"When you are a student-athlete, an honors student and on the dean’s list, and it looks like everything is working out for you, it’s really easy to think, ‘Oh, that won’t ever affect me. I’ll never have mental health struggles.’ But when life hit really hard this fall, and I found myself really struggling - with my athlete identity and my identity as a student - I kept a really good face because that’s what we’re taught to do. I am a junior nursing major here at UD and I row on the women’s team. My teammates didn’t know, my coaches didn’t know, but I have been struggling with depression for the past year.

I heard Sean Locke’s story through a professor last semester and I was a little baffled that I had never heard about it before. Living and breathing in the athletic department all the time, it really hit close to home. That there had been a student-athlete who took his life two years after graduating. Sean was a UD basketball player who got a great job post-grad, but no one knew he was struggling.

I think that all student-athletes kind of struggle with identity and I think that COVID has truly revealed that. We have had sports stripped away, school stripped away and there’s a lot of grief. So when COVID hit and my summer plans fell apart, I reached back out to the professor that I had and was like, ‘What are the odds that I can come on board in any capacity? I’m dying to do some meaningful work right now.’ Being stuck at home, I wanted to do something that felt like it matters. I saw a lot of myself in Sean’s story and I was really drawn to SL24: UnLocke the Light Foundation. I have been around ever since and now I am SL24’s operations assistant, working for them part-time.

Sean’s house is directed toward high school and college students, but we are specifically targeting student-athletes. We think and know that student-athletes need a place where they can let their guard down a little bit. We are so attached to this identity that is drawn from performance and a lot of the time, you don’t get to let that mask come off and just be who you actually are, and be in the midst of the struggles you are having without worrying about playing time or your reputation or any of that.

As I’ve worked for SL24: UnLocke the Light and kind of grown in my journey, I’ve been able to take off that mask, realizing that when I get vulnerable with other people, it just fosters more vulnerability in others. This job has been a big redemption story for me, to kind of share my story. It feels like I can talk and advocate from this place of, ‘I’m very much in progress.’ I don’t like to say that everything is perfect. That’s not the reality. I struggle every day. I think that through this, I get this beautiful opportunity for it not to be perfect right now. And that’s OK.

There’s a major element of therapeutic communication where I’m learning how to hold space for people better as I’ve worked with SL24 and gotten to speak with people and hear their stories, and learning how to be a really empathetic listener. I think that going through this process, I’ve realized that psychiatric-mental health nursing is definitely where I want to go. We are in a mental health crisis with COVID and I think that’s been brought to the forefront of people’s minds and I think that there is so much for us to learn, so much better care for us to offer and so much stigma for us to keep working to remove. And if anything, COVID has presented an opportunity to address some big stuff in our nation and mental health is one of those.”