I started playing soccer back home in Germany when I was five years old and my mother saw an ad in the newspaper about a new team at the local academy. It was a boy’s team and I ended up being the only girl making the tryouts, which was really exciting. My parents knew that, "Oh, she might be decent if she made these tryouts, and it's not just gonna be for fun eventually."

So I played with boys my entire life, growing up in Germany, and made it through the youth national team and all the regional teams, up to playing in the European Championships for the under-17s, which has been one of my biggest highlights.

I felt cool and badass that I was good enough to play with all the boys. It was very natural for a lot of girls to play with boys in Germany and it makes you a lot better, so harnessing that is awesome. At the same time, playing with the boys could be pretty tough and restrictive — I've gotten a lot of bad comments on the side.

A lot of parents of boys who used to be on my teams would be very angry when I played over one of their kids. They’d think I was stealing a spot from the boys who could be showcasing themselves as I couldn’t really make it to the men's league anyway. That was obviously really tough for me to navigate as a kid.

But I was able to catch the eye of a German player who was playing in the Bundesliga and Penn State at the time. I thought, "This is awesome. She gets to live in the US, gets to study more or less for free, and is playing high-level soccer."

I reached out to an agency and went through the whole recruiting process. I started talking to a few Ivy League schools, and that's when the deal was sealed.

I came to Harvard, and it’s been the best ride of my life.

I faced many gender inequities that I didn't know how to contextualize

I want to say that I'm really grateful that I got to play with boys and I wouldn't change it for the world. I thought it was awesome and it got me to Harvard. It definitely shapes my queer identity these days as well, and it makes sense in what my personality is and the way I play the sport as well. A lot of people will say to me, "Oh, you play like a guy."

That's a backhanded compliment — I want to play like myself and in my gender and my identity. I don't want to be labeled as a dude. At the same time, if someone tells you you're playing like a guy, that's usually a compliment because it's means you’re robust, aggressive and strong. It was empowering, but also restrictive. I faced a lot of gender inequities very early on that I didn't even know how to contextualize at the time.

Somehow I managed to just zone into what I was doing and got a lot of success with the national team. But it’s tough to justify your existence through these accolades and measurable standards. I try to think of it as character-building, which is me laughing through the fact that it's kind of traumatic in a sense.

I was sticking out like a sore thumb with my ponytail when everyone else had short hair. This culminated in me eventually cutting my hair short because I was trying to fit in. For a few weeks, I basically went undercover, and people didn't know straight off the bat that I was a girl. At the time, I was like, "Oh, I just cut my hair short, because I thought it looked cool."

No, I was assimilating and trying to be part of the crowd.

That's a lot to ask of a 13 year old, who clearly didn't know who she was at that point.

Coaches would tokenize me while passing comments on my body: Eating disorder pipelines in the soccer and sports world

I experienced a lot of toxic masculinity just from being around a lot of Type-A, super dominant masc men. I got a lot of toxic masculine traits imprinted onto me, that I carry around and am trying to unlearn now myself.

In the soccer world, anyone can play soccer — you don't have to technically be intelligent for it. So there are a lot of really weird coaches running around in these circles. I've had a lot of coaches throughout the years who have made really bad comments about my body or my playing style, and tried to compare me with my men teammates on dimensions that were really inappropriate.

They generally tokenized me and took advantage of having me on the team by saying, "Oh see, we have a girl who plays on the national team. Look at how great of a coach I am."

But they didn't do anything to have me there. Nor did they let me play or give me enough playing time, or support me as much as they should have. So it's been like a lot of tokenizing and people love hearing the story of, "I was the one girl on a guy's team and I had an awesome experience. I was one of the bros."

I was, but it's not easy. There's a lot that goes through your head every single day. There have been lots of practices where I was crying and didn't want to go because I didn't feel comfortable on teams. I moved around a lot, switching to different guy’s team because as I got older, the culture would get more toxic as the guys were realizing that I was eventually going to have to switch anyway.

I had to continuously justify and explain my existence, when I should have just been accepted. They should’ve been happy to see some diversity on their team because otherwise these teams are super heterogenous.

There's a lot of pipelines to eating disorders and reducing people to their bodies in sports, and it starts at a young age. I did get a lot of body image issues from it. My whole queer coming out was delayed with my time in the sport and with being on a guy's team. Everything went on the back-burner because I didn’t have the time to deal with all of those emotions and the other feelings that are involved with realizing I’m queer.

