The, captain of the Pakistan women’s football team, Hajrah Khan, recently broke her silence on social media about her battle against depression. She is one of the few athletes, nationally or internationally, who have chosen to raise awareness about this serious medical illness.

It was in 2015 when Khan felt she might be experiencing a downward psychological spiral. The game of football had got banned in the country by FIFA, which meant no international tours for the women’s team as well who had been going a lot of attention.

“Football was my sanctuary, my exit. I was not expressing myself enough through sports. So, that was one thing that I think triggered it because [despite] being such a high performer I had nothing to do,” she says.

Hajrah Khan, captain of the national women’s football team, shocked her admirers when she recently admitted she was battling depression. She opens up to Eos about why she chose to speak up about it on social media

It was a series of unfortunate events for Khan that made her go down this path. Then Shahlyla Baloch, a fellow teammate and friend of hers, passed away in a car accident. A day later, Khan received a call from her father saying that their family was going bankrupt.

Khan, at the time, had moved to Islamabad, away from her hometown of Karachi and was not finding it easy to cope with all of this in such a brief time span.

High achievements can bring with them sharp declines for individuals belonging to the world of sport, media and business. For athletes, a brutal injury can sometimes mean the end of their career.

“In my head, I am not supposed to be weak or a weak performer. I always have to perform the best I can. Then something happened. During a national camp, a knee injury that I sustained just wouldn’t heal. It takes a toll on you, especially if you are competing on a big level and you can’t really prove yourself or live up to the name and respect that people expect of you … That is a lot of pressure,” she says.

Stories of successful performers, artists, entrepreneurs and athletes giving in to psychological illnesses have become all too common in the West. Similar stories of female Pakistani athletes in the mainstream media and in the wider public imagination tend to be taken as the culmination of their never-ending struggles against a deep-rooted patriarchy. This adds to the pressure.

“High achievers tend to fall into a black hole,” says Khan. “You are so used to performing at a high level, and then suddenly you stop getting projects or playing deals. An average person’s graph goes up and down but gets balanced out. Ours feels like the higher you go the harder you fall. You start associating your self-esteem and self-worth with your performances. You are bound to think that you are not good enough… it just keeps going down and you know it is never ending. You just start feeling that you are not good enough.”

However, to acknowledge a problem within oneself is perhaps the hardest thing to do for any individual. For Khan, it was not until physical symptoms started to appear, that she decided to seek help. For a whole year she felt physically sick in her gut.

It takes a toll on you, especially if you are competing on a big level and you can’t really prove yourself or live up to the name and respect that people expect of you … That is a lot of pressure,” she says.

“I spent a lot of money on treatment just to figure out what was wrong in my gut. Then I realised it was [all] psychological. I had held so much in, that my body was reacting now. My doctor finally put his foot down and referred me to a psychiatrist. After that, the issue was fixed in two weeks, the symptoms and the pain went away,” she says.

Like most other athletes who are used to believing in their strength, resilience and endurance, acceptance was a slow journey.

“I reached a point where I was lying awake in the middle of the night with palpitations. I was living in Islamabad alone and that’s when I knew I had to do something [about it],” she says.

She has now been in therapy for almost eight months. She is cognizant of the fact that with psychological illness, the path to recovery is slow and challenging. But many would argue, why go for therapy? Is having a good support system in the form of family and friends not enough?

“I could have talked about this stuff to close friends. But how much of your baggage do you want your friends to take. Although I know my friends are not like that, you don’t want to spoil someone else’s day. I also wanted a direction for my thinking,” she says.

Most of it came from feeling everyday things intensely, whether it was angst or joy.

“Even if it was happiness, I would feel super intense to an extent that I felt that this is not normal. And if I was upset, stuff would get quite overwhelming,” she says.

What therapists do is that they lay down your anxieties and fears in front of you. She feels perhaps that is the hardest part: to face your internal fears and other things that you have been trying to suppress all your life.

For many people, the roots of anxiety and depression sometimes lead back to early childhood traumas and experiences. For individuals who have been social outliers in any way, this challenge is always staring them in the face.

“At school I was bullied, although I was playing sports and doing all the fancy stuff, I was the jock. With girls, I was always sidelined, like I would not be in the photos. There was a lot of body-shaming and stuff like that. The worst part is that at that age you don’t even know what all is happening to you,” she says.

This was the thing that made her feel that other girls should know about her story and ailment. That is when she decided to break the silence to embrace her internal struggles.

“I feel very sensitively about psychological illness because I am going through it. I am a very strong person and have a very strong presence. When I tell someone that I have had depression issues, they don’t take me seriously, especially when I meet someone for the first time, because there is a certain perception attached to a psychologically ill person,” she says.

She says it is possible to battle anxiety and depression even when, in the eyes of the world, you possess everything. This is why she wants younger girls to not feel bad when faced with a similar situation.

“Just take care of yourself, physically and emotionally. If you are not healthy, then you are not going to be able to deal with anything at all. The more you are talking about these things, the more you are helping yourself and others.”

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 21st, 2018