This is not a celebrity crush and I’m not a dirty old man, but I really wish I could hug Naomi Osaka.
Yeah, she has gobs of money and is better at tennis than just about any of us ever will be at anything, but she also has the vulnerability of a 23-year-old — one who has discovered that victories bring her only relief, not joy. And losses hurt like hell.
In a sense, things aren’t the same between her and the love of her life, and she needs to sort it out. She will. Even if it means breaking up.
Sportswriter Mollie Knight has a great blog post about her own struggles with depression and anxiety, including tips about antidepressants and finding the right therapist. She also makes a great point for the rest of us.
“I don’t know anyone who isn’t being held back in some area of their life by counterproductive or masochistic feelings,” she writes.
Every writer I know has anxiety. Well, every good writer. Well, every good writer who gives a damn. Ay, there’s the rub. What’s so insidious about mental health issues is how often they attack our passions, threatening the very things that make life worth living.
Suppose you ask someone out and they turn you down. If all you did was swipe right and swap a couple of texts, it might sting for a few minutes, but that’s about it. But if you talk several times at parties or work, feel like you know each other and then you get turned down, it can feel like a referendum on your soul.
Knight isn’t having masochistic feelings because she can’t hit a crisp cross-court forehand, any more than Osaka is losing sleep over a dangling participle. But when it’s your passion and you feel like you’re failing, your soul is in play. And it’s losing.
Reading Knight’s post helped me appreciate that hugging Osaka wouldn’t lead to some magical cure, even if I were her best friend. She’s not a kid with an owie or a spouse who had a bad day. The hug needs to come from within.
It’s sort of like telling an alcoholic, “Stop drinking!” Gee. Hadn’t thought of that. Just as lots of us can have a drink or two without bingeing, many can feel anxious or depressed without getting, well, Anxious or Depressed. But it’s easy to underestimate the struggle.
Maybe our empathy will grow as we see more stories about the troubles of athletes like Osaka, Simone Biles and Michael Phelps, but we also need to appreciate that lots of people are even more troubled, and don’t have the insurance or bankroll to get what they need. Or we don’t learn about their demons until it’s too late.
Knight writes about how tough it can be to find the right combination of drugs and therapy, because there is no magical cure. She also describes having panic attacks, and how important proper breathing can be, particularly the technique in this video. (If you’re the impatient sort, the main stuff about grief and breathing starts around the 12-minute mark.)
Here’s what I hope Osaka does, metaphorically at least: Hit against a backboard. It seems like an exercise in futility, just spitting back what you give it, but you can experiment all day without pressure, without social media, without being judged.
Writers and artists do that all the time with blank canvases, battling inertia and fatalism and perfectionism and insecurity — the Four Horsemen of the Blockalypse.
Therapists can be backboards, too, bouncing your stuff back with a slightly different spin than you expected, maybe helping you notice something you missed — or letting you rediscover your joy.
We all take things for granted, even in moments of leisure. If you’ve been to Versailles, Hearst Castle might not impress you much. It’s certainly beautiful, but far less grand.
But grandeur can be overwhelming. Osaka won the U.S. Open finals over Serena Williams, her childhood idol, the greatest of all time. It made her mental health worse, not better.
Maybe hitting against that backboard will reacquaint Osaka with that girl who idolized Williams. Maybe she’ll focus on doubles or do more charity work or take a teenager under her wing. Instead of a tennis court, maybe the whole world will be her playground. Maybe she’ll find the right combination of therapy and medicine, of challenge and joy.
If she pursues a different path, she certainly won’t take Williams’ place as the greatest of all time. But if she ends up being the greatest Naomi Osaka she can be, that will be a victory worth celebrating.
Murphy Slaw
Something old: It’s a traditional map with a few fresh tweaks. Hope it makes you smile.
Something new: If you’re young and want to be famous, the clock is ticking. Or maybe TikTokking.
Something borrowed: I think we follow the same diet plan.
Something blue: This tweet from Mandy Patinkin is sweet on its own, but the thread also has some good information on The Dinner Party, which helps people in their 20s and 30s who have lost a loved one. Well worth passing along if you know someone having a hard time.