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Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/1275200
I watched your documentary The Weight of Gold, and you really go deep into the emotional effects of life as an Olympian. The public may watch this film and not understand how somebody who has achieved so much can feel such profound unhappiness, because our society loves to equate success with happiness. Michael Phelps: The hardest thing for me is when friends of mine say something like that to me. My response is I am a human being. I have these feelings just like other people do. People seem surprised when I say that. Speaking for myself, for most of my life, I felt like I was not a human being, so until I was able to look at myself in the mirror and see that I was a person and not just a swimmer, that's when I started realizing what I was going through, emotionally, and what I was living with and struggling with. Is it safe to say that when you devote your entire life entirely to a single pursuit, you don't get to know yourself or have the chance to develop that emotional intelligence needed to cope with disappointments or problems as they come up? MP: It's difficult to start a journey at such a young age when you miss so much of your developmental stages. I was 15 and thrown into competing, a world where I was competing with 30-year-old men and expected not to be a 15-year-old kid, but a grown-up. At some point, I just got numb by it all. You train yourself to not pay attention to how you feel, and before too long, you are blindsided by it all. And if you do show emotions, you are showing your competitors weakness. I could not show that part of myself until the last two years of my career when I got to the point where I really didn't care what people thought about me. It was at that point where I opened up and decided to talk about the struggles I had been going through. Can you tell me what your highest moment was? What was your absolute zenith moment in your life when you just felt absolutely high and on top of the world? MP: It had to have been in 2008, after winning 8 gold medals. Achieving that singular goal of doing something no one else has done before. That was the highest point right there. By the way, you are in my refrigerator right now. You're on a milk carton (Michael is a brand ambassador for Silk plant- based beverages), but for something good. Not because you're missing. [Laughs.] MP: I love it! [Laughs.] Can you tell me what the lowest moment of your life was, where you knew you were in trouble? MP: In 2014, get ting a second DUI, and not wanting to be alive. Not wanting to be alive, why? MP: Just the feeling of letting so many people down. Leading up to that point I was trying to call out for help, and I did not really know how to call out for help at that time. That was the bottom of my bottom. I was just basically on an elevator headed straight down. Who rallied around you at your lowest moment? MP: Leading up to that rock-bottom moment I didn't have a single person, because I was pushing everybody away and at that point, it was the people who cared about me the most that I was pushing away. That would be a handful of friends and family. I remember reading about the drugs and the DUIs in the news and I think as the reading or viewing public, we are all, myself included, guilty of forgetting we are consuming news about a human being. You read about someone who has it all and does something stupid and it makes no sense. The reason it makes no sense is because you don't really know that person or what their day-to-day life is about. It is probably isolating for you, being that person, in the public eye that people see as infallible. Is that why you ended up self-medicating, do you think? MP: It is probably part of the reason I did that. I was trying to escape and numb myself, and I was trying to get away from everybody. I think some of the things I did were really my cries for help, and they were looked passed. But again, I really didn't know how to ask for help, and I didn't want to be rejected if somebody couldn't or wouldn't help me. After discovering that a lot of my struggles were based in my childhood and based in my parents splitting when I was very young, not really growing up with my dad, I was able to try to tackle that part of things. I still speak with my dad from time to time, but that was a non-existent relationship for so long. We do speak now, but it's on my terms. Once I dealt with all of that and I got through that, it just kind of got easier. Do you think the media understands the gravity of their responsibility when they are covering people in the public eye, and how it could potentially impact their mental health? MP: I think, like you said, that's a difficult thing for everybody to see, right? Because we never really understand what people are personally going through. So, I would say it's a general statement that could be applied across the board and just with journalists. How have your wife and children contributed to your healing process? MP: My wife has been the biggest and most influential person. She has been there for me through some of my struggles. Being together during this quarantine, with so many unknowns for everybody, it's been some more difficult times, and my wife and I have probably pressed each other's buttons, but not on purpose. [Laughs.] But we have been fortunate enough to grow and learn together, and that is something I am forever grateful for. I was actually afraid as hell of going through this quarantine process and some of our conversations that have come up,