I don't really know how to start this but, today is my 14h bday and 12 years ago when I was 2 I started the sport of gymnastics, up until a year and a half ago it was going really well for me, I was going to lots of comps, getting loads of new skills and just overly enjoying it. When I was about 7 I had really bad severs disease ( pain in your Achilles' tendon) so I've always had pretty bad ankles and it sorta runs in the family 😹. In June of 2015 I sprained my ankle at gym a few weeks out of a big competition, that healed and I went back into everything. About 2 weeks after I got of crutches I tripped at school and really badly sprained my other ankle. I was on crutches for over 1 month. I was devastated I was so close to an even bigger completion that I had just qualified for. After 2 months of physio appointments I went back into general gym or recreational gym as some of you might know it depending on where your from. Being put back so much I was weaker, less flexible and all these other things hat are gymnasts worst nightmares. Although my ankle was healed, it would still always hurt, no one could figure why this was I saw doctor after doctor and had X-ray after MRI after X-ray and finally they all came to the conclusion of nerve pain. I distinctly remember my physio saying it's a pain that would make most adults cry. From here everything went down hill. I was recommended to a sports injury speacialist who sent me to pain specialist who dosed me up on medications. I couldn't bear to think about gym let alone go again, but I kept persisting I really loved this sport it's all I wanted to do. Every week my medication would go up and do nothing. I would start sitting out from sport in school and start being called the crippled friend. All of this really impacted on me and I started becoming depressed, slowly but surely what started of as a snowball became an avalanche. I would come home from school and lie on my bed and cry. But I still someone went to gym, I would watch my old gym friends doing tricks I used to be able to. Depression was slowly eating away at me , the constant pain in my foot was not getting any better and the one thing I loved most in the world was slipping away from me. The last gymnastics class I did was a trampolining class where I jumped in to the foam pit and you guessed it sprained my ankle, after this I couldn't go back , I couldn't face my old squad members and my old coach. I felt empty. It was all I could remember and what I had being doing for the majority of my life. There wasn't a night where I wouldn't cry myself to sleep. Let's skip to the current day my 14th bday. Today my brother who is also a gymnast went the comp I never had to go to and as jelaous as I am I am proud of him. I still sit out from sport and watch my friends run around. The pain in my ankle is constant 24/7 it doesn't go away, in fact it's getting worse. Am I happy? No. Do you care? No. I don't expect you to. But some of you will say 'Emily it's just a sport' and if that's what you think good on ya, but it wasn't just a sport for me , it's my second home , my whole family is involved and it was always my thing. I still feel miserable all the time when someone says to me I finally got my back tuck or my double front flip or when I see my old friends post a photo of them at a comp. But honestly I don't care anymore , the only reason I wanted my foot to stop hurting was so I could go back to gym, but now that's there is little to no chance of me getting back to the level I was at. There is a lot more I could add to this like how no one truly can understand what it's like to have Chronic pain , or how easy it is to put on a fake smile and how hard it is to say your fine when someone asks if your okay. I could tell what my parents think or how hard it is not to burst into tears sometimes. But this is long enough already and I don't really know why I'm gonna post this,, so yeah.

- Emily

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