by Abby Wambach
In the seventy-second minute, Jill calls me off, and the sound of applause follows me to the bench. Symbolic, I think. I had seventy minutes and I can’t score. It really is time for me to step away. No one else scores, either—they had spent all their time passing the ball to me—and we lose, 1–0, our first defeat on American soil in 104 games.
Privately, I am devastated beyond measure. I did not want to lose; I have never in my life been comfortable with losing. I wanted it to end, but not like this. I don’t want that stumbling, slow-motion performance to be the last recorded footage of my career. I’m also worried about my own postgame celebrations. My family is unaware of my marriage troubles, and I can only imagine the faux cheery conversations Sarah has been having with them, the imaginary narrative she’s stitching together. Will she tell them I asked her to skip the after-party? That I was too afraid of us fighting and making a scene and ruining the whole night? At the same time, I am amazed that she’s come at all, once again ignoring her own hurt and pain just to support me. With soccer ending, I think, I might finally be able to show up for her. The real me, not the me I am right now.
Standing in the center of the field, thousands of cardboard doppelgängers waving back at me, I take the microphone and address the crowd. “I’m going to make this short,” I say. “I love you guys. I love this team. I love my country. And it has been my pleasure and honor to represent all of you for as long as I’ve been able to.”
Someone in the nosebleed section screams, “Thanks, Abby!” the words so loud and clear it’s as if he whispered them face-to-face.
“My family, my friends, you guys in the suites”—I think of Sarah but don’t say her name—“I wish I was there right now. But I think symbolically, the way this game went, means this team, for me, I can walk away. The future is so bright. These women are going to kill it. I know it. And before I get all emotional, I just want to genuinely express how much I have given myself to this team, and how important”—I have to pause to stop myself from crying—“and how important it is to give all of yourself to whatever you want to do in your life as a passion.”
I turn toward my team. “I love you guys so much,” I say. “Bourbon Street, watch out.”
I drop the mic on the field with a muted thud.
Wambach, out.
21
ADDICT
I never need sleep anymore. I can stay up until six in the morning and be at breakfast by eight. I have much to do, to see, to think about, to plan. Hillary Clinton’s people ask me to campaign for her after the holidays. The president of Equinox, Sarah Robb O’Hagan, congratulates me on my “amazing year” and tells me she can’t wait to witness the next phase of my life. To that end, might she introduce me to Wharton professor Adam Grant? He’s planning the next People Analytics Conference and thinks I’d make an interesting addition to the lineup. I speak with Apple CEO Tim Cook, who agrees that treating people equally and fairly is ultimately good for business. At the Facebook offices in San Francisco, I meet for hours with Sheryl Sandberg in a glass-walled conference room, situated like a giant fishbowl in a hallway maze. “Stick to your guns,” she tells me. “Focus on the feminist aspects of inequality, and the rest will work itself out.”
On another visit to Facebook, I try the not-yet-released Oculus Rift, a virtual reality device that immerses you in a futuristic, three-dimensional world. The Facebook employee slips the headset over my ears and asks, “Are you creative?” I tell him no, not at all, but as I work the controller and wander through this alternate universe, I reconsider my response. Isn’t rebellion a form of creativity? My lifelong search to find alternative routes to be better and faster, to excel at the highest level with minimal effort? Even this—my all-consuming, frenetic obsession with changing the world—involves a creative suspension of disbelief: if I direct my energy externally, on forces and factors far away, I won’t have time to examine the wreckage all around me. I can control what I envision for others, but my own life plan has been irrevocably derailed.
I briefly go home—not to Portland but to Rochester, where the town throws me a retirement party and I weep multiple times onstage. It’s a live, Technicolor episode of This Is Your Life, complete with corporate sponsors. Most of the attendees have known me since childhood, teachers and coaches and the local paper’s sports journalist, and a part of me longs to regress, to wake up on a day where my biggest problem is falsifying a book report or rebelling against curfew. Mercy’s field has been rechristened the “Abby Wambach ’98 Field.” Current soccer players for Mercy talk about why they admire me. “She holds herself in a way where she’s not cocky, but she’s very determined and passionate,” says one team captain. “She inspires a lot of young women to want to be better,” says the other. “It’s just amazing.”
