My Personal Story
While growing up into the soccer world has brought many opportunities into my life, it also has exposed me to a much sinister side of sports. The obsession with being perfect and doing whatever it takes to achieve this. What I mean by this is you're constantly thinking this illusion of perfectness and when you don't achieve this, which is never because nobody is perfect, you begin to take it out on yourself. Sometimes you don't even realize it but I started to realize it when I was about 12 years old. It all started when I had one of the worse coaches I had ever had in my life. The coach would constantly pick on me, tell me I wasn't good enough and that I will never make it with a body like that. My whole life I have never been a "big" person, but his comment had stuck with me to this day. I became obsessed with the idea that if I change my body, maybe I had a chance to make it. I started to think the coach was right when I started to play for the U.S. youth national teams a few months later. Maybe they had all noticed I lost weight and now they want me on their team. This dilusion ruined me. Since I was 12, all I could think about was this "perfectness" surrounded by what i envisioned as success, which was a body that could do all of the things I needed it to do and didn't need the fuel to do so. To this day I struggle with eating normally becasue I oftentimes link it to my success ever since that day when I was 12 years old.
It was not only my perception of body image that was destroyed over the years but it was also the constant verbal and physical abuse I had endured throughout the years. In and out of mulitple national teams, from entirely different countries allowed me to have a perception of the women's sports world. As a women soccer player, we were never good enough in the eyes of the coaches, our fans, even sometimes our own families. For coaches, espically when representing El Salvador, they didn't care about our bodies, about our mental well-being, about the comments they yelled to us on a daily basis. To them, it was in through one ear and out the other. There is no fifa regulation or rule that could stop a women-hating man to be apart of a coaching staff for a women's team. Again, since I was 12, I had heard constant comments saying I was never good enough, having objects like soccer balls, cones, even medals thrown at me, I have had coaches make me run until I puke for not looking "fit enough" on that day. I have had coaches take me out of the game and wait unitl everyone left the field to make me practice for hours longer beacsue "I wasn't doing anything in the game anyways". All of these comments had stuck with me throughout my whole life fueling this idea of perfectness and when this wasn't achieved I oftentimes would think to myself I was never enough for anyone not even me.
This dangerous mindset was the only thing that has been fueling me for years. Yes I love the game, yes I can't imagine my life without it, however I don't remember a time when I actually was free of these thoughts playing freely and having actual fun. The enourmous amounts of pressure I felt on my shoulders at all times of the day deterred me from being a kid. This mindset in a way stole my childhood from me. I was and still am so focused on my dream in making it that nothing else was on my mind. The overtraining, the restricting of food, pushing away family and friends, because it's all I have ever known. And if I'm quite honest, sometimes I wonder if it's all I will ever know. Sometimes I dream of one day where I wake up and have breakfast and not have to worry about the pressure of playing where I could eat like a normal person and actually rest surrounded by the people I love and have a relatively normal life. Sometiems I feel bad about thinking this way. I feel bad because I am very lucky to be blessed with the opportunities I have gotten in my life playing soccer. The game has brought me lifelong friendships, memories that I will never forget, and a feeling that nothing else in my life will ever bring to me. But, sometimes I can't help but wonder if I will ever have a healthy relationship with myself, where I am not obessed with the illusion of being perfect. Maybe one day I will not have to feel this way.