‘It can only get better if you tell someone’
Lily Harrold, 13, will run for Pathstone Mental Health on Sunday. She wants others to also talk about mental health.
Ever since she was two years old she loved gymnastics. Her favourite event was the uneven bars.
When she was 10 years old, she started training to compete provincially. Four hours a day, four days a week. And Lily Harrold loved it.
And then all of a sudden, she didn’t want to go. When her parents, Tim and Rosy, drove her to the club she clung to them in the waiting room and cried. If they stayed, she barely ventured into the gym for a few minutes.
There were times they spent the better part of four hours, Lily sobbing on her mom’s lap, in the waiting room. Sometimes she’d make it into the hallway between the waiting room and gym, but couldn’t go any further.
Even Lily didn’t know why.
“I love gymnastics,” says the Niagara Falls teen. “I felt like I couldn’t do it and I didn’t want to leave them.”
Lily is 13 years old, in Grade 8. She lives with separation anxiety.
It started when she was 10 years old and in Grade 5. She was at a gymnastics practice. As usual, there was background music playing from a radio station. But on this day, the music stopped, and there were announcements about a tornado warning somewhere north of Toronto.
“Over and over again,” says Lily. It stuck with Lily.
“I felt like I needed to see my family. I needed to make sure they were OK,” she says.
“I was consumed in the moment. There was nothing else I could think about.”
She told her coach she felt sick and her mother picked her up.
After that, she felt so stressed by the thought of being separated from her parents, she couldn’t walk into the gym she once loved.
In her words: “I was absolutely terrified to leave my parents.”
“I felt like I was going to throw up. My throat felt tight. It was a feeling like having to throw up, but you don’t.”
On Sunday, she will do her part to speak up about mental health. She will take part in the Family Fun Halloween Walk, Run or Roll for Children’s Mental Health, a fundraiser for Pathstone Mental Health in St. Catharines. She’s raised more than $400 to date and is one of the top fundraisers.
She wants to encourage conversations about mental health.
Kids might be scared or embarrassed to open up about their feelings, she says. “But if you don’t talk to anybody it won’t get better,” she says. “It will only get worse.
“We need to tell people it can only get better if you tell someone,” she says. “If everyone can tell someone what’s going on, everyone can help each other.”
Funds raised from the second annual event, organized by Strides2Wellness, will raise funds for Pathstone’s naturalized playground and healing garden. Construction began earlier this month.
Some 7,000 children and youth are seen at Pathstone every year.
Earlier this year, the Fourth Avenue facility opened a walk-in clinic for youth ages six to 17 years.
There’s no need for an appointment, no fee or health care required. They can simply walk in and receive one-on-one counselling, three days a week. (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.)
Friends Joanne Leblanc and Louisa Drost formed Strides2Wellness in order to promote families being active and having fun together. Strengthening mental wellbeing is as important as physical fitness, says Leblanc, a therapist at Pathstone. In the spring, they will organize an ice cream ride to raise funds for the Niagara Sexual Assault Centre.
Niagara musician, Brad Battle, who has been outspoken about his own battle with depression, will perform during the event.
Lily’s anxiety eventually affected her entire life.
“She couldn’t leave us to go anywhere,” says Rosy.
On the outside, she sometimes appeared defiant, out of control. A kid engulfed in a giant meltdown. Inside, she was scared. Stressed. Beyond worried.
Her mom stayed with her on playdates at friends’ houses. One Halloween, her dad went trick or treating with Lily and a group of her friends.
She cried uncontrollably every day. Even thinking about the next day’s events triggered insurmountable anxiety.
“I remember thinking I can’t do this, I can’t,” says Lily.
At school, her mom handed off Lily to a trusted educational assistant who met her in the office every morning with repeated reassurances, “everything’s going to be OK.”
She eventually had to quit gymnastics.
It wasn’t until Lily started to see a therapist in the Falls and was part of group counselling, an empowering experience which assured her she was not alone, that she began to improve.
And then, finally she decided to face her fears. She returned to the gymnastics club.
Her therapist stayed with her, and her mother left. Lily practised for an hour.
“At that point, I realized there was nothing to be scared about,” she says.
These days, she’s back to training 10 hours a week, and she coaches too.
While anxiety is still part of her life, it’s not overwhelming anymore. She is able to reassure herself with positive thoughts.
In fact, it’s given her a way to connect with other kids. She helps out in the kindergarten classes at school and is often requested by parents as a gymnastics coach.
“It’s helped me, to help other people,” she says.
“I am very proud of myself,” she says. “It is definitely not easy. But it’s helped me to be who I am.”