About Me

To learn about who I am, you must first know about who I was. I spent from when I was four years old to twenty-two playing a sport. I say playing a sport, but really, I spent those eighteen years as the earth revolving around the sun. Soccer was my sun, the center of my everything. The soccer field was the one place where I knew exactly who I was and exactly what I was good at, and I loved it. I had big dreams, none of which involved anything without a soccer jersey on my back and a team of fierce, funny, burrito eating girls next to me. So, when the time came to hang up my cleats, I felt like my world had gone dark. No sun, no moon, not even stars. Just darkness. Bleak darkness. 

​

I fell into deep grief. But at the time, I had never heard the word grief attached to the loss of a sport. I thought grief was something saved for deaths of people or fur family members or break-ups. Not something to be experienced after putting a ball away.

 

I was lost. I looked for my path in all the traditional ways I had been told to venture toward after college. I got married. I got a 9 to 5 job. I went back to school to do something I thought mattered, and it did matter, but it wasn't like soccer, it wasn't love.

 

With a bachelor's degree in kinesiology, a master's degree in applied gerontology, a husband, and a home, I told myself I was doing the 'right' thing. I tried to make my husband my sun, and then when that didn't work, I tried to make my work my sun, and then when that didn't work, I just tried even harder. I thought I could hard-work myself into loving the life I had created. But the harder I tried, the more lost I became. And after three years of marriage, I found myself, pen in hand, signing divorce papers.

 

I spent the next six years doing things I had never done before. I moved from Maryland to California, drove across this  mesmerizing country five times, adopted the love of my life, Rufus, my beloved Jack Russell question mark, worked for a handful of life-changing nonprofit organizations, learned about advocacy and the Disability movement, followed my curiosities, fell in love, got my heart broken, fell in love again, repeated the heart breaking thing, taught yoga (the one thing I had picked up during my marriage that started to bring a glimmer of starlight back into my life), started writing, and kept writing. Soon I was losing time writing just like I lost time training on the soccer pitch by myself as a kid. And somehow, after ten years of feeling as if I had left my heart somewhere in a patch of grass between the white sidelines, I started to feel found again. 

​

The author Elizabeth Gilbert says your home is that thing you love more than yourself. I always knew soccer to be that thing. But now, when I wrote, I realized I may have another home too, a new home right here in my fingers. Soon after I had this realization, I wanted to know everything about writing: skills, craft, technique, tone, purpose... I wanted to make writing my superpower. I applied to another master's program, this time, in something I loved, Creative Writing, and got in. I spent the next two years as a sponge in my new home. Drinking in literature, lectures, workshops, and my new writing community, who now only feel right calling family.

​

During my time in graduate school, I saw it as my mission to link my two homes, writing and soccer, and write in the face of the loss that women athletes feel when they do not make it to the professional level. I have never once read about the grief and confusion that results from the loss of a woman athlete's identity, whether she retires from a sport or gets cut from the team before her dream can find its legs. I see it on peoples' faces. I see it in their choices. I see it in the all too familiar bouncing from relationship to relationship or job to job. I see it but I have never been able to read about it. I dedicated myself to solving this problem. I wrote for my sisters who felt lost after they had to remove the number from their back. I wrote for my sisters who got lost and then never had someone say, I’ve been there, I see you, I’ve been lost too. Here's my hand, reach for it, I've got you. I wrote what I always needed to read but never got to. I wrote essays that I hope will encourage parents and coaches of young athletes to zero in on the qualities that make a player special on the field and point out to them how these skills can transfer into life beyond the sport so we can alleviate some of the “who am I?” from the grieving process after an athlete says goodbye to the craft that they have spent countless hours perfecting.

 

In my soccer years, I was always a very creative player with great field vision. I was also a quality communicator. I often found my right arm wrapped in a Captain band. All qualities that say, this little human has skills, and yet, I never once had a coach or mentor talk to me about how that could translate into a major in college, or a career. I wrote to encourage coaches and mentors and parents to start these conversations early with athletes when they are children and continue these conversations with them as teenagers and young adults to foster a sense of self-worth beyond the sport without negatively impacting the athlete’s sport ambitions. I wrote for the little me. The little me who is who she is now because she fell in love with a beautiful game thirty-two years ago. I wrote for all the bridegrooms of soccer, young and old and in-between. 

 

It doesn't need to be soccer that you lost though. It could be any role that you have self-identified with so strongly that the line between it and you that says, "this is something I do" and "this is who I am" has evaporated. I wrote for all of us who at some point questioned our self-worth after removing our most trusted label. I wrote to say that emptiness you feel is not because you aren't whole, it's because this is a hard thing, and we really have never talked about it until now. I wrote and will continue to write to say, I see you, you aren't alone, let's talk.

​

And now, with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, and a book in progress, I am here writing. Writing to educate, question, laugh, investigate, and encourage growth and healing in and beyond the soccer world. This website is my way of saying, hi! Let's have a conversation about dog cuddles, giggles, shower cries, mental health, that coach who crossed a boundary with you. Let's have a conversation about liberation from cultural barriers and romantic tall tales. Let's talk about the things that matter.

​

Xoxo. 

Jamie  

​

P.S. I am so glad you are here.