Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  I haven’t told Mum. I have to call her now and say, ‘Mum, we got pregnant, but I’ve lost the baby.’

  I was so excited to tell you.

  Rob gives me the option of letting nature take its course and waiting days or weeks for my body to eject the foetus, or having a dilation and curettage operation to remove it straightaway. The athlete in me takes over immediately—I want a D&C. The sooner we reset, the sooner we can try again, get back on track. If we move forward, I can leave this pain behind, this deep cut in my chest. Besides, the idea of sitting and waiting for my baby to slip out of me is horrifying. I can’t do it.

  I’m due to travel to China in a few days to be a swimming commentator at the Youth Olympic Games—my first commentary gig. Before the scan, I’d asked Rob what food I should avoid while I was over there, what precautions I should take. After the scan, it’s a different conversation, but I’m still determined to go.

  Luke is worried, but in my infinite wisdom, my mule-like stubbornness, I decide that throwing myself back into work will mute the heartbreak. I’m going to have a D&C, and then I’m going to jump on a plane to Beijing to do something that is unfamiliar and pretty far outside of my comfort zone. The Olympic Broadcasting Services have already paid for my ticket and my hotel, and they’ve set a broadcast schedule, and I don’t want to leave them in the lurch. I also don’t want to let something else go, because it feels suddenly like my whole life is coming apart. For about five minutes, going to China strikes me as the most sensible thing to do next. It doesn’t take me long to realise that I’m not thinking straight.

  After the procedure, I bleed so heavily that I have to stay in hospital overnight. And for days and days afterward I bleed and have severe cramps. While my body is breaking down, my mind is following suit. This is a tailspin. I feel totally numb one minute, and then I cry uncontrollably. Of course I couldn’t go to Beijing; I could barely leave the house. But I’ve never backed out of a commitment before and it feels really shameful to me. I feel like I’ve let everyone down. Luke goes back to work the next day, and I sit at home, weeping. I weep and I eat, for days and days, bingeing on garbage, trying to stuff the feelings down with food.

  Things happen for a reason, I think. What did I do? I must have done something wrong. I retrace every step in my head, everything I ate, everything I drank, everywhere I went. Rob said these things just happen sometimes and nothing can be done to stop it. ‘You didn’t drink too much coffee, you didn’t exercise too much, the bath water wasn’t too hot. Sometimes the chromosomes in the foetus aren’t right so it just stops growing.’ But I can’t shake the feeling that it was my fault. ‘That’s how many women feel after a miscarriage,’ Rob says. ‘But it isn’t correct.’

  The internet says the same thing—I’ve read all about it. I eat chocolate and I google and read articles and forums, and I cry. I know I’m not alone, and that some pregnancies just aren’t meant to be. But I feel so alone, so ashamed and heartbroken, and so convinced that I have done this to myself.

  Stephan would tell me to focus on the next thing. That’s my instinct too. Some part of me just wants to put this aside, use a power phrase to clear my head, put all the confusing thoughts aside. But my heart is broken. And there’s nothing else. I realise, maybe for the first time in my life, that I need to sit with the grief for a while. I need to stay home and cry when I want to cry. The only way I’m ever going to get over this pain is to go straight through the middle of it.

  But I know I also need a new goal or I’m not going to get through it. That’s just how I’m built. I can suffer, but I need to know there’s light at the end of the tunnel—that all this darkness is going to end at some point. I’m desperate to know when we can start trying again. Rob says I have to wait a full cycle, which feels like a lifetime. All I can do is focus on preparing my body so that when the time comes, we’re ready. I start watching the calendar again, because it’s something to hold on to, and planning makes me feel strong. I can get pregnant, I think. I will get pregnant again. But some days it feels like I’m drowning.

