Garrick shared her own experience as a starter on USC’s Women’s Volleyball team. Discussing not only her extreme dedication to the sport and balancing sports with academics, the California native began to go into depth about how her anxiety became her number one enemy, or as she described, the “hidden opponent”. Garrick’s speech was impactful, inspiring and most of all, relatable. Though the College is a Division III institution, anxiety is unfortunately of no insignificance to the Wellesley Blue. As a member of the Track and Field team, I was very familiar with the anxiety and fear that Garrick discussed. 

Garrick talked about how her performance anxiety viciously destroyed her love for her sport. A perfectionist at heart, when posed with the question of whether or not this anxiety could potentially be a strength, she paused, responding that anxiety is neither a strength nor a weakness, but rather it is both. She recognized the salience of this question and claimed to have been there herself. After her talk, the athletes were able to meet her and ask her all sorts of questions. Also the owner of popular TikTok and Instagram pages, many of the audience members recognized her from her influential online presence. 

When it was finally my turn to have a word with Garrick, I had several questions for her. I posed Garrick with a series of both serious and silly questions out of an attempt to both connect with the speaker on a surface level as well as hear her opinions regarding more serious matters. 

When asked how she deals with collegiate pressure, Garrick responded, “Honestly, you just have to stop setting expectations for everything, when I stopped setting expectations for everything, I felt this weight just lift off my shoulders. Question the norm, you can’t always optimize out of everything.”

I then asked where the line is between mental toughness and deterioration. She replied by discussing how she has come to recognize her state of being and her peak performance, describing improving her mental health by “doing reps” and in order to sustain and create good mental health, you must train your mind and then your body. 

My final question was about how one is supposed to move on from past mistakes. Garrick smiled and said, “Prepare to make mistakes.”

After we had our deeper conversation, I asked her how she liked Wellesley, her favorite Gatorade flavor, a good pump-up song, and how her partner, Max, supports her. She responded with her experience at Armelinas in Boston in which she had excellent carbonara. Her favorite Gatorade flavor is light blue, or dark purple depending on the day, and her favorite song to get hyped to is “Levels” by the late Avicii. 

Garrick provided the Wellesley Blue with advice, anecdotes and a friendly face that said “I’ve struggled too.” The Jewett auditorium was filled with hopeful smiles and intrigue as they saw a former student athlete with similar fears persevere and stand before them. We loved having Victoria Garrick, and we hope to see her again soon.

With this incredible movement, there were also incredible consequences for users’ mental health, body image and eating disorders. What began as an opportunity to share, like and create content as a form of entertainment in a state of mass isolation, quickly turned into a competition for beauty, productivity and general social acceptance in a community of strangers. 

Women in sports have had a unique struggle with quarantine, since their off-season never really came back on again, and the increase of social media consumption did not aid their experiences with mental health and body image. As an athlete myself, I expect my body to change and look different when I am in and out of season. I require different pant sizes, bra sizes and even shirts during my peak in both winter and spring seasons for track and field. While I expected these changes, I did not anticipate the abrupt ending of my track season that happened in March of 2020. 

Like many athletes, I have struggled with body image for most of my life. I began in the competitive world of ballet, then transitioned to track and field, where specific physiques are desired over others. When the world was launched into quarantine last year, I had come right off of my winter track season with bulging muscles and confidence in my body. But over time, my muscles slowly began to deteriorate. To fill my time, I, like many others, decided to download TikTok, where day in and day out I consumed video after video, seeing other, often smaller, or “more in shape” girls all over the app. Influencers like the D’Amelio sisters, Emma Chamberlain, Olivia Rodrigo and so many others involuntarily launched a skinny revolution that had a nasty impact on thousands, if not millions, of women and girls who were left feeling not only isolated from the pandemic, but that now, their beauty was contingent on their size. 

In the midst of this, there was also positivity surrounding the topic of promoting health and body image. One of the most well known influencers who has talked about her struggle with body image and social media is former USC volleyball player Victoria Garrick. Garrick has made countless TikToks and Instagram posts, and has even given a TED Talk exposing the facade created by fitness influencers and models, promoting an unhealthy and unattainable lifestyle filled with thigh gaps, six packs and skinny arms. While others’ and Garrick’s content is often comforting, this movement was significantly less popular than “What I Eat In A Day” videos, coupled with unprofessional dieting and weight loss advice. 

The constant social media consumption that took place in the early days of quarantine has maintained a very strong presence even a year later. Women in sports often struggle with body image and societal standards due to the fact that the women portrayed in the media do not have the bodies of athletes, but rather the bodies of people with personal trainers, diets specifically catered to them, and honestly, drugs. Female athletes as a collective demographic struggle with body image and eating disorders because of the feminine expectation of a woman’s body coupled with the necessity of performing in tiring competition that demands peak physical strength and endurance. 

My body has gotten me through 20 years. In those 20 years, it managed to survive 14 years of ballet, roughly nine track seasons and a global pandemic. While we may have seen our levels of activity take a negative decline as athletes over the course of the pandemic, that does not mean our confidence in both ourselves, our bodies and our abilities has to as well.