As I get stronger and emerge from my depression—which takes months, not days—I start to experience moments of pure joy with Poppy that I haven’t felt for a very long time. The heavy blanket that smothered my love for her, the fog that made me feel so disconnected and detached from the sweet, precious gift that she is, slowly starts to lift. And it’s only when I’m on the other side that I realise how much I was missing. When I was sick, I saw logically that she was adorable and thought logically that she was mine, but I didn’t feel it with my whole heart—I didn’t know it was missing. Once the fog starts to clear, the sunlight pours in, and my daughter becomes my little miracle again, and also just an average kid.
Our new normal is normal—dirty nappies, teething, bedtime stories, tantrums. No, you can’t have a fifth bottle of milk today. No, you can’t watch another hour of Paw Patrol. Yes, we can go to the park after lunch. Yes, Daddy will be home for dinner. There are finger paintings and dress-ups and birthday parties to attend. I’m tired, but it’s a normal kind of tired, and I feel stronger than I’ve ever been. My life as a mum is hard work, fun, funny, frustrating and incredible. It’s exactly like it should be.
2010
‘When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need.’
—Tao Te Ching
I just couldn’t see how Luke and I could get back to the way we had once been. We’d been taking each other for granted for so long, treating each other badly, and it had tainted our relationship so much that it seemed unlikely we would ever recover. But still, I couldn’t let him go. It felt like I was missing a limb. What saved us was that we were both willing to work on ourselves, separately. We recognised that we weren’t working as a couple, but that was primarily because we were both pretty messed up at that stage: we had to sort out our own issues before we could consider how to reconnect with each other. The love we had was always there, but it was buried underneath responsibilities, stress, disappointment, frustration, anxiety, depression and dislocation. We had to take responsibility for our own broken feelings before we looked at each other.
Luke and I lived apart for six months, the second half of 2010. During that time, we saw counsellors separately, and went to couples counselling together. Part of the process for both of us was navigating what it meant to grow up together—to understand how much people change from their late teens to their mid-twenties—and to recognise that while we had been together, we had been on separate journeys of learning and discovery. When we got together, Luke and I both still had to navigate the transition to adulthood, which is challenging for everyone. We were both trying to figure out who we were and what we wanted to be, and at the same time trying to work together on major life plans and decisions. The biggest problem we had, ultimately, was that we’d stopped having fun together. We’d become so consumed by our own personal shit that we had stopped enjoying ourselves and each other. And that’s where the connection died.
While Luke and I gingerly navigated the broken pieces of our relationship, I continued to feel lost. I had no real career prospects, no sense of direction, and an overwhelming feeling that I had taken a wrong turn at some point and needed to get back to my life’s true path. The only way that I could see myself not being lost was to go back to swimming. I needed an anchor point, a foundation for my life, and the only place I knew I could find it was in the water. It was all I had ever known. I knew the structure, I knew the routine, and I knew that it would give me a goal to work towards, to combat this feeling that I was just floating in space.
When I’d made it to the top level of the sport, I had dreamed of making it to three Olympic Games. This was something few athletes had managed to do, and had become a marker of swimming achievement. For me, life had got in the way—I had challenges and disappointments, and ultimately I’d been distracted from that goal. And I regretted it, after I retired, because it felt like unfinished business. If I went back to swimming, I decided, I would aim for the London Olympics in 2012. That was reason enough, but it wasn’t the main reason. More than anything, I just wanted to find myself again. Libby the swimmer knew what to do. Libby the swimmer was in control; she could set goals and work towards them. It gave me a sense of value.
I felt no sense of embarrassment or awkwardness about the fact that I was coming out of retirement so soon after I’d quit. A number of swimmers around that time were doing the same thing, so it wasn’t even particularly unusual. I knew I might fail, but I couldn’t not do it. Even if people judged me, or if they were sceptical, the feeling of centredness I got just from making the decision told me that it was the right path. And Stolly was incredibly supportive and pleased when I went to him. He welcomed me with open arms.
So, towards the end of 2010, I went back to Stolly’s team and started training again—and it immediately became apparent that I was grossly out of shape. I had treated my body with disregard for a year, I had gained ten kilos, and I was way off my game. As soon as I got back in the water I had doubts that I could achieve what I wanted to in the sport, but the feeling was oddly galvanising for me. I was programmed to face my doubts and my shortcomings in the pool, and to work systematically to overcome them; I had years of experience doing just that. It was in the real world I struggled, because I didn’t know what I needed to do.
I started slowly and clawed my way back—four training sessions a week, then six sessions, and finally up to nine; then came the gym sessions, the cardio, the core. It wasn’t pretty. I was very sore and very tired for what felt like a long time, but the physical punishment was also a comfort to me, because every muscle ache meant I was getting stronger. There was discussion around my physical shape, but Stolly was very kind about it. He never said I was fat or implied that I couldn’t get back to where I’d been before, although it was as plain as day that I was miles off my peak. Stolly was nothing but encouraging and optimistic, which was just what I needed.
