges and unexpected detours that occurred in my life throughout my time at Cal, it seemed fitting that my college career would come to a close in such an unconventional, complicated way. My journey to graduation was by no means an easy feat. I struggled everyday with my mental illness, battling against my own brain for four years. Of course, while many days were filled with happiness and laughter, they were also riddled with countless tears, inexplicable pain, and, at some points, fights for my own life. As an elite athlete, I was frustrated and confused as to why my mental health seemed to plummet so suddenly as I arrived for school in California. However, my history with mental illness dates back to my youth, with my battle against depression and anxiety becoming apparent for the first time at the end of middle school. Of course, at that age, no one attributed the preexisting signs of my ultimate depression and anxiety to “mental illness.” Middle school girls are often viewed as just moody and melodramatic as a result of hitting puberty, so indications of mental illness are rarely noticed. By the end of 8th grade, I had already identified myself as a star athlete, playing and excelling at every sport the school had to offer plus additional sports outside of school. I became known for my athletic prowess and I loved that title. My identity was wrapped into my performance on the playing field. However, the day after my 14th birthday, my entire identity crumbled to pieces when I tore my ACL. At only 14 years old, I had never seen anyone suffer a major injury like that at such a young age. It completely rocked my world, destroying my fragile preteen identity and sinking me into a state of isolation and hopelessness. As a result, I began resorting to self-harm. I didn’t know why I felt compelled to do it and I always felt deeply ashamed after I had done it, but for some reason, I had convinced myself that it helped me feel better, even if for only a fraction of a second. When my parents finally discovered the marks on my arms, they approached me about it and sent me to a counselor who I saw a grand total of one time. After that, the issue was rarely discussed. The words “mental illness” and “depression” were never even a thought in any of our minds. My parents and I, out of pure ignorance rather than denial, both believed it was simply a phase I would outgrow. 

Flash forward a couple years into high school as I was in the college recruiting process for lacrosse. I had put that momentary darkness that I had experienced years prior behind me to focus on my dream of playing lacrosse at the highest level. Looking back now, it’s clear that I suppressed many of the harmful feelings I was having during that time, which in turn manifested into what would eventually become a toxic, untamable pattern of negative thoughts. However, I kept my eyes on the ultimate prize, which I received the fall of my senior year when I committed to play lacrosse for the University of California, Berkeley. I was thrilled. On top of the world. Untouchable. I was itching to arrive at Cal and prove what this underrecruited girl from Texas could do. I had extremely high expectations for myself and was determined to not only reach them, but to surpass them. I had a perfectly crafted image of who I was going to be in college, what I was going to achieve, and how high I would climb. I would soon learn that real life rarely reflects the image you paint in your mind for how you want your life to be.

Less than four weeks into my freshman year, I re-tore the same ACL that had been reconstructed just four years prior. From there, my mental state went downhill rapidly. I felt completely alone in an entirely new and unfamiliar world. Just a month before, I had felt ready to start this exciting new journey at college. Now, one thing after another seemed to be falling apart. I went home to Texas for surgery and contracted an infection after the procedure, which kept me home for an additional week. I was unable to do school work and was overwhelmed by the amount of class material I was missing over the course of the two weeks I spent in Texas. I had to drop a class, but since I had missed the deadline to withdraw from the course, it took two months and the involvement of the academic athletics board to finally be removed from the course. Dropping this one class resulted in ruining my carefully laid out 4-year major plan, causing me to have to change my course of study entirely. Not being able to play and being away from school for two weeks increased my feeling of isolation from my team. In my mind, I had no friends, no support, no hope, and no idea what I was doing. I felt like I was drowning, barely able to keep my head above the waves that seemed to keep crushing me and attempting to drag me under. Once again, in a desperate attempt to cope with the negative thoughts and feelings that bombarded my mind, I resorted to self-harm. After hitting what I considered at that time to be rock bottom, I went to see a school therapist, who first mentioned the word “depression” to describe what I was feeling. After first denying it, I eventually accepted my diagnosis and began to consciously fight against it. With the help of my friends and family, I slowly rose out of my deep depression and came to a steady mental place where I had regained my excitement for my future, both on and off the field. I told myself that since I had made it through that bout of darkness, I could make it through anything college had in store for me in the next three years. 

Sophomore year was a breeze. While I still had the occasional bad moment when depression would rear its ugly head, it was overall a much better year. I returned to the field and played in every lacrosse game that season. Heading into my third year, I was in the best mindset I had been in throughout college. I was determined to be a starter that coming season and finally live up to the expectations I had set for myself. But only a few weeks into the semester, reality, once again, hit me like a freight train. During practice, I suffered my third severe concussion and, to put it lightly, it was bad. I was out of lacrosse for a month and a half. Most of the time, I was in my dark room, completely isolated from the world. I couldn’t go to class, do school work, or even attend practices because the lights and noise were too much for my head. A concussion does a lot more damage to the brain than what many people may believe. It rattles the brain inside the skull, messing up the chemical balance in the brain, which is the last thing people with mental health issues need. I could feel myself slipping quickly into a state of depression again. During that time, I also went through a difficult break up as well as a dissolution of several friendships with a couple of my teammates as a result of how depression was changing my entire personality. I no longer recognized the person I was and, evidently, others around me didn’t recognize me either causing some of my strongest relationships to crumble. Just as I did my freshman year, I found myself completely alone in my fight to fend off the darkness that was quickly overwhelming me. I fought it as hard as I could, but depression is ruthless. I fell into the deepest pit of depression I had ever experienced and I couldn’t shake it, even after returning to lacrosse. The illness was distorting my mind, which, in turn, prevented me from playing to the level I expected myself to play at. My poor performance on the field only led to more anxiety, sadness, and frustration. It was a vicious cycle of worsening mental health and worsening athletic performance. I was spiraling out of control, resorting to more frequent and aggressive self-harm. My mind was constantly flooded with negative thoughts. I was disappointed with my playing, pained by my ever-failing body, frustrated with my fragile mind and the weakness I was displaying. I was a D1 athlete. I was supposed to be strong and resilient. There’s no room on the field for weakness or mental and emotional instability. So I pressed on, withholding the truth of my mental state from everyone and refusing to ease up on the expectations I had for myself.

