by Anna Gekoski
On top of that, financially it was just crap, and we were living with his parents. I was doing a lot of – most of – the contribution financially and I think, for a woman, that is a very frustrating place to be. I think you start to resent that person. And then you start to feel . . . it’s just bad all round, and I think that’s probably when it first started. Then I got pregnant, which I got ripped in the media for, cos it meant I had to miss the 2004 Olympics in Athens. And on top of that I had to watch my husband go to the Olympics, which was depressing. It was kind of difficult for me because my career sort of came to a halt and he was a coach so he still got to go out and enjoy doing what he was doing. So it was like a stream of unfortunate events.
Then my son Jaden was born and I’m an only child so I’ve never been around babies, while my husband was the eldest one of three. So he would come back and say: ‘Oh why haven’t you changed him and duh-duh-duh-duh’, and, you know, I didn’t want to change him . . . I didn’t want to do anything. The first three months were a complete nightmare and I probably got more depressed then. Was it postnatal depression? I don’t know what the definition is, but if the definition is: having a baby, then feeling depressed, then yeah, I felt that! I didn’t feel like I was good enough and I didn’t know what to do and I just . . . I did not enjoy it. When Jaden was born, people were like: ‘Oh, you have this baby and you just have this rush of love.’ I didn’t have none of that. When my son was born it was just like: ‘Oh, there’s a baby.’ It wasn’t like: ‘Oh, my heart just exploded’, and all these fireworks that people go on about.
And then you feel even more crap about yourself because you don’t feel anything. So I got down about not being a good mum and not having that so-called movie feeling that people always talk about, not feeling that I was living up to what my husband felt was right. You know: ‘Why haven’t you changed him, why haven’t you done this or that?’ ‘I dunno, I don’t want to, leave me alone.’ The word depression didn’t even occur to me at the time, I just knew I felt bad, I didn’t like the situation. I didn’t ever say: ‘I’m depressed’, it never really occurred to me to come to that conclusion. That’s why, only after this more recent explosion of depression, going back I think: ‘Um, I think I was probably depressed long before that.’
So I think having my son compounded the problems in the marriage and in 2007 I had just had enough. The relationship was at an all-time low and I had turned my attention elsewhere, I just didn’t care anymore. So finally I said: ‘Look, I don’t love you.’ But it was very difficult because during the phase where I realised I wanted a divorce it was in the build-up to the 2008 Olympics and obviously my husband’s also my coach. So we’ve got to work together and then live together and, quite frankly, I don’t like him. And he’d do bizarre things. I remember him knocking on my door at 3 o’clock in the morning before a race – not just a one-off little thing, we’re at the World Championships – and saying: ‘I want to talk about it’, for hours and hours. But, you know, I was done already. Another time I remember one of the other coaches coming up to him during training, because he was acting strangely towards me and it was pretty obvious, and saying: ‘Whatever’s going on between you and Tasha, leave it outside.’ This was at the Olympics, this was at the warm-up field of the Olympics.
But in training you learn to turn off. It’s also how depressed people function. You have to get on with life so you put on your attire, your uniform, and you put on your face, and you do what you have to do to get through the day. And then you get back to your own space and you live in it – there’s no other way to be. And sometimes you can do it well; sometimes not so well. In 2008 I’d come off a really good year professionally and I don’t think I was as extremely depressed as I was coming up to London 2012, so it was just a bit easier to manage. I had a goal that I cared about and that was it. I’d missed out on 2004 because I’d had my son, so I was just really passionate about it. I worked my arse off to get to that point and the Games were brilliant. Other than the background noise – with my husband and all that – it was great; getting the bronze in the 400-metre hurdles was a fantastic feeling.
It was afterwards where it went downhill very fast, because I thought that if you put your full effort into something you get rewarded. I thought if I worked hard – and I’d given up a lot of other jobs so that I could solely focus on athletics – I could create a lifestyle for myself. So I thought: ‘After the bronze things will change.’ I knew that I wasn’t going to become mega-rich – as track and field isn’t often that kind of sport, especially for a 400-metre hurdler – but at least I’d be able to get a good contract. But I think the only offer I got was a $6,000 for the year contract. You might as well just spit in my face. I’d rather you just said no. Because when you see people being offered $60,000, $100,000, $250,000, and I’m offered six after I’ve got a bronze, that hurts. So I think I lost my enthusiasm at that point because I thought: ‘What have I done this for?’ You put all this effort in and you make all these sacrifices and then, at the end of it, someone’s just like: ‘Nah.’ And that took away my motivation.
And then what happens is, when you’re not in your right mind, your body follows, and I got injured a lot. The first year after ’08 I did not want to run. I needed a break – I needed a physical and mental break because I’d been through a lot. I really did not want to run, I was just sick of it, but you have to: there are no days off in athletics, you have to just keep going. So I ran the Super 8 inter-city contest in Cardiff and I pulled my hamstring almost off the bone. Basically, the surgeon said if I’d done any more I’d probably have had to have it sewn back on. So there was that and then the following year I popped my plantaris and I had to have surgery.
