We Need to Stop Pushing Through
Power to the gymnasts; to the people; to putting happiness and health first
This Olympic season there was a lot of buzz around Simone Biles. After pulling out of the Tokyo Olympics to prioritize mental health and safety, she was in the spotlight again. In spite of the increased scrutiny and pressure brought by her high-profile return to competition, Biles performed expertly and added more medals to her collection. As the world speculated about the gymnast’s interior state, she competed with what seemed like a reinvigorated sense of grace, self-confidence, and boundaries with the public.
In Simone Biles Rising, the Netflix documentary released last month, Biles unpacks her Tokyo experience. She traveled across the world during the scariest days of the pandemic without her usual support network, and while she was there, she got the “twisties,” which is when gymnasts lose their place in the air. The twisties are life-threatening, yet countless pundits and talking heads are on record saying Biles should have “pushed through” anyway for her team and her country.
To the gymnast’s credit, even though she notes the backlash was very hard, Biles stands firm in her decision to protect herself in Tokyo. She says winning cannot come at the cost of health and wellbeing and calls another famous piece of gymnastics history into question. I know the moment in question well, since most millennial girls grew up captivated by the “Magnificent Seven,” who won gold at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.
You know where this is going: It was the Women’s All Around competition, and the United States had never won gold. After a few slip ups, they were losing their narrow lead to Russia, and it was Kerri Strug’s turn on the vault. She was injured on her first vault of two. Though she was clearly suffering, Strug was encouraged by coaches to vault again so the United States could win. And vault she did, but at great cost. As she hopped around on one foot, the entire world saw the pain on her face and praised her determination, bravery, and commitment.
Strug chose gold and country over her own safety, just like her coaches thought she should. In Simone Biles Rising, Biles calls the moment out as abusive, and other members of the Magnificent Seven join her and confirm what they experienced. They demand that the mental health of young gymnasts be taken more seriously and prioritized above winning.
To be fair, Strug still stands by her decision to do that vault in 1996. She notes that she had sacrificed years of her childhood, living away from her family and moving repeatedly, to train for that moment. She was not going to walk away from it wondering what could have been. Strug emphasizes that what Biles did was right for Biles, and what Strug did was right for Strug.
This summer, there were echoes of Strug’s sentiment in Noah Lyles’ decision to compete in the men’s 200-meter dash with Covid. In a post-run interview, he said something similar, insisting that he had worked too hard for this moment to let a virus ruin his chance to win. So he competed even though he has asthma, and was proud of himself, he said, for performing so well while sick.
Lyles’ choice had implications for community health that Strug’s did not. He put his personal success over community wellbeing and his own desire to win over protecting the Olympic experience of those running beside him. Although it is easy to imagine a different response in Covid’s acute phases, especially before vaccinations, reporters say Lyles’ fellow athletes were not even mad about his decision to run. Nothing says “endemic” like their supreme sense of chill.
I suppose Strug and Lyles have the right to put their own health at risk if they wish. (We can debate Strug’s age and Lyles’ self-prioritization later.) But Biles is calling for systemic, cultural changes that would shape coaches and authority figures who advise young gymnasts to put mental health and wellbeing above winning. Strug and Lyles might want personal autonomy within a high-pressure system, but Biles is asking for change to the system itself.
If mental health, wellbeing, and happiness were prioritized over winning in our culture, would athletes consistently choose to put themselves in danger? Put another way, I wonder how our lives would change if we stepped back a bit from the urge to win. I wonder how we would feel if we stopped pushing through at all costs.
I wonder how we would feel if we stopped pushing through at all costs.
Pushing through at all costs is not just a phenomenon in competitive sports. I have personally witnessed—and lived—the American urge to push through in academia and start ups and big corporate tech. When excellence is on the line in academia, we put jumping through arbitrary, often meaningless hoops above our health and wellbeing. I see it constantly, since graduate students worldwide are six times more likely to experience clinical levels of anxiety, depression, and psychological distress.1 Yet most of us feel we do not have a choice. We are caught in a culture we did not make.
In the corporate world, American executives’ working habits mirror Kerri Strug’s willingness to suffer some pain. Executives on my past teams were always working, always on, always moving towards profit on the company’s behalf. They often cultivated that profit while on vacation with their families. And start up culture might have been the worst I encountered. The unspoken and exploitative expectation that employees be available around the clock to get something off the ground, usually with fewer benefits than they might have earned at a bigger company, brought one red flag after another. When corporations started telling employees to have “start-up mentality,” people got the worst of both worlds.
From this place, squeezed between the capitalistic grind and a uniquely American moralization of work, we constrain our lives—our meandering, pleasurable, surprising, delicate, you-only-get-one, precious lives—to the relentless rhythm of production. Interestingly, the amount I am required to produce for my current degree outpaces anything I was required to produce in the corporate or start-up worlds, even when those environments felt unhealthy and dangerous to my mental health.
From this place, caught somewhere between capitalistic grind and American moralization of work, we constrain our lives—our meandering, pleasurable, surprising, delicate, you-only-get-one, precious lives—to the relentless rhythm of production.
Unfortunately it is hard to pay the bills as a working American without turning yourself over to this kind of relentless pace for profit’s sake, always working for someone else’s bigger cut, always putting the quiet desires of your soul aside. Yet over the years, the desires of my soul have gotten louder and louder. On many days they refuse to be ignored.
When I listen, I realize how much I would like to stop pushing through. I would like to refuse relentless rhythms and anything that causes stress to pulsate through my cells. I would like time to read and write and breathe and work out and be with people. I want American workers to claim their power and demand something like the French “right to disconnect.” Mental health should be prioritized for young gymnasts, as Biles and her supporters demand, but while we are at it, we should insist on wellbeing for everyday American students and workers, too.
We are programmed to believe success must come at great cost and even be a little painful, so we congratulate ourselves for pushing through even when it puts our wellbeing at risk. But that programming comes from systems and power holders that benefit when we keep pushing, keep producing intellectual property in their name, keep closing deals for their profit, keep overriding what our bodies and spirits actually need.
It is time to reprogram what we think we know. Here is a note to start the school year: Dear Academia, It does not have to be this way. Dear Employers, It does not have to be this way. Dear Self, It does not have to be this way. Excellence and success should not require suffering. There is a softer, gentler way to do very important things.
Dear friends, how’s it going? I am starting another semester and hoping to do it the gentle way. And the radical one. Hope these last few weeks are giving you enough space to notice late-summer light. Take care out there! <3 LM
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There are several troubling studies reporting these numbers and others like them. Here is one: https://www.mariecuriealumni.eu/newsletters/33rd-mcaa-newsletter/special-issue-mental-health-academia-when-academic-dream-turns. And here is another: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-student-mental-health-statistics/.