SHARING HIS EXPERIENCE – Motivational speaker Shea Emry, seen Wednesday in Whitehorse, retired from football last February.

Depression, anxiety are pervasive: ex-CFLer For Shea Emry, taking care of his mental health starts with physical fitness. By Amy Kenny on October 6, 2016

For Shea Emry, taking care of his mental health starts with physical fitness.

The former CFL linebacker, who was in Whitehorse to speak at a Wednesday evening event as part of Mental Health Week, said his days depend on a choice he makes each morning.

“Every day you get out of bed, you have one decision to make and you can go either way,” Emry told the Star as he sat at the Coast High Country Inn an hour before his 5 p.m. talk.

You can choose to attack the day, he said, or you can stay in bed.

Some days, Emry said, he doesn’t feel like “that next-level being, that happy person, that productive person that we all want to be every single day.”

Some days, he’d rather skip the gym, grab a coffee and take his time waking up.

But, he said, he knows that if he doesn’t get up and work out, everything will suffer – his creativity, his focus, the quality of his interactions with his family.

For the Whistler, B.C. resident, it’s a daily act of self-love that allows him to be present in his life.

It’s one of the things he touches on as a spokesperson for the Bell Let’s Talk campaign.

In that role, Emry speaks at roughly a dozen events a year, sharing his own struggles with depression.

In recent years, the two-time Grey Cup champion has been vocal about having been bullied as a kid growing up in B.C., and about the pressure he felt to conform to an idea of masculinity that didn’t align with who he was.

“I feel like I’m a man, and I fit into a whole bunch of different categories of masculinity, but I don’t fit into the tight framework of masculinity that I was sold as a young boy,” he said.

Going into professional sports only amplified that.

“It’s an alpha-male world when you get in there,” Emry said of his time in the CFL, first with the Montreal Alouettes, then with the Toronto Argonauts, then the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

Emry said the CFL differed from being on a high school or university sports team, where you have the same teammates for five years.

In pro sports, turnover is high, so you don’t often have the chance to build relationships with anyone.

Additionally, everyone is competing – for jobs, for positions, for salary. It’s generally accepted that you don’t show weakness, which means you don’t let on when you’re injured.

Injury though is what ultimately led Emry to retire in February of this year.

Over the course of his career, he sustained more than 10 concussions (one of which took him out of the 2011 season and sent him sliding back into the depression he’d known as a child).

It was difficult, he said, to walk away from what had always been his dream career.

But there was also a lot of emotional strife associated with walking onto the field and knowing what he was putting his brain through.

In the end, he said it was tough, but it was easy.

These days, in addition to working with Bell, Emry runs Wellmen – a men’s adventure club Emry had been thinking about for a while before it became a reality in 2014.

The Wellmen project aims to get men outside to both work with their hands and consider concepts of masculinity and mental wellness from different angles.

The mission, says the Wellmen website, “is to re-wild men with adventures for the soul.”

What that means in practical terms is this: participants of a Wellmen adventure might spend a weekend engaged in stereotypically masculine pursuits (think chopping wood, climbing mountains, and building fires), but within those activities, conversations open up about fears, what it means to be a man, fatherhood, gender equality, chivalry and more. Conversations go everywhere, said Emry.

“It’s definitely a purposeful, curated experience,” he said.

“For the sole reason of getting guys to open up their minds a little bit, open up their hearts a little bit and I guess just have a common experience with guys that is comfortable and fun.

“And a big reason why we do it is because we want guys to get outside, put their phones down and just sit around a bonfire and chop it up.”

In these situations, as with the talks Emry gives, Emry hopes the perception people have of him can help them talk about their own struggles.

People look at him, he says, and they see a stereotype of a man – a professional athlete who “has it all going on.”

In sharing with them that he doesn’t always have it under control, Emry hopes he’s doing something to normalize the idea that depression and anxiety can affect anyone.

“I have an experience and I’m talking about it and I’m willing to be vulnerable and real and that’s why I’m here,” he said. “That’s the value that I bring to people.

“Because when they see me talking about it, and where I’m at, they feel comfortable and safe potentially talking about it with me or with someone else.”

Emry is scheduled to speak tonight in Yellowknife, also as part of End the Stigma – Mental Health in the North.