Unfortunately, nothing about the social environment in Stolly’s team had changed, in that I still felt like a square peg in a round hole. But I worked as hard as I could in the pool, and outside of it I continued to go to counselling and talk about a future with Luke. In retrospect, I can see that they were all tentative steps, a slow sharpening of focus. I was coming out of the fog, feeling stronger and more confident every week, but definitely still figuring things out.
Luke and I spent Christmas together, on a driving holiday between Brisbane and Sydney, which turned out to be a terrible idea. We’re weren’t campers—we didn’t even realise that you had to book camping spots, so we spent more than one night ‘camping’ on the side of the road. But it was a really fun experience, which was the whole idea. Through our counselling, we had decided that it was crucial for us to start enjoying each other again, and we had started dating regularly, like two young people in love. It was a bit odd going to Luna Park and the movies with a man I was already married to, but we’d both made a commitment to start again, and we both really meant it. Each of us understood that the only way we could move forward was to let go of the past, and we did it. We found the lightness in our love again. We made each other laugh.
In February 2011 I went with Stolly and the squad to an altitude training camp in Mexico, where the thin atmosphere forces your body to process air more efficiently, creating big fat blood cells that have a greater capacity to carry oxygen around your body. We were going to be there for several weeks, and I found that I was really reluctant to be away from Luke during that time. We were still living apart, but increasingly I felt like it wasn’t right anymore. It didn’t help that the days were pretty boring and repetitive, and the nights were very low-key. Also, my body didn’t seem to be responding the way the others did. I never really felt breathless, which was supposed to be an indicator that the altitude training might be working, but we did a few hikes and I did cardio workouts every day to try to shift the weight that I’d put on in retirement. Mostly I thought very hard about the life I wanted w
hen I got home. Luke and I were in a really good place—we were talking every day. I was absolutely sure that I wanted to be with him, so one night when we spoke I asked him to move back in with me when I got home. He didn’t hesitate because he felt the same way; we were a team again.
When Luke and I decided to get back together, it was a serious and solid commitment—no hesitation and no looking back. We started looking for a house to buy in Sydney, but quickly realised that it just wasn’t the city for us. Nothing about the city had clicked. We hadn’t taken the time to stop and reflect on where we actually wanted to be, but the minute we started looking at Sydney house prices, it was like a lightbulb flicked on over our heads. We didn’t want to pay an exorbitant price to live in a city we hated. We wanted to move back to Brisbane—to our family, friends and a lifestyle we loved. I think Stolly was disappointed in my decision, but on some level he’d probably anticipated it. I think he knew I wasn’t entirely happy in the squad, so he was very gracious about me leaving.
Once the choice was made, we snapped into action. Within a month, Luke and I were back home. To try to save money, we moved into a one-room hut that belonged to some very good friends of ours, and quickly found that living on top of each other was a crazy idea. We had three dogs, a leaky toilet and all our belongings jammed into a very small space, but our intention was to buy some land and build a home, so the cheap rent was extremely helpful.
Immediately after we’d settled in, I went back to train with Stephan. He welcomed me back to his squad as easily as he’d let me go, and it was up to me to deal with the fact that I would be training alongside Jess. But with everything that had happened over the preceding year, I was in a completely different place and the prospect bothered me far less. The squad was different, full of young and unfamiliar faces, but I was comfortable with that too. More than anything, I wanted to work with the coach who knew me best and would drive me hardest to succeed.
But Stephan had changed too in the time that I was away—he seemed nowhere near as hardcore as he used to be. It felt like he had backed off from the ferocious drive that put us both on the map. He had been such an intense character, driving people, riding them, constantly pushing them beyond what they believed they were capable of, and I suspect he was just a little burnt out. It took so much energy to build a champion.
Having said that, I still found Stephan’s training regime far more punishing than Stolly’s. I really only began to realise how out of shape I was when I went back to Brisbane, because his style of training was so much more aggressive. At my peak with Stephan, I would easily complete a 100-metre kick cycle in under two minutes, with only the power in my legs. I just couldn’t make it when I went back—I couldn’t even come close. There was nothing in the tank. I didn’t have the strength or the aerobic fitness, and I began to seriously doubt whether I could ever make it back. Did I actually do competitive swimming? I wondered. Was I actually an Olympic champion at some point? Maybe I just dreamed the whole thing …
I was now a mature athlete, too, which made everything that much harder. Gone were the days when I could just think about losing millimetres of skinfold and off it came. My metabolism had changed, my body was older and didn’t respond as quickly as it once had. It felt like it wasn’t responding at all, to be honest, but in reality it was just happening more slowly. I did the work and it happened. I recognised that I was now a different athlete and made some necessary changes, like learning about and focusing on my nutrition. I followed a diet plan for the first time in my career. It occurred to me that if I’d actually followed the recommended nutrition plan in my younger years, I might have been an even better athlete.
