About a month after I retired from competition, I called to set up cable for my new apartment. At the time, figure skating was more mainstream than it is today, but it was still a niche sport. Unless you were hanging out at an ice rink, it was rare for a skater to be recognized in public.
That morning on the phone with the Comcast representative, I absentmindedly answered his initial questions about the services I wanted, then gave him my contact information. After sharing my name, he asked if I was the skater and how training was going.
And I froze.
A few weeks earlier, I had moved from Southern California to Boston to hide. My decision to leave skating was abrupt, caused by an eating disorder I had been battling and was finally ready to confront.
I had no idea how to respond to his question about training. I didn’t want to tell him that I had quit skating, knowing his next question would likely be, Why? But I also didn’t want to lie. The shame about how my career had ended was paralyzing.
This was the first time someone had asked me about skating since retiring, and I just didn’t know what to say.
When you grow up as an athlete, you tend to spend a lot of time dreaming about the pinnacle of your career, the ultimate achievement that will solidify your place in the history books. You are driven by this future moment of success: winning a championship title, winning an Olympic gold medal, dancing Odette in Swan Lake. You grow up learning everything about your idols, the ones who have already lived what you hope to emulate. You think of these athletes every four years when you’re watching the Olympics, reliving their moment of glory that capped off their career.
But what you don’t often think about is the other side of reality, the ending of a career that doesn’t include the gold medal or the crowning achievement. You don’t tend to think of the athletes who are forced to retire because of an injury that just won’t cooperate or those who face a crushing defeat at their last event. You try to steer your thoughts away from the athletes who bow out because their aging body can’t withstand the demands of another training cycle or the ones whose love for their sport dwindles during the tail end of their career.
And when you become one of these athletes, you may carry a lot of mixed feelings about your career.
You may carry a lot of shame.
As a society, we don’t like to talk about shame. Even naming the feeling can make you want to run away, to hide—just like I wanted to that morning on the phone.
Shame urges you to deflect, to avoid. It urges you to minimize an experience, jump to the next topic when asked about your sport or dodge anything that reminds you of your career. You might catch yourself saying things like Oh, I never think about that part of my life or That was a long time ago; it doesn’t mean much to me anymore.
Shame can also lead you to dwell on the ending of your career, as this less-ideal outcome becomes the defining factor of your athletic experience. You might find yourself stuck in a loop, ruminating about your mistakes, living a disappointing ending over and over again. Shame robs you of the pleasure, the victories, the positive qualities that made you a great athlete. It defines your story for you, and, most insidiously, it robs you of your grief.
Shame is not a character flaw. It’s a universal emotion that is based on an erroneous story about an experience. Behind it is the belief: Because of this experience, I have evidence that I am bad. I am inherently flawed.
When an ending isn’t on your terms, you may get caught in a shame spiral partly because of the peak-end rule from Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues (Kahneman et al., 1993). Their work found that people judge an experience largely by its most intense moment and its final moments. This can help to explain why the last season of a career might outweigh the previous decade, and it can normalize the fixation on a career’s ending as an effect of memory, not a personal flaw.
When the ending of your career is coupled with intense disappointment, you are likely to attach an emotionally driven story to the experience, which can perpetuate shame. These stories tend to sound like My body failed me or I wasn’t good enough to deliver under pressure. Or, perhaps the most painful story: I’m a failure. This shame-based story can lead you to a one-sentence definition of your athletic career: I didn’t make the team. I crumbled under pressure. I got injured. I quit.
The thing about shame is it can only survive in the shadows. To bring it out of the shadows and start to remove it, you need to speak about it. When you start to explore your shame, it’s important to make sure you are sharing your story with an emotionally safe person—a therapist, a close friend, a family member—who won’t respond with judgment but will meet you with compassion. An outsider’s empathy can help you start to practice self-compassion, and shame cannot survive when it is met with self-compassion.
Because shame blocks you from processing what happened to you—the injury or illness that was out of your control, the disappointing outcome—once you move past your shame, you give yourself an opportunity to begin to grieve. Although grief is uncomfortable, it allows you to reflect on the sum of your career—not just the ending.
I like to view a career as if it were a figure skating long program. When you skate a long program, the judges give you a score for each element, and their final score reflects your performance in its entirety. If you skated a clean program except for the last element, you would never expect a judge’s total score to be based only on that element. If a judge did this—ignored every other element that you performed beautifully—you’d be enraged. You’d rightfully argue their scoring was unfair: the missed element should count toward your score, but it should never be your score. When you fixate on one experience to define an entire career, this is what you’re doing to yourself. You’re denying yourself an accurate assessment of your career.
To help with this, it can be useful to explore—or more tangibly write out—your whole career as a timeline, including everything before the ending. When you see your career written out in its entirety, you can start to explore your various experiences. What were the high points before the ending? What were the lower points? How did you respond to adversity throughout your career? What did you learn about yourself through those tougher moments? What did you learn about yourself through your victorious moments? This allows you to integrate your experiences.
After freezing on the phone with the Comcast representative that morning, I hung up on him mid-conversation. At the time, I could only see my career as defined by its ending. He didn’t need to know about the eating disorder I was just beginning to confront, but I could have shared an honest answer that protected that part of my life I wasn’t yet ready to talk about.
When you allow yourself to grieve and explore your career fully, you become the author of how it’s shared. You can craft an answer to Why did you stop competing? that feels comfortable to you, and you can own your career rather than avoid it.
You don’t always get to control the ending—the injury, falling out of love with your sport, not making the team—but you do have authority over what it means and the role it plays in your story.
The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.
Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). When more pain is preferred to less: Adding a better end. Psychological Science, 4(6), 401-405.