My sister Laura tells favorite family stories: One Christmas I insisted that everyone do a random act of kindness; mine was to leave money in a copy of The Giving Tree at the local Barnes & Noble. I used to lick each French fry so none of my siblings would want to eat them, and I’d have the whole plate to myself. Last summer I held fishing contests for my nieces and nephews at our house in the Thousand Islands, promising hundreds of dollars of Beats by Dre speakers and headphones as the prize. “We don’t accept ties,” I warned them. “There’s only one champion. Get out there and fish—we need a winner.” Afterward I apologized to them for being so tough, and explained that I was trying to teach a valuable lesson: life makes people work for what they want.
My nephew Ben thanks me for inspiring him to be a better teammate and person. He will never forget a question I once asked him: “Who do you want to be and how do you want to get there?” My mother imagines all the exciting things I am going to do with the talents the good Lord has given me. The local sports reporter, who has covered my career since high school, calls me a role model and a “guiding light” and says he can’t deliver a bigger compliment than this: if his two-year-old daughter grows up to be half the woman I am, he’ll be a lucky, lucky father.
I take the stage to deafening applause. “If you dream anything, if you want something, just go after it,” I say. “You might surprise yourself.”
From Rochester I fly to New York City for business meetings. My agent travels with me, making sure I keep to my schedule, compiling notes and ideas for my “equality manifesto.” Before we part ways he takes me aside.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You need to take care of yourself. You look unhealthy, and I’m worried about you. You have to understand that your greatest quality—your willingness to take risks, and to do and say things that others aren’t—is your secret sauce. It’s what draws people to you. And if they think that it’s fueled by alcohol or drugs, and that it isn’t coming from you, it’s all going to go away. Think about that.” I agree, and spend the rest of that trip detoxing on the floor of my hotel room. I sweat my ass off. My skin smells of waxy chemicals. My eyes leak. I can’t stop yawning but I can’t sleep. I hate the world. I hate myself. Unbeknownst to me, a few concerned friends have begun to hatch a plan; they call it “Operation Get Abby Back.”
On December 21, I fly back to Portland, where my brand-new Tesla and another stash of pills are waiting for me.
When I get home, Sarah and I have the worst fight of our marriage to date. I am gripped by the need to remove myself from the situation. If I stay, I know I will pick up my pills again, wash them down with too much vodka, and ruin all the hard work I did in that hotel room. Instead I throw clothes, toiletries, and a few bottles of pills into a suitcase, start up my Tesla, and head south to Los Angeles. I think of the trip I took eleven years ago, back in 2004, when I drove thirty-two hours straight from Florida to Phoenix to see Haley, to hear her admit in person that she had been with someone else. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I stop only to charge the car and to block Sarah’s phone number and e-mail. I need to go in search of happiness, I think. There are too many highs and lows, too much back and forth between incredibly awesome shit and moment
s where I have no idea what I’m doing or who I am. Why is it that when one part of my life ends, every part of my life ends? When I arrive in Los Angeles, it’s twenty hours later, and Kara opens her door to let me in.
When we’re alone, out of earshot of her partner and son, I pull out a paper bag crammed with my drugs—bottles of Norco, Adderall, Xanax, Ambien. From my wallet I retrieve my last prescription. Holding it high, I declare, “I’m going to frame this and put it up on my wall as a reminder of my addiction.”
I stay with Kara for a week, until I feel calm and settled. I can do this, I tell myself. I have quit drinking cold turkey countless times when I needed and wanted to. I am stronger than these pills. I don’t want to do them anymore, and for all my life I’ve done only exactly what I wanted.
Despite this grand gesture, I do not toss the pills.
