Bulls forward DeRozan opens up about his father’s death and his mental health originally appeared on nbc sports chicago
DeMar DeRozan is a long-time advocate for mental health promotion.
He has admitted his struggles before and even watched it during his free agency period in the summer of 2021 when he said he did not get out of bed for four days.
However, there are times when even the best athletes in the world bring themselves down, including Bulls Go ahead, DeRozan. But he has a way of making sense of it and provides insightful guidance on how he handles difficult situations.
“Man, you know, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have days where, you know, it got extremely heavy.” DeRozan said on The Draymond Green Show. “You know, you just shut down and take a moment to regroup. My favorite saying was always: ‘Make a bad thing that happened make sense in the future.’ Whatever it is. That’s all I used to tell myself. Let me make this negative make sense in the future. And I always told myself whenever I got down, whenever I felt a certain way. being a better son, being a better father, being a better friend, being a better basketball player… It was always trying to find different elements to try to be better, to make sense of the negative things that I am going through. “
One of the times DeRozan experienced depression was after losing his father, who died of various illnesses in February 2021. DeRozan got a tattoo of his father on his left shoulder that is noticeable while playing on the court.
DeRozan credits his father for much of his success in the NBA. He showed up at every practice and every game to help DeMar succeed. He claims that he was the only man he “feared”.
“I think when I lost my father, it opened the door for me to accept being, in a sense, vulnerable,” DeRozan said. “Vulnerable, accepting life in a different light because you start to realize, you know the saying ‘Nothing is promised’ but you have a different sense of it. When something of that magnitude hit you. He was the only man I feared. When I say fear, it was never meant negatively. But it was always, ‘I don’t want to let you down.'”
DeRozan had a close bond with his father. One of the anecdotes he shared was about his father putting him in a dark closet. DeMar “kicked and screamed,” but his father never let him out.
It wasn’t until his father put him in there one day that he stopped begging to be let out. It was then that he realized that he was no longer afraid of the dark. Before stumbling upon the term, DeRozan meant that he experienced systematic desensitization. It’s when you experience situations that cause you so much anxiety that you get used to it.
To that, DeRozan tattooed Bane’s quote: “Oh, you think the dark is your ally. But you simply adopted the dark; I was born into it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was a man. By then I wasn’t more than blindness for me”.
Without his father, DeRozan will never be the same as he was before. But he believes that he has grown from it and accepts that his pain is one of the beautiful things in life.
“Exactly what you said when I lost my dad, I was lost for a while,” DeRozan said. “That’s crazy what you said because I haven’t had a conversation with someone who put it in the same terms that you just put it in. You hit him in the head. Like, you know, I got into a lot of s- -t where if he were here, I never would have gotten into.”
