It started with an offer for a car ride. “Would be happy to carpool to Frisco,” read the message. The United States women’s national soccer team would be playing New Zealand in Frisco, Texas in February of 2012. I was flying in from Boston and didn’t know anybody in person, though there were vague plans to meet some internet friends who I’d met talking about women’s soccer— a mountainous achievement for someone who was once so shy she sat in a very small room in literal and awkward silence for nearly 30 minutes with one other stranger rather than make an introduction. But through the need to share the intense emotions brought on by the game, first with the Boston Breakers, then the national team, I had slowly been feeling my way out of my shell. This faceless person offering me a ride through a DM was one of those internet friends, someone who lived across the country but would be in Texas for the game.
I didn’t feel nervous or all that unsafe; the women’s soccer community is full of this kind of informal networking. I’m casually acquainted with other fans all over the country, and consider myself can-I-sleep-on-your-couch friends with people from Washington, D.C. to Seattle. I even gave a speech at the wedding of a friend I met through our commiseration over the Breakers. I found all these people through soccer over years of WNT and NWSL games, and though in 2012 I was still very much shy about making new friends online or otherwise, Gabby from Portland was one of several people I was starting to get comfortable with.
As I lurked around the car rental counter at DFW, my eyes passed over a redhead who was talking to one of the service representatives. After a few more passes, the penny dropped and I went over and asked if she was Gabby. She was, and I kept it to myself that for some reason I had thought she would be taller. In my head, everyone is approximately 5'6" until proven otherwise. I don’t remember much else about that trip, except that day of game the temp dropped suddenly and precipitously and it was so cold my leather jacket might as well have been paper. Gab lent me her hat, which might have been the only thing that got me through it without hypothermia, and she somehow stayed at life-sustaining temperatures through the judicious application of beer. But the groundwork had been laid for a real friendship, and even after we left Texas, we continued to correspond online and just chat about soccer in general.
We met up again for another WNT game in 2014, once again in Frisco. By now we were pretty solid friends, at least for people who mainly talked about soccer online, and we had joked about recording a podcast together. So the night before the game, we sat in the corner of a dimly-lit bar and worked our way through a list of topics and Gab polished it up on her laptop and there it was, our first podcast. I thought at the time it would be a one-off, or something we did a few more times but eventually knocked off as we lost interest. Four years later, we’ve recorded over 100 episodes, interviewed players like Ella Masar and Haley Carter and Becky Sauerbrunn, and even have our own merchandise, the funding for which came from a kickstarter whose donors honestly startled me with their support and enthusiasm.
Cut to spring of 2016. I was in a bad depression — probably my worst since college — and one night I sat down and poured a glass of whisky. I just wanted to tune out for a bit; if I had to be so depressed, so numbly disconnected from happiness, at least I could be drunk, which was normally a fun time for me. But I misjudged my tolerance (or perhaps kept moving the line every time I knew I’d crossed it, it’s not super clear now), and at least two fingers of whiskey too many later, the world tilted into a pretty severe spin every time I tried to move. I hated how I felt, hated that I had let myself get this way, hated that in that moment I couldn’t seem to make anyone understand just how helpless and alone I felt. But it was a despairing kind of hate, shuddering quietly in my heart, submerged under a fog of nothing weight. I felt weirdly unmoored from the world at the same time that I was stuck in my useless, drunk body.
My phone was at hand, though, and I started texting the few people I trusted enough to vent. I’m feeling kind of bad was the general vibe I think I sent, even then not wanting to let on just how bad. My friends were lovely and supportive but it didn’t make me feel any better, possibly because I wasn’t being totally honest with them. I didn’t want to burden them and I couldn’t bring myself to put into words what I was thinking of doing. But then Gab asked if I wanted to talk, a real live conversation like people used to have back in the day before the youths and the texting, and so I called her, three time zones and a continent away.
At some point I started crying. I don’t think I ever said out loud that I really just wanted everything to stop but I think Gab got it anyway. She was patient and calm and asked if I would like her to fly me out to Portland. I could stay with her and take a few days to get my head on straight, or at least in better shape. I think maybe that she was willing to do that tipped me back towards something more stable. Or maybe I was embarrassed at the thought that I needed watching. I couldn’t do that, ask someone else to be that responsible for me. But under the tears that I couldn’t seem to stop, the gesture touched me — and perhaps made me feel as though leaving would be a mistake. Whatever it was, it got me to a point where I felt like I could hang up, go to bed, and wake up in the morning.
Obviously, I did wake up. I had one hell of a hangover, but not as bad as it could have been thanks to chugging a ridiculously responsible amount of water before passing out. I was depressed, not stupid. And after that, day by day, I climbed my way back to stability. I took a break from drinking, tried to get my physical health in order with a little more exercise and a little less crappy food, focused on work. Almost two years later it almost doesn’t feel real, what I went through. And yet it was terrifyingly real and if I let myself really remember, I can kind of catch a few tendrils of that awful hollow nothing before I shake them off.
It’s not the same for everyone who suffers from depression, obviously, and I count myself lucky I was able to do any of this without professional help, or that it hasn’t recurred to the same degree. Sometimes I wonder if I might’ve suffered less if I had sought out professional help, but what’s past is past. I made it, and a big part of it was because four years earlier I responded to a DM from a random connection through soccer and made a friend.
Everyone should try to be the kind of friend Gab was to me: kind and patient and without judgment, just the question “What do you need?” She didn’t fix all my problems, didn’t magically make me better. And if someone in the state I was in comes to you, you are perfectly right to say “I think you need to talk to someone qualified to deal with this.” The important thing is, she was the kind of friend I knew I could ask for help with the very first step which is this: knowing it’s okay that you’re not okay and talking to someone about it.
I would not have met Gab if it weren’t for soccer. Who knows what people would be in my life without this sport. Maybe I would have friends I love enough to consider family; maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t have even hit that depression trough if the course of my life were different enough, or maybe my brain was just waiting to hit me with its worst shot. I’ll never know. What I do know, what I consider fact, is that being a part of a community saved my life. I owe the game a lot, not least of all the love and comfort and joy I find in several of my best relationships. And so here I’ll stay, with my family, and with a game that is far, far more than just 22 players and a ball on a field for 90 minutes.