I’m clearheaded and sober when I fly east to join Hillary’s campaign the first week of January. Lena Dunham, the writer and actor, will be there, too, and before the event she sends me a text: “Do you have your speech all planned out?” I panic; I have no speech, not even a loose outline prepared, and so I text my agent: “What speech? You didn’t tell me I need to have a speech, like a proper speech.” His response is immediate and reassuring: “No, it’s not a proper speech. It’s what you do—you just do your thing. You just go. You’re the best at it.”
When we arrive in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I speak first. I say that being able to envision a female in the Oval Office is exactly what I’ve been working toward my whole life. I’ve just retired from playing professional soccer, something that wasn’t even possible fifteen years ago, and now here we are, possibly having a woman as president. Scratch that—it’s not if Hillary gets into office, but when.
I wait for raucous cheers and applause to subside.
I don’t support Hillary just because she’s a woman, I continue. I wholeheartedly believe that our country, by and large, is socially conscious, and if you examine her plans and ideas and goals, it makes sense to vote for her. And I believe that everyone is inherently worthy of opportunity; everyone deserves a chance. Even if you are a minority, even if you are a woman, even if you are different colors, different races, different orientations. And to me, she represents someone who gives all minorities in our country a positive mind-set: if she can do it, I can, too.
More cheers and applause, and then I bring it home:
The symbolism of a female president is incredibly exciting to me. Imagine a fifteen-year-old girl looking up to a woman president and walking a little taller, feeling a bit more confident, beginning to image that she, too, could achieve that office. And then imagine a fifteen-year-old boy, looking at his classmate and thinking she could be president one day—a slight shift in gender norms that could have a long-term ripple effect, eventually changing the world and the way we all operate in it. It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to watching Hillary Clinton make it happen.
Lena approaches me afterward and says, “I think you’re the most charismatic person I’ve listened to speak, ever.”
“Come on,” I protest, rolling my eyes.
“No,” she insists. “You’re really good at what you do.”
I think of all the people she must know—writers and actors and artists who get paid to craft and deliver words. I am honored by the compliment, and impressed that she went out of her way to tell me.
“Thank you,” I say, simply, and remind myself that I am proving myself in a venue that has nothing to do with soccer, that my value did not end when I stepped off the field. I can do this, I think. I am doing this.
While I build my new platform, researching equality issues and meeting people, my marriage continues to flounder. Sarah is angry at me for leaving Portland so abruptly, for temporarily blocking her number, for choosing to run away rather than face our problems head-on. When we do text, our words are stilted, and hint at the best way to dissolve our union rather than repair it. I have no idea what I need or even what I want, and I share my misery and confusion with Kara.
“It’s so sad,” I text. “It’s hard to quit her and the life that we built. But it became a fantasy and not reality. That is what I do know now. It’s been so hard to keep silent from her. Like the hardest thing I’ve ever done, in addition to not abusing pills and alcohol during that time. It makes me mad, tho. Loving someone so much that you actually have to let them go.”
“Yep, the worst,” Kara agrees.
“And I won’t ever stop loving her.”
“Honest answer,” Kara writes. “You still off the pills?”
“Yes,” I respond, truthfully. “But today I wanted anxiety ones after Sarah’s e-mail. Hahahaha. Had a drink on the plane. That was it, tho. I want to get fit again. So I am gonna focus on that. .”
But my mind inevitably returns to the negative, exhuming the thoughts I’ve worked so hard to bury. Within a half hour I’m texting Kara again: “I have known for my whole life I wanted to be a mother. And I’m so mad that I can’t do that right now. I’ve waited for years to be done playing for that experience. And I can’t blame Sarah. It’s my fault, too.”
Kara encourages me to go away, carve out some time to reflect and relax, and to keep relying on my friends rather than on pills. “If you really want to find yourself,” she writes, “you need to enroll everyone that you keep close to you.”
“A retreat could be the answer,” I concede. “I have to stop worrying about the plan I used to have about what my retirement was gonna look like.”
“Surround yourself with people that you can grow with,” she urges. “People who challenge you and don’t give you a hall pass on being your best self.”