Then it all exploded through our divorce, which I filed for in December 2008, and when I came back to the UK in 2009 with Jaden that’s when it all really went poorly. We were moving to Birmingham to live with a family member who had kids in the household and I thought it would be good for Jaden to be around them. Well, about two weeks or a month before we arrived everything went wrong, there was a major issue in the family, so instead of walking into the warm, welcoming environment that we had planned, we basically walked into a nightmare. So I’ve brought Jaden into this really depressed situation, and it was just rough. And I was travelling to London to train but I really had no help with Jaden like I thought I was going to have, as my family were unable to support me in the way we had intended.
So that was really difficult and then it just spiralled from there. My home situation: I wasn’t happy with it. My financial situation: I wasn’t happy with it. My life: I just wasn’t happy with it! Everything about my life I just wasn’t pleased with so it just goes from bad to worse. Long story short: Jaden left in January 2010 to go back to LA.
***
That year, after Jaden left, I moved to Bath and started training at the university there in preparation for London 2012. When I first moved I was very depressed, very all over the place, and no one here knew me so they didn’t know that my behaviour was abnormal for me. So they just thought: ‘Wow, she’s different, she never wants to engage with the group, she warms up on her own, she doesn’t really talk much.’ Which is completely different to my normal personality, but they didn’t know that. At my core, I am naturally bubbly, outgoing, friendly, I care about people, I’m silly, not embarrassed very easily. So depression is like an intrusion on who I am – as opposed to having changed who I am – if you know what I mean.
So when I’m not feeling good I interact the least amount possible. So, for instance, I’m not a very telephone-cally person anyway, I’m more email or text, but you definitely won’t get me by phone when I’m depressed. When you’re on the phone you have to keep up this conversation and I just can’t be bothered. I don’t want to answer no questions, I don’t want anyone asking me how I am, or what’s going on, I just don’t want to put in the effort to try and engage in conversation. It’s a lot of work. Whereas by text you can just sa
y one thing and then get on with whatever you’re doing – or get on with doing absolutely nothing, which is most likely what you’re doing when you’re depressed. So you just do enough to function if you can and some days were easier than others.
Training-wise I was just flat, everything was flat. And it was very difficult because in order to excel in sport you have to put in an extreme amount of effort. And when you don’t even feel like getting up, putting that amount of effort into training is almost impossible. As an athlete other people expect so much of you, but there’s also something unique about an athlete that makes them a good athlete and a successful athlete – it’s in the way their mind works. We are very hard on ourselves as people. We don’t often recognise how good we are, how successful we are, because the nature of what we do is always on to the next thing. So you have an achievement: ‘Yeah, that was nice, now what can I do next?’ You have such high expectations of yourself but it’s impossible for someone to achieve that all the time, forever. Somewhere along the way it’s going to take a drop and that’s very hard for an athlete to deal with. Because, you know, having a goal and not achieving it says to an athlete: you’re not good enough, you’ve failed. And nobody likes to feel like a failure.
But I just didn’t have the fight or the motivation in me at the time, because when I’m depressed I just feel kind of, urh, lifeless, all day. There’s a lethargic feeling, sort of no get up and go, no umph. Everything, you know, at this low-level drone. It’s like a dark cloud that follows you everywhere. Some days it lightens up and then there’s a few rays of sun but you just never know when it’s gonna hit. It can really catch you off-guard because one minute you’re fine and then the next minute you think: ‘I couldn’t care less’, I’m just sort of a bit dead. And then I’ll think: ‘I’m alright again’, and then suddenly I’ll be watching something that wouldn’t normally make me cry and I’ll be bawling my eyes out. It’s kind of like having your period – you’re a bit more moody, or cranky, or more tearful or whatever – but it could come at any moment and last for God knows how long.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a genetic thing going on because my aunt was admitted to a mental institute, my cousin committed suicide in 1998 at age twenty, a very close family member just admitted to me that he was suicidal recently, that he only stuck around because he wanted to see how I was going to do at the Olympics. Another person closely related to me went through a really bad stage where she was feeling suicidal and was totally depressed. And with what we know about the brain and how it’s made up – physiologically, biologically, how it’s actually structured – if there’s a fault in a certain area it causes various behavioural patterns to be more prominent in that person. I mean, I’m no scientist but if your biology means that you inherit this flaw in your brain in the way it works then, yeah, it would not surprise me if there were some hereditary component.
So one day I was telling my sports doctor that I wasn’t, you know, feeling up to . . . life. In order to have been able to do the things I needed to do, I literally would have had to have somebody living with me who would just take care of me. Somebody who would prepare everything, like all the food, as I couldn’t even be bothered to eat junk food, let alone making high-quality meals. And I know this was quite hard for people who knew me to understand because I’m the one that everybody goes to for advice. I’ve always been that person; I’m always everybody’s big sister. So normally I get the brush-off when I’m asking for help because everybody thinks that I’m going to be able to figure it out myself, because in their perception I’m so strong. But surely that means that when I do ask for help you would jump to it even more so, because you would think: ‘Well, if she’s asking for help then it must be serious.’ But people would just say: ‘Oh, you’ll be alright, you know what to do.’ Well, I may know what to do, but I just can’t do it, so someone better just be on the lookout.