  You only hear about other people’s miscarriages after you tell them about yours. Mum had a miscarriage, which I kind of knew, but we’d never really talked about it. After my oldest sister was born, Mum got pregnant and lost the baby. She was at home alone with my sister, who was a toddler at the time, and she started bleeding while she was standing at the kitchen sink. That was it. She’s very stoic when she remembers it, but I can sense her sadness because the memory is still so vivid for her. I feel closer to her now than I ever have, connected by our loss.

  I’m also hearing about women from the swimming community who have had not just one but multiple miscarriages. I wonder if our training has something to do with it, and feel another stab of guilt. I also feel guilty that I didn’t know what these women were going through at the time—that there’s a stigma around miscarriage that makes us want to be discreet. It’s awful, but I understand that instinct because I don’t want to broadcast my grief. I don’t want people, especially mothers, to feel bad for me. I don’t want people to know that I am weak, or vulnerable, or just not having a good time, because it’s hard enough dealing with the grief without getting those looks of pity and concern. In my more rational moments, I know that everyone means well and that I have nothing to be ashamed of, and that if I give people a chance they’ll show me the same love and support that I would offer them in the same circumstances. Even so it’s difficult to shake the feeling that grief is somehow unattractive and boring. I find it hard to let people know how deeply I am hurting, so I put on a mask when I’m out in the world that looks like the old me.

  A couple of weeks after my miscarriage, one of my closest girlfriends tells me she is pregnant. I want so much to celebrate with her, to be truly joyful and excited for her, because I love her. But I just can’t do it. All I want is to be where she is, to have what she has, but my grief is still too close to the surface at this stage. I don’t hug her as fiercely as I should. The smile on my face is wobbly and feels forced, and I find myself wanting to run away. I feel so guilty that I’m not sharing her joy as much as I know I should. She knows about the miscarriage but we haven’t really spoken about it, and I won’t speak to her about it now. I don’t want to be a downer when she has so much to look forward to, even though it makes me feel more alone.

  Why does it seem like everyone is pregnant all of a sudden? I feel like I’m surrounded. My sister-in-law is expecting her second. It feels like they sneeze and she gets knocked up. And I just found out that a couple Luke and I know, friends of friends, conceived at the same time as us. Their due date is literally the same day that our baby was due. I am truly happy for them, but the news makes my heart constrict and I have to fight back tears. It’s so confronting seeing someone else living the life that I feel I should have had. Everyone else is lucky and we’re unlucky. They’re happy and we’re not.

  And it’s my fault—I know it is. I’m worthless. I always have been. I failed. Why did I fail? Why can’t I get this simple thing right? My thoughts are dark, obsessive, overwhelming. What is wrong with my body? I wonder. What’s wrong with me?

  2005

  ‘Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves, that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.’

  —Tyler Knott Gregson

  When I raced well, I was in the moment. I was 100 per cent present, running on autopilot, unaware of any thoughts or feelings. That’s what it means to be ‘in the zone’. But out of the pool, when I was thinking about my swimming career, my mind was always on the future. I was always thinking about the next step, never the here and now, which meant I never really paused to think about my achievements.

  Immediately after the 2005 World Championships, I went to Duel in the Pool, an exhibition meet between Australia and the United States, and beat the recently crowned World Champion Jodie Henry in the 100-metre freestyle. I should have
felt so much joy in that moment, because it was the first time I had broken through in that race. But there was barely a ripple in my head. I had started to associate satisfaction and pleasure with complacency; if I was satisfied, I wouldn’t strive for more.

  I wonder now if that’s actually right, and whether taking a moment to stop and smell the roses isn’t a better long-term strategy. I wish at least that I could remember moments like that without feeling I took them for granted. I wish I had more perspective back then. I think I would have been a better athlete. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe that singular focus and constant forward momentum is what allowed me to achieve what I did—but it often made me feel like a failure when I was at the top of the world.

  If there was ever a good time for me to stop and ponder my success, it wasn’t 2006. The trials for the 2006 Commonwealth Games were in January, followed by the actual games in March. Then the World Short Course Championships were straight off the back of the Games, and after all of that we had the trials for the 2007 World Championships. It was a brutal year of competition.

