This story initially appeared on Behind the Whistle, the official blog of the IWLCA, and is being republished with permission from the organization. Maggie Clark is a sophomore midfielder at James Madison University.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This entry was written as James Madison University was engaged in raising awareness regarding mental health issues. The team supports Morgan’s Message, an organization that works to “eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health within the student-athlete community and equalize the treatment of physical and mental health in athletics,” the Rodgers family, who are JMU alumni, the lacrosse community, and athletes everywhere. The team wants everyone to know they are not alone. By sharing their stories, they hope to create courage and connection. Over the next few months, we will share additional entries focused on this topic, written by members of the JMU team.
The mind is an extremely complex structure that is still not fully discovered, unlike most other parts of the body. Most of us have pretty normal childhoods and play with chalk and swing on the swing sets, and then somewhere throughout the years of becoming a teenager, you learn to grow up and face the brutality of life. Mental illness is something that many people do not talk about regularly, and the only time you do hear about it is during a unit in health class, but it is something that needs to be more normalized, which can allow people to be more comfortable talking about it with someone.
I’ve had friends go through extremely tough times, along with family members, and for a while I did not understand what I could do to help. I couldn’t sympathize with them, at least not until this past year. COVID-19 hit hard for many people due to the quarantine and having life be brought to a stop, but it hit extremely hard for me. It started off with losing my last high school lacrosse season with my best friends, which I looked forward to since I was in elementary school. I also lost the end of my senior year in total, along with a normal graduation. It felt like I didn’t get the right closure. Then my grandma passed away on July 5, a year after the love of her life for 72 years, my grandpa, died.
All those events hit pretty hard to home, and after everything started to unravel, I slowly started to lose myself. I finally understood what it meant to put on a smile, even though no part of you felt like smiling, to make everyone think you were OK. I started to not want to hang out with my friends as much and stayed home more. Looking back on it, I didn’t even want to talk to anyone about anything and internalized it all and let myself suffer alone. Since coming to college this fall, I started putting myself back together and finding joy in the little things again. I would call myself a work in progress at the moment because freshman year is hard in a new place, along with worrying about playing time in a sport. But I’ve accepted the new opportunities with open arms.