Speed skater that is diagnosed with anxiety disorder, panic disorder, severe depression, and anorexia nervosa.

I moved to Calgary in the summer of 2014 and it was my dream to train at Winsport and the Olympic oval for figure skating and speed skating. This is also when my world turned upside down. I never felt like I belonged in this world from a young age, as I always felt different. I was a shy, quiet, isolated girl, and the only way I got to be who I am, was through sport.  In the summer of 2013, I was training at a top performance facility for figure skating and my new coach sure had a way with words. Some of the things I heard daily were: “you are too fat for this sport”, “it looks like you have gained weight”, “are you ever going to go on a diet”, and “you need to stop eating and work out more”. I was waking up at 5am and going non-stop until 5pm training for both of my sports. This is when the eating disorder starting taking over my life. I cut out breakfast and lunch every single day and the only reason dinner was taking place was because I lived with my grandparents at the time. Once I moved out of my grandparent’s house, dinner was cut down to once a week. I was training full time yet only living off 300 calories a day. This triggered the depression. It was like I was being weighed down by a thousand pounds and I couldn’t get out of the dark.  Anxiety now took over my life and I couldn’t stop my brain from counting calories, comparing to other people, and thinking of myself as being my own worst enemy.

Fast forward to 2015 in the month of May. I quit figure skating but was still speed skating! At this time, I injured my hip and I couldn’t skate for about three months. This is when I stopped eating all together, since I couldn’t gain any weight. In November of 2015, my coach came up to me and saw I was skin and bones. He asked me what was going on, but I was in denial about my eating disorder, I could not see that I had a problem. This was my normal life.

This past year has been a rollercoaster of emotions. I am now going to get into a few of the concerns that was specific to my life.

As the saying goes, health comes first, right? Well my health came last to me. I lost forty pounds in the matter of three months last year. I could not function anymore, I was skin and bones. I could hardly go to school! Sport continued, but my coach reduced the training load so I that could survive. By the end of January, I was put in the emergency room for heart failure, suicidal thoughts, my stomach acid was burning through my stomach as there was no food in my system. I was sleeping for probably 20 hours a day because I just couldn’t stay up anymore. I had no energy or life left in me.

Health comes first and performance comes second, right? My health was crashing fast, and so was my performance. My performance was quickly going down while my depression, anxiety and eating disorder was sky high. I depended on skating for my quality of life.  Every time I went on the ice I struggled with energy levels and pain, but it wasn’t from overworking, but because I was so hungry and needed to eat. However, my brain just kept replaying the message that I was too fat to eat.

Relationships were one of the hardest things. I lost a lot of my friends because I just turned into a robot with no emotions. A lot of my friends didn’t know how to deal with me; I couldn’t go out socializing a lot because that usually included food (my biggest fear). My relationship with my coach went from him being able to push me through practice, to him fearing telling me anything wrong because I could take it the wrong way and take it out on myself in a negative, unhealthy way. I felt like a burden to my coach but he was the only one I trusted! I would text him all the time but I felt like I was wasting his time. I took isolation to an extreme level. I didn’t go to school for two months straight because of the anxiety and depression.

Through everything else, my self esteem and self confidence went down hill. I was diagnosed with body dysmorphia: when a person constantly thinks about their body in a devastatingly negative way, even though it may not be what is seen. I couldn’t stop comparing myself to everybody around me. If someone would say that one person was bigger than me, I couldn’t see it! All I saw was them being skinny, and me being fat. The worst thing I think was that people would congratulate me on losing so much weight. They would tell me how much better I looked and how much stronger I looked, but I was so unhealthy and so disgusted with myself that I was in the dark about every little thing in my life. I remember always going up to my coach and asking him, “what is wrong with me?”, “why am I not normal?”, “why am I going crazy?”, and anyone dealing with mental health knows that “being crazy” is the most insulting thing, simply because you have something not connecting in your brain correctly or like the majority of people.

Today, I am in recovery. Over the summer, my coach admitted me into the hospital for the eating disorder. I was not a happy camper about this, but today I am glad I went as I could finally get my life back in my control. The one thing that hurt me the most though was that, because I was admitted to a clinic for Eating Disorders, I was there 5 days a week 11 hours a day for 3 months. This killed me regards to sport, and I became even more depressed. I had to wake up at 5am to train until 7:30am, and then go to the hospital for 8am. I would stay at the hospital till 7:30pm, train until 11pm, and then repeat the next day. This got to be very exhausting! I was one of the first people in the clinic to be in a competitive sport. Sport was my life, yet my life was being taken away because of the eating disorder. Yes, the clinic treated my eating disorder, but my depression and anxiety got even worse. This is where sport needs to come in and help with the mental heath stigma.

I would like to thank the following people:

Connie Kapak, Annemarie Van der Wal, Jeff Kitura, and all the staff at the Eating Disorders Clinic in the Alberta Children’s hospital. Also a special thank you to the people I met going on this journey of recovery with me as well – without these people and their encouragement/support  I would not be in recovery today.