When spring came around, I had become a completely different person. I was so depressed I could barely get myself out of bed. I started having panic attacks at practice. I often had to run to the bathroom so that no one would see me hyperventilating and breaking down in tears. My mental illness affected my performance which resulted in a decrease in playing time in games, thus worsening my mental anguish. My parents became so concerned that they flew out to see me almost every weekend wherever my team was playing. As I was saying goodbye to my parents after a short tournament in Las Vegas, I began to sob and told my mom and dad that I couldn’t go back to school, but I knew I had to. So I climbed back onto the bus after mopping up my tears, attempting to appear as if everything was fine. As the weeks crept on, things only got worse. After a Friday night game, I walked back up to the empty field, laid down on the turf, and sobbed for what felt like hours until the stadium lights turned off. Crying myself to sleep became a regular occurrence. Every night, I would hope and pray that I would fall asleep and not wake up in the morning. And every day, the moment I did wake up, I would begin crying again, increasingly exhausted and pained at the thought of facing another day. It came to the point that every morning, I had to call my dad to calm me down and talk me out of bed.

I began to envision how much easier it would be to just stop living. I believe every human has this thought at some point in his or her life. But soon my thoughts became worse and worse. I had entirely lost my will to live. I started to research and contemplate the best way to go about ending my own life, weighing the options based on what I thought was the least aggressive and most foolproof. I started slacking in my classes, unable and unmotivated to complete work, go to lectures, or even take tests. In one class, I burst into tears and could barely speak while trying to explain to my professor why I couldn’t take a midterm. I became more and more at ease with the mindset that none of the school work mattered anymore because I would be taking my life soon. The only thing that kept me from acting on my morbid thoughts was my family and the insufferable pain my death would inflict upon them forever. So I resisted my urges to act solely for the sake of my parents and my sister. 

During a trip to the northeast for a couple of away games, my parents travelled out again to check on me, knowing I was in a horrible place and trying their best to help me however they could. When it came time to leave after our final game, I broke down in tears in my parents’ arms, barely able to hold myself up, and begged them not to make me go back to Berkeley. I didn’t trust myself with my own safety. I knew if I went back, I might not see them again. After that breakdown, my father, who would never have talked to my coaches on my behalf unless it was a life or death situation, was forced to reach out to my coach to inform her of what was going on with my mental health. I had a conversation with my coaches the next day and they were very supportive and helpful, but still, it did very little to ease the constant war that was raging in my mind.

By the beginning of April, I had reached my limit. The tears that once seemed endless were replaced by complete emptiness. I had cried so much to the point where I had no more tears left. In turn, I became entirely numb. I couldn’t handle the mental pain anymore. I had become a shell of my former self and I was unable to regard anything beyond my current circumstance. I couldn’t see through the darkness that clouded my mind. I was convinced I would never be happy again. All I could think about was the anguish I felt and the desperate desire to rid myself of the pain. So I used a razor blade to slice open the artery along my wrist. I had intended the wound to be fatal. Not wanting to wait out the end result and hoping for an easy departure, I consciously went to sleep, still bleeding heavily from the gash carved into my wrist. I woke up in the morning, my sheets stained red. However, I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I felt the most calm and stable I had felt in months. Images of my family discovering the news of my death played in my mind over and over. I knew in that moment that I had to get through this for them. I had no desire to live for myself but I needed to live for them. I clung onto the notion that I couldn’t put my family through years of sadness and guilt and frustration and unanswered questions that they would face as a result of my suicide. So I pressed on. With great difficulty, I finished my spring semester and returned home to do months of mental “rehab”. I needed to spend the same amount of time strengthening and preparing my mind to return back to school in the fall as I did training and preparing for the upcoming lacrosse season. For 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, I did intensive therapy, working to improve my mindset and reduce my propensity to harbour negative, toxic thoughts. I returned back to Berkeley in August and faced similar challenges that I had struggled through the previous year. However, I felt much more prepared and resilient. I still had very bad days when I would revert back to my old harmful habits, and to this day, now six months out of college, I still do. I have mornings when the last thing I want to do is face the day ahead of me, moments when I still think about how nice it would be to be free of life’s challenges. I still have nights when the worries and stresses and negative thoughts in my head become so overwhelming that they keep me awake for hours. I’ve come to accept the fact that my depression is a chronic condition that I will have to manage my entire life. It’s a lot of hard work, constantly being aware of your emotions, knowing why you’re feeling the way you are, and having healthy coping mechanisms in place to reduce flare ups during difficult times. Mental health is a lifelong journey; it’s a constant work in progress to better yourself. The ups and downs in life will always be inevitable, but it’s the way we handle and react to those unpredictable shifts in our lives that make all the difference. Just like we practice and train for our sport, we should devote ourselves to strengthening our minds as well as our bodies, and the best way to do that is to be open and honest with ourselves and to not be afraid to communicate our challenges with people we trust. Vulnerability is NOT weakness; being vulnerable is one of the most courageous things we can do. So if you are struggling, silently or openly, know that you are not alone. It’s okay to not be okay, but it’s not okay to remain that way forever. These are all words I wish I had been told when I was at my lowest, including these:

You are so loved and we like having you around. You are stronger than what you are facing. This is not the end of your story.