The story of,
This is the story of one Olivia Jenks. Jenks is currently race age 19, and has been racing for 10 years now. Jenks is racing for Arizona State University Tri Team, and before she aged out she raced for Z3. Jenks faces depression, anxiety, and PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) after the loss of her twin brother in a cycling accident when they were 14. This is her story.
“My main mental health issues have been mood disorders and anxiety disorders,” Jenks said. “I've had both depression and other related disorders. But all depressive symptoms. And I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety, and PTSD, and I’m currently having symptoms of OCD, but it's more just the obsessions.”
Jenks’ mental adversaries started at a young age and were interconnected with her triathlon life.
“When I was 14, my twin brother [Tim] died in a car-on-bike crash,” Jenks said. “It was our first time ever drafting, and I was with a new group of people, and it was just really unfortunate; it was an accident. [I don’t] blame anyone for it. But that's when the PTSD started. Depression kind of came, maybe half a year later. The PTSD evolved into some of the more anxiety-based disorders since then.”
Many people know PTSD is most commonly related to military veterans, but it can still affect anyone that faced a trauma.
“It basically involves persistent nightmares,” Jenks said. They “might be about the event that happened, about the trauma, or they might be just very disturbing. And I would have flashbacks, almost every day for a while. And almost anything can trigger it at first, the loud noise of a door closing, any kind of emergency vehicle going by, sometimes even just someone mentioning his name, or like a certain smell could trigger a flashback.”
It's not unusual for the flashbacks experienced by people with PTSD to be triggered by things going on around them.
“What would happen is I would see events from that day,” Jenks said. “it would be like, right in front of me. I'd see the car hitting him, or I'd see, pictures of him on the road in my mind. But like, obviously, no one else knows that that's going on at the same time.”
Jenks’ family got lots of support from her community after the loss of her brother, including the triathlon community.
“I mean, dealing with the trauma; dealing with the grief is different from depression,” Jenks said. “I was also, you know, an adolescent. I was transitioning from middle school to high school and trying to figure out my identity, and then all of a sudden, I lose half of it. Cuz [sic], I mean, Tim and I did everything together, we're twins, even though we're different people, we were still with each other almost every single minute of every single day, whether we wanted to be or not.”
After months, people seemed to move on from the accident but Jenks was still stuck in the moment it happened.
“Anytime you have a trauma you go see a specialist,” Jenks said. “Like, this is my twin brother, we're talking about. I didn't have a choice, I needed to go see a therapist. We actually didn't do any medication, until maybe two years ago, when I had some more scary depressive symptoms, and was thinking about self-harm. And that's kind of when we decided like, okay,
maybe a medication will help.”
Although the accident was related to triathlon, the sport was still a part of her. A part that she couldn’t lose.
“But the thing is if I didn't have triathlon, like that would be another part of my identity that I lost,” Jenks said. “And the sport is like, it's an outlet for me. If I am triggered one day, I know that I have basically four sports to choose from to get my anger out. I can go and swim, I can go and bike, I can run. Or I can go like lift, or throw balls against the wall and just get really mad or, like, calm myself down in the pool, or just go kick ass in a run and kind of forget about what happened.”
Jenks’ mental health would’ve kept rolling downhill if she didn’t have this kind of outlet. She did this with her brother, but now she does it for him.
“As far as depression and anxiety goes, it is prevalent in triathlon, but it's also prevalent everywhere else,” Jenks said. “It's something that needs to be talked about. More people need to get help for, you know, any number of reasons. Even if you're just having like, a pre-race anxiety, you can go see sports therapists, a sports psychologist, and get help, and it'll really help
enhance your performance. I really think that, you know, almost anyone can benefit from seeing a therapist and just talking about what's going on in their lives.”
Jenks has found meaning in what has come from her trauma by helping others.
“From my trauma, some good has come,” Jenks said. “We have this great scholarship, we give to eighth-grader in our community every year, who are passionate about what they do. I started a mental health club at my high school to help raise awareness surrounding mental health. I personally have been able to get in contact with so many different people that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to. Even though this horrible thing happened to me, I would just say it’s important that we all keep pushing on and we all keep talking about it and like, you don't need to feel bad for me. I've learned how to live with it. And I think it's important to be able to take what happened to me and, and try to help others.”
Now, Jenks and her family have created The Tim Foundation, a non-profit organization that gives scholarships to eighth-graders in their community, helping them pursue their extracurricular activities. Through her grief and trauma, she has found a way to help others: Something to push her forward, especially when the more depressive side of her grief settles in.
And through her love of triathlon, she has found happiness again.
Yours truly,
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