Valley Stream girls athletes get boost from Olympic gold medalist Samantha Arsenault Livingstone
Olympic gold medalist Samantha Arsenault Livingston speaks about mental health to the female athletes at the Valley Stream Central High School District on Saturday. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin
Former Olympic swimmer Samantha Arsenault Livingstone helped roughly 200 young female athletes in Valley Stream strengthen their emotional prowess on Saturday while discussing the demons she fought after clinching the gold medal she had always dreamed of.
On Saturday, in the gym at Valley Stream Memorial Junior High School, Livingstone came armed with some brain-boosting exercises to help students realize they are not the sum of their successes or failures -- and their self-worth is not dependent on either.
To illustrate the point, she raised her two fists in the air, with the left fist symbolizing the self, and the right fist representing an individual's actions in the world. The right fist, she said, may move up and down depending on hits and misses in life: acing a test, making a team. The left fist, or self, is immovable. She stressed the importance of self-worth.
"I'm sharing the words that I wish I heard that would have spared me from some of that intense suffering," said Livingstone, who won an Olympic gold medal in 2000.
Livingstone recounted feeling hollow and empty after stepping off the Olympic podium in Sydney, Australia, with top honors, fresh off a record-setting 4x200 freestyle relay in 2000.
She said she heard the inner critic taunting her: “I wasn't good enough, strong enough, fast enough. Good enough to be an Olympian.”
That moment was just the tip of the iceberg. She spoke about how prior harassment, a shoulder injury and an eating disorder in college plunged her into further despair. She had thoughts of suicide. Therapy, she said, turned her life around.
Medical experts previously told Newsday that teens on Long Island are suffering from declining mental health. Nationwide nearly 3 in 5 teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, while 1 in 3 seriously considered suicide, according to a CDC survey of 17,000 teenagers released last year. The feeling of sadness among girls was double that of boys.
A separate study released last month found that drug prescriptions nationwide to combat depression and anxiety among young people spiked nearly 64% since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some of the girls were leaving with a better understanding of mental health.
“It’s important to do this as a team because you see them perform physically well but you never know what’s going on behind the scenes,” said Nattaly Lindo, 18, a senior and track and field runner at Valley Stream North High School.
Lilli Dolan, 17, a senior on the softball team at Valley Stream North High School, approached Livingstone after the talk for a little one on one.
“I thought she gave us a lot of good strategies for dealing with different things in sports because I feel like a lot of people don't really talk about what it feels like to be in the moment, just like the achievements," Dolan said.
