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Showing Up for Your Post-College Grief

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Many retired athletes struggle with their mental health after the days of competition are gone. This is the story of a former college soccer player, Sarah Brink, and her experience with post-college grief.

 

“The first sign that I was not fine came as I stood in line at Trader Joes one afternoon, the first September following my graduation from college.” 

I anxiously surveyed the food in my cart, wondering if I had procured the correct food an adult was supposed to buy for the week ahead (my mom would not have been proud to learn I had not made a list). The lines were long, the store cramped, and the lights felt far too bright. I’m ashamed to say this (I will now spend 10 minutes discussing new Trader Joe’s products with any cashier that will listen), but I did not want to be there. It hit me in the store, but it extended beyond the automatic red doors opening to the extensive array of Trader Joe’s flowers. I did not want to be in this new city. I did not want to be in graduate school. I did not want to figure out how to work out on my own. I certainly did not want to figure out what groceries to buy. I did not want to live with people I felt little connection to. I had been afforded the privilege to attend graduate school, and I did not want any part of it.
 
The only thing I wanted, in that moment, was to be back on the soccer field surrounded by my teammates. I wanted to make a bad joke with one of them while going through our dynamic warmup. I wanted to battle with one of them 1v1, knowing that we existed in that space as both teammates and fierce competitors. I wanted to give someone a high five or provide them words of encouragement. I wanted to be immersed in the game I loved, forgetting for a moment about the pile of homework that awaited me once I finished. I wanted to be seen as a soccer player. On some level, I think I wanted to be seen, period. My college soccer career was far from perfect – it was littered with injuries and moments where I was not displaying the best version of myself or being the best teammate I had the potential be. But, as soon as I left school, all of those good parts were what made up most of my memories. There were certain parts of who I was that I felt only existed while on the soccer team during my time in college – A fearlessness, an unapologetic competitiveness, a certain freedom. Now that I was done, I didn’t know where those pieces of me had gone, and I even questioned if they ever existed.
 
women's soccer team picture

 

Despite the obviousness of it now, I was not okay during this first fall post-graduation, but I struggled to admit it to myself. I had spent my youth and teenage years grappling with severe anxiety, at times unable to even stay home alone for just 15 minutes. My only respite was being out on the field or on a basketball court, being part of a team. It felt like the only extended period of time where I saw myself as “normal”, existing with little to no panic, intrusive thoughts, or an impending sense of doom. By the time I got to college, my anxiety began to improve, in contexts even outside of sport. Through therapy, I had gained a toolbox of anxiety coping strategies, and I was engaging more with the things that scared me most. I graduated from college feeling confident in who I was and grateful for everything being part of a team had given me. I graduated feeling fine, and I developed a narrative of needing to stay fine. I put on a smile, tried to engage in my graduate classes, tried to be social, tried to appear like I was not spending every second wishing I could go back. Spending every second wishing for that guaranteed respite from anxiety. In my head, I was supposed to be moving forward from my anxiety, not backwards. I had come so far, therapy was a thing of the past, not something I needed as a “mature” 22-year-old. But I was drowning under the weight of trying to seem fine. Without the feeling of being part of a team, not only did I feel as though I was losing my ability to cope with my anxiety, but I was losing pieces of who I was.

“By December, I had spent four months barreling forward, trying to ignore these intense feelings of uncertainly and the bubbling anxiety.” 

So, really, it should have been any surprise when I woke up in the middle of the night one day in December, fully enveloped by a panic attack. And then again the next night. And again. And again. I had had panic attacks before, but not in a few years, as I had grown adept at using my toolbox of strategies to talk myself down before they erupted. But all of a sudden, my toolbox was nowhere to be found, and I spent each night stumbling to the bathroom as spots clouded my vision, desperately pinning my cheek against the cold floor of the bathroom, trying to feel something while convinced I was dying. Because at the height of a panic attack, that is what it feels like. That is what your brain has told you is happening. You have an intense moment of full belief that you are about to die, a moment before you tug and pull yourself back into reality to remind yourself that at some point your body will come down from this awful feeling. That had always been my antidote during a panic attack, knowing and repeating that it is not possible for my body to stay in that physiological state for long. At some point, the feelings of panic will always subside. But even knowing that, when the panic subsided, and I lay on the floor covered in sweat, I felt helpless.
 
December continued, as months do, and middle of the night panic attacks continued. My parents, fielding constant phone calls from me about what was happening, urged me to return to therapy. I balked and chose instead to solely trying switching my anti-anxiety medication, at the suggestion of my doctor. This new medication luckily prevented my panic attacks from occurring every night, but I continued to navigate my new life feeling completely untethered. I looked around (on my phone) and saw all of my graduating teammates, and those on the men’s soccer team, seemingly doing fine. They smiled in their Instagram posts, shared stories of their new lives in New York City or San Francisco. People seemed to be relishing this new life, so why did it feel like I was spiraling? I shamed and shamed myself for experiencing both anxiety and a distrust of the person I was at present. “You were better!” “Life was good!” my inner dialogue shouted at me. Finally, one day, as I rode the train back from one of my classes, the walls closed in around me. I felt my body buzzing from anxiety as I fought back a panic attack. Amidst this fight, I felt like someone else entirely, and I was exhausted from trying to locate the “old me”. I felt tears begin to run down my face, and as strangers gave me both strange and empathetic looks, I knew I couldn’t keep pushing through this on my own. I needed help.
 

sarah brink on the soccer field

Despite my shame, I found a new therapist and began seeing her regularly. I connected with her immediately as she validated the feelings I was having – “well of course you don’t feel okay, there are so many changes that have taken place!”. In our first session, she offered up an emotion to describe how I was feeling that nearly knocked me backwards. Grief. It seems so obvious now, but at 23, I had reserved that emotion for a select number of incidents. Death, serious illness, heartbreak. Simply graduating from college did not make the list. But she was right. As I described the joys of being part of my college soccer team, the friends I had made, the memories I had collected, the person I had become – I was describing a time in my life I was never going to get back. I was describing an identity I had fit myself into that no longer existed. It was an identity that didn’t make sense in my world after college. Instead of allowing myself to grieve my time in college and my former identity, I wished and wished that I could just go back in time. I had not shown up for my grief in the way my body and my mind desperately needed it to, and I had confused my identity for my self-worth, for my character. And by not showing up for my grief, I couldn’t show up for my anxiety either.

“The college sports experience and path following graduation is different for everyone.” 

 For some people, the moment they have played their final minute, they are ready to move on. For some, there is relief. For others, they have been provided the opportunity to continue their sport in the professional sphere. For many, like me, the intersection of their mental health struggles and grief over an identity they once knew collide head-on. We have to be honest with ourselves that the identity we prescribed ourselves as a college athlete cannot fully exist once our final season has ended. But that doesn’t mean we cannot grieve that time and honor the memories that accompanied such an identity. It also doesn’t mean that we can no longer consider ourselves an athlete. I think, over time, we learn that while some identities are part of us, while others come and go based on the contexts we find ourselves in. Losing an identity does not mean we lose who we are as a person or our sense of self. It also does not mean that the feelings being on a team gave us will never exist again. The thing that creates those feelings will just be different. Under the college athlete, we were always a human, even if we forgot to see it that way. And when we graduate, there’s a moment, before we really start in the adult world and collect new identities, that that’s all we are: human. That can be scary but being human is the only constant we ever have. So, when the final whistle blows, and you hang up your jersey one last time, show up for your grief. Show up for your mental health and ask for help. Show up for the human you have always been and always will be

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