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.

Moving away from home was really helpful for me.

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 near 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.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]