Lauren Betts on the day she sought out help for her depression: “I don’t think I even realized I was sinking. The whole time I thought I was treading water, I was actually slipping away. Picture yourself underwater, facing up toward the sky and just…. fading. Fading, until you can no longer see the surface. Fading, until you finally reach the darkest part of the ocean. That was me. It happened so randomly. About two years ago, after months of feeling kind of numb, I woke up one morning feeling everything. Every anxious thought I’d ever had about myself hit me all at once. My anxiety was at an all-time high. My mind said, I don’t want to do this anymore. ‘This,’ meaning life. I had probably been depressed for six months. It all started at the end of my freshman year at Stanford. Then when I transferred to UCLA, there was hype around my name, and I just never dealt with my emotions. Gradually, it became really bad, until I started drowning. That morning, I knew the headspace that I was in was too dangerous to ignore. I’d never felt so scared in my entire life. I don’t want to do this anymore…. That horrible thought kept popping up in my mind. I couldn’t go back to my day-to-day and just pretend like nothing happened. I felt like there was no other option but to go to a hospital. I was just like, There’s no other way out. Either I’m going there, or I’m doomed. I was desperate. I called my trainer at the time, and they came and picked me up. That afternoon, I checked myself into the UCLA hospital. I remember there weren’t even enough rooms because there were so many people in the psych ward who also desperately needed help. So, I was put in the hallway, with people screaming and shouting all night. I didn’t get any sleep. I just laid on that gurney wondering how my teammates were doing. The whole experience was really hard. I was a hot mess. Doctors checked in on me throughout the day. People came to visit, and I begged them to take me home. I was not happy. The food is terrible. You don’t have your phone, you don’t have anything — you’re just laying there, alone with your thoughts. If you’re in a bad headspace and you really need professional help, please go and take care of yourself because it is the BEST option over doing something else. But I never want to go back. More than anything, though, I just never want to feel that low again. I want to be HERE, experiencing life, in all its beauty and all its messiness, for a really really long time. But I know now how thin that line is between having your whole future ahead of you, and not. All it takes is one really bad morning.” playerstribu.ne/Betts @laurenbetts12 | @UCLAWBB | @MarchMadnessWBB | @bigten
