Mardy Fish
To show weakness, we're told in sports, is to deserve shame. But showing weakness, addressing your mental health, is strength.Collection: Strength
Mental health doesn't care what your name is or what you do for a living.Collection: Health
Showing weakness and showing fear and letting people in was a huge part of my comeback.Collection: Fear
It's just health. They call it mental health, but your brain is part of your body. It's an injury. You just can't see it.Collection: Health
Davis Cup means almost everything to me.
I'm very comfortable knowing how hard I have worked in the later stages of my career.
There were times I felt I'd never get my life back. Am I ever going to be normal and go out with my friends and have a beer and not think I am going to wake up at 3 A. M. and have anxious thoughts about what normal people are doing?
I was a guy who loved to be on my own at times and to travel and some of the most comfortable times were in the middle of my career flying overseas, where you have to turn your phone off and no one can get to you for 10 hours. It was just a really comfortable place for me.
I played as many golf tournaments as I could. I killed time by playing and practicing. It's something I love to do; it's fun and I was good at it.
I feel very blessed to play a sport for a living.
The sport, my job, was taken from me so abruptly that it took me a long time to get my life back.
I had my job, which I loved to do, which I was really good at. I was at the top of my career, and I had it all taken away because of a mental illness.
The more and more I spoke about it, the more I found out how many people deal with it, the more I read about it and researched it, the more you start to realize how many Americans deal with some sort of mental illness on a daily basis. That gave me comfort.
I'm obviously struggling to go out on my own terms.
I want very badly to have a success story at the end of it, at the end of my career and say, regardless of how many matches I can win this summer, I want to go to the U.S. Open - for that be my final event - and say I went out on my own terms, instead of it being taken away from me in Winston-Salem in 2013.
It took me months and months to get back to normalcy - to have a glass of wine at dinner, to go out to a movie with my wife. Just those normal things that you take for granted I wasn't able to do for a long time.
I've retired 15 times in my head, I mean literally.
I don't feel like in my head I have anything to prove.
I've got a big serve, a hard serve, and quicker points as opposed to longer points.
I'm superstitious as far as stuff around the courts. I'll eat the same things and drink the same things, and have the same breakfast in the morning.
I'm pretty lucky. I know I'm really good at what I do, and it's fun for me.
Anytime you can beat a player that's going to go down as one of the best of all time, that's a good win.
You can't play this game without being fit, and without being mentally fit and ready.
Some days are better than others, some weeks are better than others.
I was just too heavy, flat out too heavy.
You can be pretty selfish as tennis players, being an individual sport.
Try to do some cool things while you can because it's not going to last too long.
It's been well chronicled that I've had a lot of losses in finals.
I'd certainly like to feel I'm a better player than three titles, but it is what it is.
I regret not being able to mature quicker.
All of a sudden, it wasn't quite good enough to make the fourth round of a Grand Slam, when my whole life before that it was an incredible achievement and something that I had only done a couple of times.
I've got an incredible family, I've been blessed to play a game for a living, and even more than that, I've been blessed to have the ability to play it and the ability to play two sports at the same time. There's not many people that are able to do that, so yeah, I feel very lucky.
I had a really great career. I have won over 300 matches, won a bunch of tournaments, almost won a bunch of big tournaments, beaten a lot of good players and done more things than I ever could have imagined.
I put my head on my pillow now, knowing that in the later stages in my career, from 2010 on, I did everything I possibly could do to be as good as I could possibly be, I know it sounds really cheesy but it was actually true.
There is no tournament to win for mental health. There are no quarterfinals, or semifinals, or finals.
It's hard to play somebody who is wounded.
Sports end in a result. And life keeps going. Mine, I hope, is just getting started.
I always wanted to be a professional athlete and really did not necessarily care which sport.
I would not complain very much if I didn't feel well. I'd fake it on the court, not show that side of it.
I was 21 when I made the the finals of Cincinnati and finished 20 in the world, and thought it was going to come pretty easy.
With my anxiety, I essentially need to be around someone at all times.
The truth is you want stress in your life. You don't want an actual anxiety-free life. What would the fun be there?
Mental health is not a very easy thing to talk about in sports. It's not perceived as very masculine.
We're so trained to be 'mentally tough,' in sports.
We're trained from a very young age not to show weakness. And I was very good at that throughout my career.
I learned that I had the willpower and ability to reshape my body and my lifestyle.
There are certain circumstances where I feel a little unlucky or why did this happen to me but I'm sort of transitioning from that and finding ways that I can learn from it and help with it.
I was at the bottom, man. I was in a deep, deep place. It wasn't like I needed a little bit of medication and a couple of therapy sessions, and then we're back.
A lot of it is maturity and getting older. You know, sort of getting married and realizing you're not out there for yourself anymore.
Everyone has got demons and stuff they're dealing with.