This reflection comes to us from our friend Michael Belote, published first on his blog, Reboot Christianity.
Ronda Rousey, if you have been living in a cave for the past few years, is one of the most successful and famous professional fighters–male or female–in history.
She is the first US woman ever to win an Olympic medal in Judo. She is the youngest woman to ever qualify for the Olympics, qualifying as a judoka at age 14. She was consistently one of the top 3 ranked judo champions in the world before transitioning into mixed martial arts (MMA), where she quickly dominated and became a world champion. Going into November of last year, she was 12-0 as an MMA fighter, and only one fighter had ever even survived the first round…her dominance was unparalleled, with 8 of her 12 challengers being defeated in less than a minute.
And then, in November 2015, she lost. Brutally. Holly Holm defeated her in two rounds so badly that she was hospitalized for some time afterward, and not allowed to fight for six months to allow healing.
“I’m Nothing”
This week on The Ellen Degeneres Show, Rousey talked about this for the first time. She had this to say:
“I was literally sitting there and thinking about killing myself and at that exact second I’m like, ‘I’m nothing, what do I do anymore and no one gives a s–t about me anymore without this.’ ”
She didn’t say this lightly–Rousey’s father committed suicide, and for the first time she felt depression lead her there. She said her boyfriend literally saved her life, because it was in speaking with him that she found something to live for…the desire to be with him and to have and raise children together.
With a fighter of Rousey’s stature, this of course has gotten a lot of play in the sports media world. And as you might imagine, most sports talk show hosts seem to be handling this without a lot of nuance.
The basic discussion points go like this: she’d never really lost before; part of being an athlete is learning how to lose gracefully; most people learn that young, but she didn’t; she now will have to learn to push through this.
In other words…work harder. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Rinse, repeat.
But this morning, I heard a fantastic voice of clarity on the subject, who nailed it perfectly. ESPN’s Mike Greenberg, a radio show host who himself has experienced depression, had this to say, and everyone should read and think about it:
“I can tell you what I heard when I heard her talking, through my own personal experience [with depression].
It’s hard to define what depression is. Picture someone you know, who you don’t like very much, but you are forced to spend a lot of time with them. Now imagine that someone is you. That’s how you feel about yourself. You go through significant bouts at times where you think about yourself, ‘I don’t like myself at all.’ Think about how you treat people that you don’t like, then think about how you treat yourself. Think about the standards you hold yourself to, the things you beat yourself up for, the things that you would support other people through, but you actually end up criticizing yourself in your own mind. That’s how I define depression…
What I heard her talking about had nothing to do with losing a fight. Nothing–so the fact that had she lost at judo, nothing. This isn’t about ‘she had a bad show’ or anything that we could ever relate to. This is about a person who had found a definition of herself that she liked. ‘I like this. I like being the baddest woman on the planet. I like the fact that I’m a superstar. And everyone likes me now for that reason…And if I’m not this, people don’t like me, and I don’t like me.“
Every human has inside them an existential crisis–“Who am I?” “How do I fit in this world?” We all know, intuitively, that there is something missing. Our identity is unclear, undecided.
Sometimes we say this optimistically: you can be anything you want to be! (Which of course, is untrue, as is proved by the fact that I’m not in the NBA right now.)
But often we see it pessimistically as well, as a need to “find ourselves.”
When you start looking for it, you see everywhere that people are desperate for identity: I’m a feminist, I’m a conservative, I’m an environmentalist, I’m a vegan…
“I’m a _________” is a good measure for significance in our society. And for Greenberg, depression is what he feels when he fills in the blank and finds that his description of himself, his personal view of his identity, is not something he particularly likes. I have thankfully never battled depression (just a few bouts with anxiety), but my wife has; and this seems like a pretty good descriptor of what she has gone through. My wife is beautiful, talented, thoughtful, kind, and brilliant…but that isn’t the identity she sees in herself. And so she is constantly extremely worried about how others will view her–leading to worry about her appearance, quietness during discussions (lest she say something wrong), and the constant feeling that everyone is judging and watching her. As you might imagine, she hates parties!
You see, depression is particularly insidious, because the person battling depression can’t “set aside” their identity crisis. We all have this identity crisis at our core, and go through bouts of sadness (or “little-d” depression); but we can set it aside in our minds for a period to get things done, and eventually the sadness passes. The person who is chemically Depressed, however, cannot set it aside and get by. As a result, it is always present. This leads them to want to withdraw from others (so as to avoid having their identity judged and found lacking). But then they are only spending time with the one person who, as Greenberg says, they don’t particularly like right now and can’t get away from. Thus a spiral continues into self-loathing and–sometimes–suicidal thoughts (as in Rousey’s case).