  My goals would shift from one meet to the next. I had never been to the Commonwealth Games, so I wanted to prove myself in that arena, but above all I wanted to cement my place at the top of the leaderboard. The Duel in the Pool was not a major championship, so I was yet to win a 100-metre freestyle event that I thought counted. I wanted to get the world record back too.

  I felt like I had a point to prove with Jodie. I had always been a fierce competitor, but I’d always felt like I was competing against myself. Now I began comparing myself to the other swimmers, racing against them in my head and focusing explicitly on beating them. Jodie loomed the largest in my mind because she was my toughest competitor. I wanted to be the best, and quite often she was the only person standing in my way. This was a dangerous path. If you start thinking about your competitor, you start swimming other people’s races instead of your own. This only made me more intense. Jodie was still as relaxed as ever, which only frustrated me more.

  I knew that I would qualify for the Commonwealth Games—three people qualified in every race—so at the trials I was more focused on my time. I broke the world record in the 100-metre freestyle—53.42 seconds—but Stephan didn’t congratulate me when I jumped out of the pool. ‘Why did you do that? You went out too hard and your stroke rate was too high,’ he said. He knew I was thinking about Jodie when I hit the water. ‘You would have done a better time if you had swum your race properly.’

  It was devastating to be chastised by him, and my body was screaming from the exertion. On the other hand, I’d swum a personal best time and broke a world record, so it wasn’t at all bad news. However, I did recognise that there was a problem brewing. I was thinking too much about what was happening in other lanes—about what my competitors were doing. I also noticed that a whole lot of ‘what ifs’ were starting to creep into my thoughts. What if I mistime my taper? What if someone else gets faster? What if I do badly in this race? What if my goggles break? What if I slip off the blocks? What if, what if, what if?

  I started acting out post-race interviews in my mind that were based around me losing. Before I got in the water I would imagine a journalist saying, ‘You must be really disappointed,’ and I would practise my response. It was like I was trying to manage the shame before it happened. What will I say if I lose?

  I didn’t think very deeply about why these negative thoughts had started to appear, though in retrospect it’s obvious they were a by-product of my sharpening ambition. The higher I climbed, the more intense and impressive the goals, the greater the risk of failure. I really didn’t want to fail. It created a kind of psychological instability—but as an elite athlete, I wasn’t trained to explore where those negative thoughts were coming from, I was trained to still my mind. I worked with a sports psychologist but our objective was never to explore any mental-health issues I was having—it was all about peak performance. I was trained to push negative thoughts aside, though I tried to do it in a way that was positive.

  When the Commonwealth Games came around in March, I flew to Melbourne with a new and improved power phrase. It started the same way: I’m strong, I’m fit, I’m healthy, therefore I’m fast. I added a second part to silence the anxiety in my head: No doubts, no regrets, I’m just here to have fun. It worked, because on some level I believed it.

  With my new power phrase, the rest of the world fell away. When I swam at the Commonwealth Games, I felt the curtains drop over my lane and block everything else out. I stopped worrying about Jodie and anyone else in the pool, and just focused on my race process. And I swam like a demon. I won gold in the 50-metre freestyle, the 4x100-metre freestyle, the 4x200-metre freestyle and the 4x100-metre medley relays. I took silver in the 200-metre freestyle and the 100-metre butterfly. I beat Jodie for gold in the 100-metre freestyle, finally breaking through in that event on the international stage.

  I wish I could say everything went according to plan, but it didn’t. I was drug-tested at the Commonwealth Games virtually every day, because I pulled medals every day. Drug cheats are constantly improving their systems of cheating, and at the Games the process had become pretty invasive to try to combat it: we had to drop our pants, hike our shirts up to our chests and do a little spin for the inspector to prove that we weren’t peeing stolen urine out of a concealed bag. I found it embarrassing but I wasn’t worried about it. It was just part and parcel of the job. Besides, I knew I wasn’t one of the cheats.

