Can a Secret Hold You Back?

The sun was particularly bright at practice that day. Every noise bombarded me. Birds chirping, wind whistling through the trees, dried grass crunching underneath our cleats, cars meandering down the adjacent street, my heart pounding in my fingertips, breathing, coughing, laughing, yelling... So much movement, so bright, so intense… I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t hear anything else without losing my sanity.

I snapped.

I don't remember what I yelled at our goalkeeper coach...something about how I couldn't listen to her then. Tempers flared. I lost control.

To the neurotypical, no feeble combination of words can evoke the constant assault from the outside world on someone with autism. My best attempt is that it feels like drowning in the harshest, hottest sunlight. When this meltdown happened, I had only had a formal diagnosis for a few months. I, like many girls with autism, escaped detection until my late teens--the manifestations only becoming apparent when my carefully structured support system at home vanished at college. 

Along with the grueling schedule of practices, weight training, games, classes, studying, and sleep deprivation of a student-athlete, I no longer had my regimented schedule. I shared a room, a bathroom, a dining hall, a living room, and learning spaces with other humans. Constantly. My parents, sister, and pets were over a thousand miles away. I was surrounded, but I’d never felt so thoroughly alone and overwhelmed. 

I sank into a deep, suicidal depression. My mother urged me to come home for treatment, but something about leaving scared me more than staying and seeking treatment while in school. I started seeing a psychologist at Student Health and taking meds. I was less weepy, less desolate, but I struggled to wade through each day.

Yet...I tried to hide it. I told our athletic trainer and my big sister on the team about the depression and medication, so they could “keep an eye on me,” but I tried to hide it from everyone else. The shame I felt from succumbing to the weight of mental illness silenced me.

Some months later, another teammate in my class asked us to meet her in the locker room after breakfast. We arrived before she did, unsure about why we were there. When she entered, she immediately broke into tears. We ran to her and immediately enveloped her. I started crying too. She had been hiding her deep depression from the rest of us as I had. She hid her struggle to come to practices, to games, to classes, as I had. She was afraid of what might happen like I was. 

We sat on the carpet-covered concrete floor of our locker room and talked and cried and shared. All of us had been hiding parts of ourselves from each other, our teammates, the ones who were supposed to stick with us always. Each of us had different secrets and fears, but one thing that resonated with each of us was that none of us needed to suffer alone. 

Yet...we did. All of us did. I can’t speak to the experiences of other athletes, but my desperate need to be accepted and wanted drove me to keep secrets. A simultaneous wave of fear of being rejected and a buoy of hope of being accepted made me believe that the secrets were necessary. Even after I received formal diagnoses for both Asperger’s Syndrome* (now no longer recognized as a separate diagnosis from autism) and Major Depressive Disorder, I was terrified to tell people: my friends, my teammates, my coaches. I had learned from experiences in youth soccer and school that my differences were not often appreciated. My best chance of being accepted was to submerge my oddities under a facade of stoicism than offer a chance for ridicule and discrimination. 

After the morning in the locker room, I worked less hard to hide everything. I was tired, so tired of pretending I was “normal.” The charade was exhausting, and the isolation and pressure made meltdowns more likely. Plus, the discrimination and ridicule that I feared would follow me from youth sports did not follow me to college. My teammates and friends did not laugh at me when sarcasm confused me or when I was oblivious to social rules.

I struggled, but I was not completely alone. Every practice, every training session, every game, and every class presented obstacles and expectations that my autistic brain had to reconcile. To an extent, I will always struggle to keep up with expectations, but I didn’t have a meltdown at practice again. Perhaps having others know why I acted how I did was enough to provide a buoy. Perhaps I gained better self-awareness. Perhaps the medication cocktail increased my resistance to life’s onslaught. Perhaps a combination... Regardless, the need for secrecy drifted away--in large part because of support from my teammates and friends. They saved my life and helped me wade through navigating school and sports with more transparency than I had ever experienced.