So I was just chatting to my sports doctor and he recommended taking these antidepressants. And I refused at first, but he kept bugging me about it, so I did take them from him but I never took them – if you see what I mean – I just took them so that he would think I was taking them. You know, when you read something on the box that says you could commit suicide because of taking them, you don’t want to take this thing lightly. You hear a lot of stories about people who have. And no one’s monitoring you, they just give you these pills and it’s: ‘Off you go, good luck!’, which I don’t really think is a good idea. And everyone else I talked to said: ‘Oh, don’t do that.’ You know: ‘Oh, my mother was a zombie when she did that, she was nothing like her normal self.’ Or: ‘These devastate your body’, and blah, blah, blah. This was from friends I knew who had known people on medication and also my mum, who didn’t want me to because she’s a natural health person, so she’s studied a lot of these chemicals and is not a big fan.
But at that point, I couldn’t do other things to help myself because I couldn’t care less. For some people they might be able to trigger themselves to eat well or exercise, or there might be something that just allows them to snap themselves out of it, but I couldn’t do it, not on my own. So although I think the natural way’s the best way, there are times when you just can’t, so after thinking about it for a long time, I eventually did end up taking the pills. I thought: ‘Let’s try it.’ So I started taking one type and after a while I went to my GP and I said: ‘These have helped me get a little bit better but it’s kind of plateaued and I need to be a little bit more motivated to get out of bed.’ You know, I had the motivation to put one leg out of bed, to not mind waking up, but I needed to be able to get out and do stuff, I wanted to do more. So I was put on another one and I was on that for about eight days. But during that time I’d spoken to my friend who was on antidepressants and she was like: ‘Oh, you should try these ones because they actually give you energy, almost to the point where you have to tell yourself to relax a bit.’ So I went back to my GP and I said: ‘Well, my friend said to try these ones, what do you think?’ And she was like: ‘Yeah, sure.’ So now I’ve had my normal ones, switched to the other ones, and about eight days later she let me have the new ones.
I felt a bit odd when I started taking them and they said: ‘Oh that will just pass in time’, but it wasn’t just at first, this was ongoing. The problem was I didn’t know what part was me and what part wasn’t. I was still up and down emotionally and in training I’d feel dizzy and I would blink and feel like I was going to fall over. And every so often I’d get little injuries, or my training wasn’t going well, or it would go well for a while and then it would plateau. And I’m like: ‘What IS this? Is that me? Is it because I’m getting old? Or is it the drugs?’ It was a nightmare. And because they were having such an effect on just my running, I’m thinking: ‘Well, what else are they doing inside of me?’ Because it’s a chemical – do you know what I mean? These are very, very strong drugs, mind-altering drugs. And I didn’t want to live like that, in some cloud of not knowing, so I knew I’d have to get out of that state eventually.
***
In the run-up to London 2012 we were training in South Africa in January and I think things had gone reasonably well there, but I knew that if we had any more problems injury-wise then it was gonna be a long shot. But to be honest by that point I’d lost my passion; it felt like something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do like in previous years. I wasn’t doing it because I loved athletics or because I was passionate about it like in 2008. I cared because it was in London but that was the only reason I was doing it. But you can’t tell anyone that stuff because you’re supposed to want to be an Olympic champion. You can’t say: ‘I don’t really want to do this, I’m just going through the motions.’
And in a way, you don’t even want to admit to yourself that that’s what you’re thinking. You tell yourself that you do care every day when in actual fact you feel different. And then you feel stupid because this is the London Olympics, this could change your life if you g
et it right. So why would you not at least try? But it was arduous. I really didn’t care, I just wanted to get it over and done with – the sooner the Olympics came and went the better. I should have retired before, you know: ‘Done, boom, stick a fork in me’, but because of London I kept going. But at that point it had become more other people’s dream for me than mine. So that has its consequences and they don’t fall on the people that encourage you to make the decisions, they fall back on you.
The day I took an overdose had been a good day. I’d had training, I’d started my session and it was going really well: I mean, like, I was on it. Then, just as we were about to get to the main part, I felt a weird pain in my leg so we called the session. And I was fine with that because the lead-up had been really good, so I wasn’t bothered. Then I was driving home and I just started crying; I wasn’t sad but I just started crying. That was infuriating to me and at that point I said: ‘Well, if I can’t even have a good day and not cry, and I don’t even know why I’m crying, then this is ridiculous. I’ve tried and I can’t do it and I’ve had enough.’ So I drove home and I took all the sleeping pills that I’d been prescribed when I had insomnia. I was just like: ‘God, I can’t live like this. I can’t live thinking I’m having a normal day and the next minute I’m crying. This is bizarre. I cannot function on a daily basis like this. I’ve had enough now, so goodbye . . . or hello!’