I want to write a story about the 2006 World Cup, which will have little to do with soccer and just about everything about what soccer has meant to me. Have a feeling I'll end up using I much more in this than I'm comfortable doing, but it is my story after all so here goes.
I followed the 2006 World Cup from Thailand, recovering from gender reassignment surgery in a hotel just outside of Bangkok. My friends Neil and Chris had come with me for support, but the pain meds they had me on kept me pretty spacey. Which was unfortunate, as Neil had brought Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon to read to me as I recovered. There was no hope of focusing on that, as I could barely follow the NFL reruns that made up one of this Thai hotel's two English language channels.
These were friends I'd made at Berkeley, living in a vegetarian themed Co-op house. I'd begun my transition to my current life as Josie Moira after moving to Berkeley in 2003. Not that I hadn't been preparing for years throughout my high school experience, but Berkeley presented two things which my high school home life hadn't.
The first is probably guessable, my family was traditional and catholic and my father had already at a few points made threatening remarks about the parts of my life I was having trouble hiding. By senior year I felt like I was ready to burst, having read a coming out poem to my AP English Lit class and often wearing a skirt on stage with my garage band.
The other bit is something that still follows me, and part of the reason I've felt pressure to re-come out to the new people I've met, the fact that I went to high school at an all-boys Salesian catholic school in Los Angeles. Its something most folk probably never think about, but imagine if the question "where did you go to high school" was a loaded scary question. It comes up whenever I apply for work, it comes up in getting to know people.
So Berkeley distanced me from those concerns, and my transition unfolded rapidly enough that by the 2006 World Cup I was in a hotel in Thailand undergoing a procedure. When I was finally clear headed enough to want some of the outside world, it was an English language Thai newspaper covering the Cup that gave me something to focus on. The US didn't do so well during that June, but it was my first time really caring about soccer results since the 1994 World Cup.
By the time the Italy-France final rolled around, I was back in the states and completely depressed. Maybe it was getting off the pain meds, but I've often suspected that it was an emptiness at the end of a long journey. I'd spent the space of a World Cup cycle with my sole focus on transitioning. School happened in the background, more about getting to stay in Berkeley than about working on my degree.
The day of the final was my One Good Day before things really went dark. A park in the Italian corner of San Francisco was showing the game on a big screen, and when they won in penalties fans of the Italian team marched down Columbus ave. holding a giant Italian flag. It wasn't my team, but there was something comforting in feeling lost in the event and not wallowing in my own stuff.
By the 2008 Euro tournament I was living in San Francisco in the Italian quarter above an AS Roma supporting coffee shop. I was supposed to graduate Berkeley in 2007, but the depression had taken over to the point that I withdrew in my last semester. I'd found work in a coffee shop, but housing was tougher. The residential hotel above the coffee shop was a step up from the residential hotel above a strip club, but it wasn't the most glamorous life.
2008 and the Euros is the year when I truly got into soccer as an adult. The coffee shop I worked in was a little French bakery across from the Roma coffee shop. The Roma shop had a little TV and was showing all the games to a packed house, and I became the designated rep for the French team as I watched along with them. Italy beat France to get out of the group, which I was fairly glad of as far as getting out of there alive was concerned.
By the 2010 World Cup I was back in Los Angeles, and I screamed my lungs out as Landon Donovan put the US through to the knockout stage. I'd gone to a handful of Galaxy games in 09 and 10, and after the 2010 Cup I decided I'd try my hand at blogging about this sport which was capturing my imagination.
When I say soccer gave me drive and direction, I say that as someone who can tell the story of my last decade using major tournaments as plot points. In the past when I've been asked about how I got into soccer I've told half the story, the same way I've mumbled and said something vague when someone local asks me where I went to high school.
This is just a glimpse at where my transition and my soccer love intertwine. Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your support.
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