Micheal, 27 – Soccer as Therapy for Mental Illness

“Growing up I, I played soccer and… school wasn’t important basically, and so,  I just went for soccer.  High School was the same, I would just get minimum of 2.0 (GPA). Sometimes I got higher, but it was usually just 2.0 to play soccer and I thought I could do that the whole time.”

“In junior year I was on academic probation because I was under for an athlete or something, they told me you were allowed to, so I did that, I didn’t have the right GPA. I did that junior year, it was all fun. Then my senior year a lot of things happened, I had dyslexia as well, so growing up in school was kind of hard, but my senior year I was like ‘Hey I’m gonna play my senior year, everything’s gonna be good, and then once I’m done with school, I’m never going back to school, I’m just gonna do my own thing.’ I didn’t work out that way. I got cut from the team, I didn’t have good grades and the school district promised to help me with schooling and they did not. So at that point, I was like, ‘I don’t want to deal with it anymore.’ So I took the easy way out and dropped out.”

"It affected me a lot, it was actually really crazy because I lost my self-esteem, I actually got really depressed, I started eating a lot, I gained a lot of weight. I describe it to everyone I talk to as a black hole.”

“Battling mental illness has been harder. It’s been a more constant mental battle, where every day I wake up and it’s like ‘ alright it’s not going away, still there’ you just have to learn to deal with it and go like’ alright today I’m gonna try a little bit harder.’ You just have to kind of do things, even though you feel anxious all the time. I always thought like ‘If I feel anxious today, more anxious than usual, I just have to stay home and just let it beat me. But I learned that you can go out and you just kind of have to dig deep, and just go out and be like ‘alright today I’m gonna go to work and I’m just gonna give it all I have.’”

“Learning was hard. I had a lot of teachers, tell me that, ‘Your son is not smart, he is not paying attention, he is not gonna excel in school.’ I had all these negative thoughts [from] negative people telling me that, ‘You can’t do it’. I had people telling me ‘You can do it, there is a way’  but I listened more to the negative people. So for I long time, I thought that way, ‘Why study in school if I am not going to excel, why study, if I’m never going to achieve much.’ It wasn’t until a while ago, couple of years, that I said ‘ you know what, I can excel. I don’t have to listen to negative people.”

“Soccer has just been always my drug you can say. I go to it and just when I’m having a hard day with anxiety or depression, I go and kick a soccer ball. If I had a tough day with school, same thing. Now is not just so much soccer but also sport, basketball or volleyball. I just go to a gym and start shooting and just the control I have in sports… I can control the ball how I want and have it do what I want. It helps me feel in control of my life when everything is falling apart. Music is another thing that helps. Sports and music go hand in hand for me, where I’m just like, I go play my sport, put my music on, and everything is just like my own universe where I can do what I want, and just be happy.”

“I want to be healthy. I’ve learned with battling a mental illness that health and dieting and what you eat plays an important role. I’m allergic to dairy, so I’ve been trying to cut of diary lately and that has helped life the fatigue and the depressive mode. I don’t know if that is scientific but that’s how I feel. I gotta get healthy in a way that best suits me in order to be happy, more happy.

“I always usually see young kids and I just say like, ‘You know what you can do whatever you want.’ If you want to play soccer, you gotta work hard, there are requirements to get there and you can do it. If you want to be a doctor, same thing. If you want to be a journalist, same thing. Whatever you want to be, you can do it.”

“I would tell my younger self, don’t give up. It’s gonna get hard, you gonna want to quit a lot of times, but also rely on your friends, rely on your family. Ask them for help.”

“You gotta trust the process. Me and my friends always say, trust the process, there’s a process to everything.”