November 20th, 2015
We beat Alabama this morning, 50-44 🙂 …and lost our second game, 69-44 to the Lady Milwaukee Bucks team. I didn’t exactly play all that well…but tomorrow is a new day. We have two more games and I have two more opportunities to play better.
But playing bad was all mental…because my chair is awesome! I love being on smaller wheels because they allow me to have stronger and quicker first pushes, which is especially helpful on defense. And on offense I feel like I am better able to maneuver around players when I see an opportunity…whereas before I felt sluggish and like my chair was always a second behind what I was trying to do.
…It’s times like these, when I play bad and my mind and depression begin to get the best of me that I just have to look around and remind myself about how far I have come and how many amazing and supportive people that I have all around me, and pull myself out of it. And my chair is now, yet another, huge reminder of the many caring people that I know believe in me. I’m going to keep my head up and I am going to keep moving forward because I know the player and the person that I am and can be…and I am not going to let anything keep me from living the life I want.
I decided to post the last part of that…because I know there are a lot of people out there that suffer from depression as well…and I just wanted to acknowledge that I know how hard it is to live with depression and not everything is all happy and easy, and I don’t always feel strong or confident and I know a lot of pictures that are always posted on Facebook can make it look like I am.
There are a lot of times that it is hard for me to see the things that I have already accomplished and how much better my life is today than it felt seven years ago when I was in the accident. Depression might hit me at times…but I am not going to allow it to control me and I am always going to keep fighting it.
I had a realization a few months ago… I realized that I may never completely overcome my depression…and it may actually be something that I have to live with for the rest of my life…but there are ways to fight it and make things better and I will keep facing it and I will keep getting stronger…because like I said…I’m not going to let anyone or anything hold me back. My depression is a huge reason that I push myself as hard as I do and I always set my goals high…because knowing that I am working towards something that is hard to do…and knowing that throughout the entire journey of getting to where I want to be, I will be learning so much about life and about myself, and In the end, no matter the outcome, I will be a better person and I will be stronger than I was before. And if I don’t push myself…I know I would be consumed by depression because I would have to live with knowing that the only reason I didn’t do something that I wanted to do was because I was scared of failure and because I didn’t think that I could handle doing whatever it was that I wanted to do.
Depression makes you feel like you are never good enough and that nothing in your life could ever be good. It makes you feel like you don’t deserve good things and good people in your life and often times it causes you to be self-destructive and create that self-fulfilling prophecy…and then you ruminate on “your failures” when really, those “failures” would easily not exist if you would just give yourself a fair chance to actually be successful. And that is the hardest part…knowing that your life could be so much better if you would “just stop thinking so much” …and yet…you can’t “just stop” thinking so much. It is a very vicious cycle….
and I am starting to ramble…so I am gonna stop…I gotta go to bed so that I can have a fair chance at playing my best tomorrow 😉 😉 haha
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