“I have to accept what I hear . . . we are our environment. And Sarah challenged me to be a better person and not continue doing my patterns. I didn’t want to change for her. That’s why I left. I want to change for me. I know I married her because she would never let me get too lost. But here I am, needing to do it alone . . . I am lost. And it’s okay. I accept that this is my life.”
“AND you can be in action about getting found,” Kara insists.
“I want to be stronger,” I write. “I need help.”
“Dude, it’s not a failure to ask for help. Why not go quietly into a retreat center that focuses on restoring identity? Look into the Chopra Center. It’s massage and yoga and organic food and silence. Let me help you get the help.”
I think about the Rochester retirement party, that idolized version of myself that everyone believes is the real me. There’s so much I want to do, and yet so much I want to undo, and I don’t know how to reconcile the two.
“I have to hold my younger self and love on her,” I answer.
Kara knows exactly what I mean. “Hold her in your arms and tell her. Ask for her forgiveness. She’s your pure self. The un-jaded one.”
“I know,” I write, and can’t help but smile thinking about her; in my mind, my childhood self is an entirely different person. “She was so cute and always needing a shower. Haha. The one who has never had her heart broken. I have to learn how to be alone. And be okay with it.”
“You know how you always say you’re unlovable?” she asks.
“I know logically I’m lovable,” I reply, and think of how that worry plagued me as a kid—knowing I was different, and believing that difference was a liability. “But deep down I have a scar from long ago.”
“Forgiveness is an act of self-love,” she says. “You’ve suffered enough. You owe it to yourself, dude.”
I have to muster the will to type my next words: “My self-loathing has been killing me.”
“You’re coming down now,” she points out. “You’re slowing down and processing it . . . I understand self-loathing. However, don’t stay too long with that. There’s no power there. There never will be.”
“I want peace,” I say, exhausted from the exchange. “Deep peace nothing can shake.”
Toward the end of January, I take Kara
’s advice and rent a house in Manhattan Beach for three weeks, intending to decompress and center myself, to start off the New Year in a positive frame of mind. This year, 2016, is the year of the monkey, and I was born in 1980, another year of the monkey, which I take as a good omen. I plan to spend part of the time by myself, and I invite a group of friends, including Sydney, to join me for the rest. I am excited for my friends to see me in a state where I’m not crazy and weird and all doped up. I hire our World Cup chef to come cook healthy meals. Those three weeks will cost more than a year’s worth of mortgage on my house in Portland, but it’s worth every cent.
When Suzi the chef arrives, she goes shopping for organic fruits and vegetables and gathers us all in the kitchen while she does her magic. I take pictures of her beautiful meals and post them on Instagram, ignoring the commenters who ask why Sarah isn’t there with me. I surf and post pictures of myself in my wet suit, and ignore more questions about Sarah. I think about who I was with her versus who I am by myself: Am I afraid of being alone because I love Sarah, or because I’m just afraid of being alone? Was she my rock, or was I my rock, and I gave her more power than she should have had? Every night I sit on the balcony and watch the sunset, taking comfort in knowing that the same view will greet me again tomorrow.
In the middle of my stay, I travel to Mexico for a weekend to attend a friend’s wedding. I’m still abstaining from pills, but I stand at the bar and do shot after shot after shot. Kara’s there, and she watches as I fall on the dance floor, slamming so hard on the ground that I break my finger; it crooks, witchlike, in the wrong direction. Without any hesitation, and feeling no pain, I stand up and break it back the other way, setting it in its proper place, and I celebrate this feat with another shot.
In February I decide to attempt complete sobriety, forgoing alcohol along with the pills. I visit my parents at their condo in Florida, intending to help my mother rehabilitate from knee surgery and further contemplate the state of my marriage. Sarah and I are at least texting again, taking inventory of what went wrong, like claims adjusters surveying rubble from a hurricane. Okay, we acknowledge, we really had something good, and we fucked it up. Either we accept what happened and move forward together, or we accept what happened and move apart. At the moment we’re apart more than not, taking turns staying in the Portland house, leaving before the other one arrives.