Forward: A Memoir

Strength is a full gamut. You’ve got to be strong from top to bottom, but you also have to raise your hand and say, “I’m feeling weak right now. I need some help.” There is true strength in being able to ask for help.

Here are just a few of my labels: tomboy, dyke, lesbian, butch, bitch, coward, failure, control freak, rebel, fraud. And a few more, on the flip side: phenom, inspiration, captain, champion, advocate. At a young age I learned that you own labels by defying them, and defy them by owning them. I know that the final word on me will be one that I choose. Seventy-seven

U.S. Soccer’s monetary figures are equally unsettling. In 2017, the women’s team is expected to generate $17 million in revenue compared to $9 million by the men, and yet the men’s salaries still dwarf the women’s across the board. For wins, the women’s team earns thirty-seven cents to every dollar earned by men. Players in the National Women’s Soccer League earn between $6,842 and $37,800, while members of Major League Soccer earn an average salary exceeding $200,000.

Because no matter who you are or what you’ve done with your life, you recognize the feeling I’ve described, that private, flailing terror that makes you wonder if you’re lost for good.

At a young age I learned that you own labels by defying them, and defy them by owning them. I know that the final word on me will be one that I choose.

With each passing day soccer carves a larger scoop of my life. I love it for what it gives me: praise, affection, and, above all, attention. When I'm on the field I don't have to plead to be noticed, either silently or aloud; it is a natural by-product of my talent. I loathe it for the same reason, terrified that soccer is the only worthwile thing about me, that stripping it from my identity might make me disappear. My future teammate and friend Mia Hamm will one day offer this advice: "Somewhere behind the athlete you've become and the hours of practice and the coaches who have pushed you is a little girl who fell in love with the game and never looked back... play for her." I am not, and never will be, that little girl. Already I know I'm incapable of falling in love with the game itself--only with the validation that comes from mastering it, from bending it to my will.

My self-loathing has been killing me.

Forgiveness is an act of self-love,” she says. “You’ve suffered enough. You owe it to yourself, dude.

It will happen so often, for so long, that it will become a joke to me and my teammates, yet a part of me will always find it hurtful and want people to pay better attention, to take the time to look. To see me.

Trapeze artists are so amazing in so many ways, she says, because they are grounded to one rung for a long time, and in order to get to the other rung they have to let go.

Your drinking is killing us. When you drink it feels like you're leaving me, like you don't want to be with me, like you want to be by yourself.

I think I'm in love with you in this moment

I'm the saddest person I have ever known

President Obama recently called me and my teammates "badass" and I feel entirely unworthy of the term... Five months ago at the World Cup final, my wife Sarah and I made international news with a celebration kiss, and now she isn't speaking to me. We'd renovated a beautiful, sprawling house tucked in the hills outside of Portland, Oregon, and I can't consider it home. I'm thirty-five years old and had planned on being pregnant by now. My body feels like a foreign object and I am desperate to escape my own mind.

I meditate with my mala beads and ask myself hard questions: "Can I accept responsability for the things that happened, the things I created? Can I accept responsability for the hurt I've caused? That's why people get divorced--because they can't deal with the sad feelings they created. And until you can get right and accept the fact that you've shattered somebody, that you've broken their heart in more ways than one, there's no way that you've ever going to be able to survive.

One of the like-minded, badass women I've been speaking to offers a metaphor that perfectly captures this moment in my life. We're talking about retirement and transitions, the challenges involved in letting go of the only work and life you've ever known. Trapeze artists are so amazing in so many ways, she says, because they are grounded to one rung for a long time, and in order to get to the other rung they have to let go. What makes them so brilliant and beautiful and courageous and strong is that they execute flips in the middle. The middle is their magic. And if you're brave enough to let go of that first rung, she concludes, you can create your own magic in the middle.

No one has ever spoken to me like that in my life, and I gratefully internalize every word. I'm tired of hearing about my talent and am desperate to know my flaws; I want to corner and confront them and coax them into improvement. I want to be better, if only because being better ensures more attention.