|
Member
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: RED SOX NATION
Gender: Female
Posts: 22
|
Baseball Is My Lifeline
How baseball and the Red Sox are helping me fight depression and self-harm
I’ve always been a baseball fan, but it wasn’t until 2006 that I became a FAN. In 2006, for the first time, I found myself battling major depression and self-harm. I’d had been showing signs of progressing depression from the time I was 7 when my dad and step-mom had first separated. From first to fifth grade I would throw tantrums, cry, or just refuse to do certain things. When I was eleven I began to get massive headaches that were a result of extensive crying or just thinking about how I wasn’t seeing my step-mom and step-sister as often as I wanted to.
In the winter of 2004 my dad and step-mom got back together since him and my little brothers mom had broken up. We all moved in together and that’s when my depression got worse from only being able to see my little brother, my life, on the weekends. Then, my summer after sixth grade, I found myself having thoughts that I hadn’t had before. I started having my first suicidal thoughts, and came close to trying many times. I didn’t make my first attempt at my life until 7th grade. And it was a poor attempt and rightfully failed.
The January of 2006, I found out that my best friend had tried cutting. I remember yelling at her, telling her how it was a stupid thing to do, and that if she was hurting that much she could always talk to me. But that February I ended up forgetting exactly what I had said to her. That February, my own problems with cutting began. I started to look to this “reliever” when ever something happened. This continued until April, as I got the same talks from my friends and teachers (no one had told my parents).
April, everything came to a halt. I stopped cutting, my mood went up significantly, and overall, I was doing much better. Why? I’m not exactly sure, but I accredit it to my increased attention in baseball. That year I decided to challenge myself to watching every Red Sox game. I started collecting pictures from the newspapers, reading up on the sport, and just trying to put everything I had into the game. I would have baseball discussions about topics that I knew nothing about (though people that I did) just so that I could learn more about this fabulous team (what people didn’t realize was that I would wait for them to state something, then repeat it back to them, just say it significantly different from how they did.) This is how my first “obsession” with the sport started.
That July, just a few weeks after I had graduated from eighth grade, my mom saw the scars on my arm, and panicked. I tried to explain to her that I hadn’t cut since April but it didn’t work. She was scared and at that point I couldn’t change that. (To this day, I still wonder why the teachers and staff at my middle school hadn’t told my parents what was going on with me, I mean, all of this might’ve been solved sooner.) That summer I also began the first part of my shrine (which is in the process of being taken down since I am going to move in a week). I met new people from a private high school that I would begin in fall. I immediately became known as “the red sox girl” (a tag that still has not let up). And the Red Sox were swept in five games, at Fenway Park, to the Yankees. Still, my mood was good and I hadn’t cut in months. That season I only missed two games (due to having to attend a school retreat where there weren’t any TV’s or radios in September).
When baseball season ended the depression returned. I began to see a therapist but it didn’t do much because in November I started cutting again. In December I started Prozac, and in January I was hospitalized twice in three weeks for suicidal thoughts and cutting. From February until April I didn’t cut again. Then in April I started having a large amount of problems and the cutting returned. I tried to focus all of my attention on baseball but it didn’t work, the other problems were too overwhelming. So I ended up in the hospital…again…during the first Yankees series. I was a wreck, not because of everything else that I was going through, because I didn’t get to see this series. I didn’t get to see the Red Sox sweep the Yankees at home. I didn’t to see them hit four home runs in a row (my friend recorded everything for me though, and I got to see it five weeks later). This hospitalization, followed by four weeks in a day program, ruined my freshman year in high school. I didn’t fail anything, but I received incompletes in physics and history (and my parents made me transfer into public school, which I don’t forgive them for doing because I wouldn’t have repeated a grade if I had stayed at my other school). But during those four weeks, my attention went back to baseball and my mood went back up the great ladder. I was doing well again.
I started collecting baseball cards, another way to divert my attention. When you put the Red Sox, baseball cards, and therapy together, I had everything needed to not go into anymore slumps. And I didn’t until September when one of my best friends died at the same retreat that I had gone on the previous year.
Nothing, not baseball or therapy, could take my attention away from the fact that I had just lost one of my best friends in the whole world. She was one of my three friends who came to visit me each time I went into the hospital. She was one of the only people that I could talk to about my problems. She was the only person who didn’t mention the Red Sox or baseball when they signed my year book, she actually made a point to write “I am not going to talk about the Red Sox because you have 154 other people in the school who will”, instead she talked about how much she hated the MBTA bus that we were riding on. With this going on, I found myself in the hospital again. I didn’t get it this time though, it had been two weeks since she died, and two weeks since I had cut, I wasn’t even thinking about suicide, but since I was thinking about cutting and since a lot was going on, it was felt that the hospital was the best place for me.
Two weeks after getting out of the hospital I saw the Red Sox win the World Series…baseball season was over…depression was in. In November my cutting became extremely bad again and I actually attempted suicide. It being a combination of 280 mg of Celexa, hairspray, and rubbing alcohol, if I hadn’t called my best friend (I have/had three), crying and telling him that I loved him it would’ve worked (he called my old school counselor who called my mom and told her to take me to the hospital). From November until the start of Spring Training my cutting was horrible. It became an almost everyday affair.
All throughout Spring Training I was able to not cut…then in April…as with previous years, the cutting returned. It’s still going on right now, but my new therapist has listened to me when I say that it is the only thing that keeps me from trying to kill myself again, so I have not gone into the hospital.
This past week my mom found out that I have been cutting again and she threatened to put me in the hospital but after talking to my therapist she decided against it. She’s afraid that she will “wake up one morning and find out that she doesn’t have a daughter anymore”. But although my suicidal thoughts have peaked over the past few weeks I’ve been able to assure her that this will not happen.
Today I’m feeling better, and maybe it’s because the Red Sox are winning. I give credit to the Red Sox for the way that they have been able to help me with fighting depression. During baseball season I feel significantly better, and maybe it’s a psychological trick that I am playing on myself but baseball makes me feel better. When I am thinking about it, reading about it, listening to it, or watching it, I am in a good mood. I start to become scared when the baseball season nears a close because I know that my mood will become crazy again. But for these seven months, I know that I can rely on baseball and the Red Sox to help me out when I get down. Baseball is my lifeline.
|
there is no hurry. We shall get there some day - Pooh