  Shortly after the Commonwealth Games, I was notified that one of my samples had shown an amount of testosterone above the levels allowed at the event. I was in the middle of training for the World Short Course Championships and was due to leave for Shanghai in a few days. The news totally threw me out of whack. It also came in the wake of a number of media reports about me and Leisel Jones being particularly muscular at the Games. After a number of years training at an elite level, my body was changing. I was also 21 years old, so I was becoming a woman who was strong rather than a child who was strong. My shoulders were broad and my lats were well defined—my upper-body strength overall was exceptional. But my body shape was natural, or the natural result of a punishing amount of physical work, and it was hurtful to hear people speculating about it—they compared us to the Chinese drug cheats. Then the test results came in and I was absolutely floored. I felt like my core moral values were under suspicion, and I had no idea how to defend myself.

  Luke and I went to Stephan’s house for the very first time to try to figure out what we were going to do. He lived in a modest place in Murarrie, which felt quite dark inside, though it may have just been my mood. We didn’t go any further than the front living room, where I sat on Stephan’s couch feeling utterly overwhelmed. Luke and Stephan talked through the strategy—who we could talk to, what the results meant, how we could prove them wrong. Having the two most important men in my life take charge of the situation, applying their similarly analytical brains to a problem that I couldn’t solve, was such a relief. I knew that Luke loved me, and in that moment I felt like Stephan genuinely cared about me, not just as an athlete but as a friend. I felt safe with these men on my side.

  I didn’t know at the time that the Commonwealth Games allowed for a smaller range of ‘normal’ testosterone readings than other competitions. Stephan figured this out pretty quickly and leapt to my defence, working fast to keep it out of the papers. I was so grateful that he took charge because I was an emotional wreck; I don’t think I could have done that myself. Ultimately, Stephan was able to demonstrate that my testosterone levels had been consistent in every drug test I’d had since I was fifteen years old. For me, this was a revelation and explained so much. I had always known I was strong—now I knew why.

  Unfortunately, getting the all-clear from the drug-testing committee didn’t stop the growing sense of unworthiness I felt, a little seed of shame, even though I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. My record was clean and the story never made it to the media,
but still I had the lingering sense that there were nameless, faceless people out there who thought I was a cheat, and I desperately wanted their approval. I wanted the world to see me as someone worthy of love. And all I could think to do to prove myself was to keep winning races.

  I delivered at the World Short Course Championships in April 2006, taking six medals home. I blitzed the 50-metre and 100-metre freestyle events, and the 100-metre butterfly. With my team, we won gold in the 4x100-metre medley and silver in the 4x100-metre freestyle. When I stepped up to the block for the 4x200-metre freestyle, I was more nervous than I had ever been—I was so pumped I was almost shaking. No doubts, no regrets, I’m just here to have fun, but we were trailing when I dived into the water. In the final leg of the race, I swam over the Chinese leader. I touched the wall just ahead of her on the very last stroke, carrying our team to a gold medal. All my training and racing was starting to develop a strength I had never had before: a strong back end. This win was one of my proudest achievements, and the relay team was one of the best I had ever been part of.

  Luke and I announced our engagement after I got back from Shanghai. We told the media because I had a public profile and that’s just what people like me seemed to do. It was certainly what my management advised me to do. None of my friends or family had been through anything similar, so I couldn’t ask them for advice, and I think as a 21-year-old I was naive enough to imagine that the media was pretty harmless. We sold the story of our engagement to New Idea for $10,000 and they ran a fairly innocuous feature, with happy snaps of me and Luke in a posh hotel, grinning lovingly at each other. They had Luke give me a piggyback ride, which felt pretty silly—but what did I know? After-wards, they offered us $20,000 for the exclusive rights to publish our wedding photos. We signed on the dotted line because, again, I just thought that’s what I was expected to do. Given the nature of the day, though, we decided to donate the money to charity.