Anxiety can lead you to fixate on a problem that does not in real life exist. But in one way, my fears were realised, as throughout the season that I represented UCD in the league, I was plagued with rugby injuries. Concussions, torn hamstrings, broken fingers. I felt like a well-used punching bag. “Why me?” I would ask no one in particular, and then I created this simpering “Why me?” environment. When I lay about the apartment recovering from injuries, Tom Waits muttering on the stereo, those awful American chat shows flashing on the TV, I cultivated a deeply negative pit of existence, which I dove into, inviting it to cover me over.
Gradually, the sport I once loved, and needed, had become an object of hatred and resentment. It would be some time before I recognised any connection between my mental condition and my propensity for injury – how the physical and the mental are not in fact separate parts of the self that orbit around each other, but deeply connected.
During the summer of 2003, Leinster hired a new head coach in Gary Ella. It offered a slight glimmer of hope, a new leaf, a fresh start in that he might not have any preconceptions of me as a player [Breslin was playing for the Leinster senior squad at the time].
Since the quad tear, I had not sprinted all out. Anyone who has experienced a bad muscle tear will tell you that psychologically, it’s hard to regain the confidence to sprint all out. I spent the entire pre-season under Gary barely out of second gear, but he still selected me for one of our early Celtic League ties in September, away to the Welsh provincial side Celtic Warriors.
Leo Cullen, a player I unreservedly respect, and no doubt one of the best professionals this country ever produced, was captain that day, and I remember him roaring at me to sprint for the kick-offs, but I still felt that dull pain in my thigh as if it were about to snap. The look of disappointment on his face absolutely killed me. Here was one of my heroes on the pitch, and I was letting him and the rest of the team down. If I were fully fit I would run through a brick wall for my team, but I just didn’t have it in my body and it would play through my head all week after games.
I was paranoid that the squad were pissed off with my below-par performances and I would dread arriving into the training grounds. I have become very aware of the negative effects of toxic environments on mental health, and this was as toxic as they came.
But I didn’t have this awareness when I was 21 and determined to be a sportsman. Two weeks after the game in Wales, we were hosting Edinburgh on our home ground in Donnybrook. I knew I had to deliver a performance of some sort, so I put myself under intense pressure leading up to the game.
I was being paid to play this sport. In the squads and academies underneath us, there were always two or three players waiting to get into my boots and inherit my contract. I could not be perceived as weak and made to wear that label. As soon as I dropped the ball, figuratively speaking, I was gone. All week I felt a heavy weight on my chest as I fought for breath. That incessant nauseated feeling deep in the core of my stomach lingered throughout the days. These are the warning shots, and I knew what was coming next.
The Wednesday before the match I sat on my bed in my apartment wanting to tear the skin off my face. My entire body felt painfully itchy, and my thoughts became like poison as they imploded in my head, loud voices of negativity. I was scraping the skin on my head so much that I was drawing blood. I kept thinking, How am I going to walk out on a pitch in only two days in front of thousands of people to play a rugby match in this state? I would have rather been injured – horrific as it was, it was nothing to the mental torture of knowing that in the eyes of others you are fit to play, but feeling completely unable.
A horrible notion came to me and I eyed the confines of my bedroom. I convinced myself that I could get around the problem if I knocked myself out. I would tell the coaches I fell, and be dropped from the team. Like years before, when my urge to self-destruction had led me to break my own arm, I found myself in the grip of a similar compulsion. It was my way out – the only way, I rationally convinced myself. So I began head-butting hard the solid concrete wall in my bedroom. A dull ache vibrated down my neck and I started feeling dizzy. There was that sense of release, too. I am not sure how many times I hit the wall, or what made me decide to stop, but I do know I narrowly avoided knocking myself out. A grazed lump came up immediately.
That night I knew beyond any doubt that I could no longer function as a professional rugby player. I wondered if I would be able to function at all. I felt weirdly relaxed, with either a touch of concussion or that false and temporary relief associated with self-harm. I decided that things simply could not get any worse. I rang UCD’s online counselling service, and a young girl answered. I told her that I was self-harming, and let go of as much of my story as I could manage. It was a relief to offload these words on to someone else’s shoulders. I fell asleep still talking to this kind girl and woke up the next morning with the phone still beside my ear, and a pulsing headache.
Somehow, I played the match, and offered a reasonable account of my ability, but it was cold comfort. My career was over; every cell of my body knew it.
I rang my mother and told her that I thought I needed to retire when the season was finished. She had witnessed first hand the devastating effects injury was having on my mental and emotional health, even though we had never discussed it openly together.
I told Mum that it was making me “too upset and sad”, as usual tarting up my language lest she think there was something deeper wrong with me. I think she was relieved when I told her.
“What will I say to Dad?” I asked, and she immediately said, “Dad will fully understand.” And he did. I’ll never forget how he dealt with it. He was incredible. This man, a soldier with the Irish Army, who had the heartache of leaving his family for years on end, understood what mattered in life, and of course appreciated that I could not do this any more.
- This is an extract from Me and My Mate Jeffrey by Niall Breslin, published by Hachette Books Ireland. He will be signing books at Eason on O’Connell Street, Dublin, on Saturday, September 5th
