What Competing Taught Me About Hiding
The scoreboard never asked how I was doing. Neither did I.
I was good at exactly one thing for a long time: not letting anyone see me struggle. I didn't think of it that way at the time. I thought of it as being tough. Being a competitor. Being someone the team could count on.
Nobody teaches you that those are two different skills — performing under pressure, and being honest about what the pressure is doing to you. I was excellent at the first one. I had no idea how to do the second one at all.
The truth is, by my junior year, I dreaded practice in a way I never told anyone, not my coaches, not my teammates, not my parents who had sacrificed a lot to get me there. I still showed up. I still competed. From the outside, nothing had changed. From the inside, I was running on a kind of fumes I didn't have a word for.
The lesson
I want to be careful here, because I know how this can sound — like the answer is simply "talk about your feelings" and everything gets better. It's not that simple, and I don't think anyone owes their struggle to an audience. But I do think there's a difference between privacy and disappearance, and I had drifted from one into the other without noticing.
What actually helped wasn't a single conversation. It was smaller than that — starting to write things down after practice, just for myself, with no plan to show anyone. Naming, on paper, what I was actually feeling instead of what I thought I was supposed to feel. I still compete. I still love it. But I don't confuse being strong with being silent anymore. Those were never the same thing — I just spent a long time acting like they were.
The psychology behind it
What I was doing, without knowing the term for it, was emotional suppression — pushing a feeling down so it doesn't show. Research on suppression is fairly consistent: it doesn't actually make the feeling go away. It tends to resurface later, often more intensely, or shows up physically as tension, poor sleep, or a shorter fuse. The body keeps the tab open even when the mind refuses to look at it.
Writing it down instead — without an audience, without a plan to share it — is a form of what researchers call expressive writing, and it's one of the more reliably studied ways to reduce that physiological cost. Not because the writing fixes anything. Because it stops the feeling from having to stay completely unprocessed.
For your journal
- 1.Where in your life are you performing wellness instead of practicing it?
- 2.What would it look like to be strong and honest at the same time?
One action for today
After your next practice or hard day, write three honest sentences about how it actually felt. No one has to read them.