Hi folks. I wanted to tell you all about my discovery. 6 years ago at the age of 44 I found myself on the verge of a precipice. It was the winter before my final breakdown, the ‘rock bottom’ as they call it and the catalyst for my slowly moving upwards towards the light. I was depressed and lonely (to put things lightly) and I was desperately looking for answers. Once such idea was to join the brand new local women’s soccer team. Though I was a self confessed hater of sports, I could see that ruminating in my house was good for neither my daughter nor I. I needed to reach out to other women because I new the value of it and my natural desire to close up was killing me. So I picked myself up by the scruff of the neck and hurled myself unwillingly into the painfully awkward fray of socialising outdoors in the cold.
Once we started moving about it wasn’t so bad, the exercise woke up parts of me that were stagnant and I just kept my head down and listened to the coach. That first season was hard, in the last few weeks I had a crisis and hurt myself badly and I had to play with a bandage on my arm which I explained away as a sprain and because in sport you get a few injuries, no body questioned me. I kept playing because we only had just enough players and they needed me. I new it was doing me good.
Fast forward to 6 years later and I am utterly loyal to this bunch of wacky and wonderful women. It turns out we all have problems. None of us are perfectly sane and the seasonal blues are common among the players of winter sport. That’s why we get out there. Because it helps.
So there you go; despite trying to avoid sport with a passion, it turned out to be part of my cure.
Who’d have thought?