There's a lot that I'm detangling now, and it gets much worse in individual sports and sports where there's limited clothing. It's something that a lot of sports will just gloss over. There are a lot of barriers and really warped thinking styles.

There are still a lot of really weird people who are in charge of a lot of hype spots in the NWSL and other sports leagues. We need to just be a little more careful with the people in these areas, because a lot of coaching positions attract very distinct and questionable personalities.

When I touch the soccer ball, all the binary gender norms fade away

I think being in a sports world opened up more possibilities for me to explore who I was outside of what everyone else was doing my age. I didn't know that the term ‘student athlete’ existed until I got to Harvard.

A lot of people in US high schools, hang out with the other student athletes and their lives are defined by their sport. But for me, it was very separate. I was a student in school and an athlete outside of school, which really helped me in navigating all sides of who I was.

At school, it was awesome to just be a regular student because I got to be myself and be around my friends and do regular things — go out for movie dates, get coffee, and just sit and talk for hours when I had the time for it.

On the field, I got to really tap into more of a stereotypically masculine side that sports will bring out in queer athletes, or at least in queer women athletes. I really enjoyed being one of the bros for a while, and I still have that identity. Obviously, the culture at Harvard with us being a women's team, and everyone being cis, is very different from the environment than I was in before.

Germany's lagging behind a lot in understanding that gender is a spectrum, but being on a guy's soccer team allowed me to tap into the grey zone beyond the gender binary, where I just got to exist and enjoy the sport.

I thought, “I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want. I'm not gonna define myself, or even have to think about what any of this means."

When I touch the soccer ball, everything else fades away. So when it came down to it on the field, me and the guys, we were just one unit. It didn't really matter who was who and who you were off the field.

It’s been helpful to detangle my self worth from my soccer identity

Moving away from home and moving away from the culture there was really helpful for me. It’s been great to experience a different soccer culture in the US, where there’s more of an emphasis on bonding with your teammates, especially in college, where you live and breathe in the same spaces as your teammates.

It’s been really helpful to create connections that go beyond just the field because earlier, I was only around my teammates when I was on the field, and we never hung out outside of it. So it felt like a working relationship, and not a personal one.

But at Harvard, my teammates are my best friends. I’ve been able to really explore who they are outside of the sport, while understanding that we all have very multifaceted personalities, and that we're much more than just athletes.

It’s been helpful to detangle my self worth and their self worth from our soccer existence, and our soccer identity, and to learn that I am so much more than my sport. I've stopped defining myself the outcomes of a game. I’m understanding that there's so much more to the sport, and I'm not going to be playing it forever.

I’m finding comfort in the fact that I am a whole human being outside of soccer, and I will be once I stopped playing the sport too, which is evidently going to happen in the future. I'm realizing for my entire life before Harvard, I didn’t live for myself. I was very influenced by family and a lot of my identity was tangled to what I was doing, and not who I actually was.

With time and experience from being an Atlantic away from home, I'm realizing that I'm so much more than that. My conversations with my teammates have helped me contextualize and gain perspective on how my relationship with soccer was never a good one until now.

I'm realizing that I can play for happiness, and for myself. I don’t have to perform under scrutiny of other people's lenses.

I was caught up in the capitalist thinking of being productive

I think this is a cheesy line, if I could go back in time, I would tell my younger self, "Stop and smell the flowers sometimes. Just relax and be present in the moment."

Because I was just pushing forward to the future and always thinking "What's next? What more can I do? What do I need to be doing to get when I want to be?"

I was very caught up in all of the capitalist thinking of "you got to be doing something productive at all times" instead of taking some time for myself and existing, as that concept was never part of our culture at home.

It’s interesting now, to take some time for myself, to self-care and to figure out who I am and what I actually like, outside of performing for others.

That's something I tell myself and others, "You'll be okay in the future. But also give yourself a little rest in the moment and actually embrace and enjoy every moment that you do get."

I'm never gonna play on a guy's team again.

At the time, I was always like, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait to play for a professional women's team one day, which is coming up soon now.”

But when we’d play with the men's team at Harvard, I realized how much I miss it.

And that's the kind of dichotomy where I'm like, "Okay, maybe I should have relaxed a little and enjoyed the moments that I had earlier."