BERKELEY, Mich. (WOOD) — There’s no doubt that Kate Nye is a woman of remarkable strength.
The Detroit-area native is an Olympic weightlifter, bound for this year’s Summer Games in Tokyo.
“Not to be cheesy, but I love weightlifting. I have an insane passion for it,” she said.
In competition, she lifts more than twice her weight above her head.
But that’s only a small measure of her true strength.
Nye lives her life out loud, posting to Instagram each day showing her workouts, regular moments and insights into her quest to become an Olympian. She also posts deeply personal content, including about her struggles with mental health.
Sometimes, she said, she was so depressed didn’t even want to compete.
“I was undiagnosed for so long and I was suffering for so long not knowing what was wrong with me,” she said.
Her husband Noah encouraged her to get some help after a difficult meet.
Through therapy, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was relieved to know what the problem was, but also said she immediately bore the weight of stigma.
“I struggle a lot because depression and anxiety are two big ones people talk about. But when it comes to bipolar disorder, I still thought immediately, ‘I’m crazy,'” she recalled.
Not so, she learned.
With the right medication, she was her old self again.
At the World Weightlifting Championships in Thailand in September, she swept the gold in her weight class and set three junior world records. The performance put her on deck for the Olympic team.
It also put her in a position reach out to those who were experiencing what she was before she got help.
“If someone else is struggling with that and doesn’t know what wrong with them, and wants to get better but they don’t know how, maybe I can be the person to make it click in their head that maybe they should go see someone, or talk to a therapist or a family member just to get it off their chest,” she said. “That was a really big deal for me.”
