“I will break the bubble and put an end to the silence”, announced Ricky Rubio (el Masnou, 1990) in the solitude of the street, but accompanied by his friends in the audience. With his father, Esteve, and his sister Laia on one side, his closest friends on the other and Barça’s main team in the center. Basketball was the least important part of the presentation as a new Barcelona player. Dressed casually in jeans, a gray jumper and leggings, the flamboyant signing took the microphone and let loose. “When you see yourself reflected in someone, you don’t feel so alone; I hope that speaking so openly about my mental health problems will help more people,” he anticipated.
The Masnou defender has been training under Roger Grimau for almost a month and has been officially linked to Barça for three weeks, although the official presentation was delayed until yesterday, after reappearing with the Spanish national team last week past the FIBA ??competition periods. But not even his most recent debut as a Barcelona player overshadowed the slow, sincere and, at times, striking speech that Ricky Rubio gave. “I developed chronic stress and it deregulated my body. I never labeled it as such, like depression or an anxiety disorder, I had symptoms of mental health issues and the only way to deal with them was to understand why I had gotten to this point. And it was due to two factors, one internal and one external”, he explained with a serious face, but conveying peace and tranquility.
“The intern is because of my way of thinking, that things had to be one way and now I see that there is another way. I still don’t fully believe it, but the psychologist told me to trust it, that there are many ways to get to Rome – she explained. The external was basketball, the competition. The player had eaten the person and I didn’t know who he was, it was a very complicated moment and I was very scared. I needed to get away from everything, and that’s why I came home.”
At two points in the speech, Rubio uttered the word fear. “Fear is relative and is sometimes confused with nerves, which are not the same thing. In the end what happened to me was that there was nothing that seemed right to me, but I have learned to put things into perspective and not to go to extremes. There are gray ones and I’m learning to draw them,” he revealed.
Everything exploded at the beginning of August, when he was concentrating on Spain for the World Cup and decided to go to Scariolo’s office to inform him of his decision to temporarily leave basketball. “Then I felt like the most cowardly person in the world, I didn’t understand how, after so many years, I wasn’t able to overcome one more problem. But now, with perspective, I think I was very brave, because the problem was bigger than basketball and I thought about myself”, he emphasized.
Ricky, who defined the recovery process as “climbing the Dragon Khan”, explained: “Since August and for three or four months, every day I got up, basketball was over for me. The person was not there, I had to discover him and I have been working on him. I had always built myself from the outside in, and now I have done the reverse process. It’s very hard, but also very rewarding.”
From the time he left basketball and began to treat himself until he returned to training at the Palau, six months passed. “They told me that I went fast, but for me it took forever, I was done with basketball. It has been a stage of respect and fear”, he admitted, at the same time referring to a walk in the mountains with Mar, his therapist, as the moment he saw himself with the strength to try again.
Before the event ended, Ricky tried to reach out with words to the people who suffer from something similar and also to his own: “If you work you can get out of the darkness we are in, you need to ask the professionals for help. And always a few kind words, phrases like ‘I’m here’ or a good hug help”.