I made steady improvement, creeping back into fighting form, but just as I felt like I was getting back into my stride, a wrist injury pulled me out of training. I developed a pocket of fluid called a ganglion in my right wrist, a tiny internal bubble that created a huge amount of pain and required surgery, which kept me away from the 2011 World Championship trials. At the same time, I developed a hand condition called De Quervain syndrome in my left wrist, which made it hard to manoeuvre my thumb until I had a couple of cortisone injections.
My frustration was immense—I’d never had to deal with injuries before—but on some level I understood that it was part and parcel of being a slightly older swimmer. In Sydney I had trained with Eamon Sullivan, who had suffered what seemed like a thousand injuries and just kept going. He somehow managed to break his heel while jumping into the pool in Mexico, and just kept swimming.
I had plenty of role models to guide me through. I knew my body was more vulnerable, but I was also confident that I could and would get stronger, because that’s what happens to female sprinters—their power increases in the mid to late twenties. I had faith that my body would do the same. It was inevitable that there would be challenges with my comeback, but I had so much clarity and focus, and purpose, that nothing felt insurmountable. It felt like I had control over my life again. I had a sense of direction, which empowered me to believe that I would develop some clarity about what I wanted to do with my life in a broader sense—though, ironically, in that intense training regime, you really have no time to think about anything else.
I was extremely disappointed to miss the World Championships, because I felt like I needed the opportunity to see where I was at and experience an elite-level competition ahead of the London Games. I did make it to the World Cup tour, swimming three short-course meets in the Asia Pacific leg. My results weren’t great, which again was frustrating. I was confronted with the reality that I might not make it to London, or make it in the capacity that I wanted to, which was to compete in individual races. But that only made me more determined to improve.
All this happened under the spotlight of media attention. It was an awkward time for the sport, because some other swimmers and I—dubbed ‘the comeback kids’—were receiving financial support from Swimming Australia, and there was conjecture in the media and among other athletes about whether we had earned it, when we hadn’t acquitted ourselves particularly well on the international scene and I wasn’t part of the World Championship team. There were some loud voices suggesting we shouldn’t receive any funding at all under those circumstances.
My reaction to this was fairly composed, which I think was a sign of my growing maturity. Instead of collapsing into self-doubt and a sense of unworthiness, I reflected on the situation and tried to back myself. I know I had done some great things for Australian swimming in the past, and it was my full and passionate intention to do great things for the sport again. I didn’t think I had anything to apologise for. Geoff Huegill, Michael Klim and Ian Thorpe were also in the crosshairs, but when those three came out of retirement, they created a huge buzz that made people tune into swimming again. It wasn’t even about how they performed—the huge media attention and public interest they generated had value in and of itself.
Luke was my rock through all of this. After we made the commitment to each other, our relationship went to a new level. We worked together, nurtured each other and always had each other’s back. It made every challenge I had in the water that much more bearable, because he supported me even more than he ever had before. I was battling my body, constantly under some kind of stress, but nothing was unmanageable this time around. I was where I was supposed to be, with the man I was supposed to be with, and I had faith that everything would be okay.
Chapter Nine
2017
‘What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, what if you fly?’
—Erin Hanson
My deterioration into mental illness was slow and subtle, and my recovery is slow and subtle too. There is no magic bullet. There is no day when I wake up and think, Fantastic, I’m cured! I still feel a lingering sense of failure, a lingering sense of unworthiness, a lingering sense of frustration that I can’t control every outcome, but they become softer and more manageable with every day that passes. The dark thoughts start to ebb away until I realise
one day that I haven’t had one for a very long time.
During my recovery, we move from the house we own in Seven Hills to a rental property in New Farm. I realised that I was feeling incredibly claustrophobic and cut off from the world in the old house. I needed to be close to a park and cafes, to have the outside world within walking distance. Poppy is such a high-energy toddler, and when she starts walking, at around eleven months, I want to make sure she has the space to move and climb. We need the green, open places and river walks that New Farm has to offer, and our new house is closer to Poppy’s childcare, which makes life easier as well. Moving house also helps me to move the emotional weight inside of me. Some part of it is left behind at the old place; New Farm helps me heal.
Talking to my friends also helps. I have a group Messenger chat with my closest girlfriends, and I tell them that we worked with Katie to help Poppy to sleep. There were obviously indications before that moment that my life wasn’t smooth sailing, but I think this is the moment I really let my friends in, and let them know how dark things had become for me. At first I am reluctant to use the words ‘postnatal depression’, because I don’t always like labelling things. People assume that if you have depression you have to be medicated, which is absolutely essential for some people, but that hasn’t been the case for me. I want them to understand but not judge me, so I’ve been a little ginger in my approach, but now I’ve started to think that labels can actually make things easier to talk about. Instead of feeling ashamed about having a mental illness, I want to feel more comfortable naming it and talking about it. I want my friends and family to understand that depression and mental illness exist on a spectrum: some days are bad, but some days are really great, and everyone’s experience is very different.
Beneath the Surface Page 17
