Sydel Curry-Lee Explains Her Past Concussions And How It's Affected Her Health

Mental health advocate and social media influencer Sydel Curry-Lee has mentioned her multiple concussions in past discussions, but wanted to catch people up who had questions.

She took to Instagram Stories to explain how and when she experienced multiple concussions and how it's affected her life since.

After thanking her followers for their continued interactions and giving her some things to discuss, she explained that she doesn't exactly know what to talk about some days.

"Some days I'm just like so caught up in mom life I don't think about myself or like talk about myself," she said.

"I don't even know what to talk about on social media anymore because I think it's something I have to work on, but so much of my life, of me, is just like so minuscule to like everything else that's going on in my life and other people or things that are happening in my life. And I just don't think I'm important. I seriously don't think that I am important enough or anything just to like talk about me how I used to talk about my life and myself."

As a content creator, talking about your life is necessary, she explained, and then she segued into talking about her previous concussions. Curry-Lee said she had five concussions while playing volleyball. She said she got hit in the head four times and her head hit the ground before her body did once.

"Back in 2017, I did go see a neurologist who specializes in CTE and concussions. He was working with a football team at UNC at Chapel Hill," she said. "They did a bunch of tests, put a bunch of things on my head, wires, I spoke to him about my mental health issues, my symptoms, lack of sleep, migraines, all of that."

She said that he didn't diagnose her with CTE because he didn't think it was bad enough but did say that the concussions did contribute to her mental health decline and the physical symptoms she was dealing with.

"When I come on here and talk about my mental health, and people try to invalidate me because of what they see," she said. "I guess they don't know that getting hit in the head multiple times with deep impact did something."

Curry-Lee shares much of her life on social media, the ups and the downs. Curry-Lee, currently pregnant with her second child with husband NBA star Damion Lee of the Phoenix Suns, is mom to son Daxon, 16 months, and has shared her mental health struggles as well as her fertility journey with both pregnancies.

In a January Instagram video, Curry-Lee talked about oversharing, dealing with judgement and criticism and anxiety.

She said that her oversharing is how and why she began sharing her mental health journey, and as a social media content creator, she wanted to put meaning behind it.

"I wanted to bring light to mental health, talk about my mental health and also talk about ways that we can change the stigma around it," she said. "And my contribution to try to change the stigma around mental health is sharing my own experiences."

When she began sharing her journey, she started a blog in 2017 in the hopes of not only helping herself but helping other people. She needed someone to help her not feel alone going through her journey, and she knew other people needed the same.