Breaking the cycle
How did Rousey break the cycle?
Well, according to her, she found hope in motherhood and her boyfriend. She decided that she found a cause worth living for. You see, she has changed her self-identity away from “undefeatable fighter” to “future mother.”
Similarly, activists take up a cause to redefine their identity. Others “fake it till they make it”–using cognitive dissonance, they just pretend they don’t have a problem until it goes away. (Note…this doesn’t work for the chemically depressed.)
Ultimately the entire self-help industry (and, one might argue, the prosperity gospel) is really all about trying to “reinvent” an identity. Life will be better tomorrow because you’ve reinvented yourself. And these “reinventions” may sound hopeful…but they aren’t hopeful to me. They are profoundly sad.
Because what has happened is simply an exchanging of burdens. They exchange one flawed identity for another–and eventually, when that one also fails, they will fall again.
It is the Second Use of the Law, to throw out a theological term: whatever identity you take on makes demands of you, and eventually you will fail those demands. And so you will find that, again, your identity does not fit you anymore.
So I am sad for Rousey. She is an amazing, accomplished woman with a lot to offer the world. But…she will not find her salvation from depression in motherhood. She will find all of sudden an immense pressure to be something new, the “do it all” mom, and she will find her identity crisis afresh.
My yoke is easy, my burden is light
A yoke is a wooden brace that is used to tie beasts of burden together, and in the ancient world was largely viewed as a symbol of slavery.
The Scriptures tell us that sin is a yoke (Romans 6) and also that legalism is a yoke (Acts 15, Romans 14, Romans 7).
We all have an identity crisis at our core. We all wonder who we are–and, when we look in the mirror, we don’t like what we see. And so we exchange the yoke we have…we change our identity…but if we are only exchanging it for a new yoke of “law,” then we will one day be in the same position. Rinse and repeat.
Instead, as the French mathematician Blaise Pascal noted–“inside every person is a God-shaped hole.” In other words, this existential crisis, this identity crisis, is exactly what we see in Genesis 3: sin has cut us off from our identity as Image-Bearers of God, and only when He is what fills our identity will we find existential satisfaction.
Only then can we–as Paul says–find contentment no matter our circumstances (Phil 4:12). Only then will our life look like one of peace, joy, love, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faith, and self-control (Gal 5:22-23).
Only when we stop tying ourselves to false yokes will we find the identity we seek. Jesus said that His yoke–the cross–takes the burden off of us. His yoke is easy; the burden is light (Matt 11:30). The burden is easy because he did the work for us. Our identity is that of a co-heir of creation; a lost sheep that has been saved; a servant who has been found acceptable; a bride who has been loved; an orphan who has been adopted.
All our work is meaningless and can be forgotten and left behind, because God didn’t forget us or leave us behind.
And all of a sudden…the world is brighter. We may still get depressed, but we can battle through it because it doesn’t matter what others think of us…it doesn’t even matter what we think of ourselves…the One Who Matters sees us and loves us, just as we are.
As the Jesus Storybook Bible says…we become lovely, because He loves us.
COMMENTS
3 responses to “Ronda Rousey, Identity, and Depression”
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Loved this, Michael. I felt the same sadness after hearing her comments–the misplaced identity that I can relate to so well. Thank God I began to understand grace before I became a wife and mother, because I can only imagine the heartbreak she will experience if she makes her happiness depend on such sin-stained endeavors as marriage and parenthood. They’re hard enough already–how anyone survives either without grace, I’ll never know.
Thanks, Michael. I am wondering whether part of the graceful attitude toward oneself while experiencing depression is the acceptance of this state. In other words, the depressive state is intractable, and attempts to fully overcome it (often through cognitive dissonance) won’t work. Maybe, though, experiencing grace in the moment can get one through depressive episodes. Just thinking out loud here…
I’ve been through this myself and for the first time in my life I thought about ending it. Interestingly I didn’t “pull myself up by my own bootstraps.” I thought God didn’t exist maybe and that He’d left me but I heard songs and so many scriptures came to mind that said the complete opposite and a preacher on tv told me not to kill myself literally a few days after this started (which I thought was directed to me but wasn’t sure because I hadn’t got to the point where I started to make actual plans but yet it still helped). I didn’t think I had anything to live for but His promise that He’d never leave me or forsake me got me through it, not the hope of a better life.