One More Step: A Professional Soccer Player Confronts His Mental Health Challenges

by Elliot Kettle

Listen to Executive Director Gabriel Nathan read this post aloud:

At twenty-seven years old, I still do not have all the answers for my own issues, let alone for people’s general mental health. This is just a snapshot of my story at a particular point in time, and what helped me. Everyone is unique and therefore has their own journey. My story is not the most important thing going on in the world. In the grand scheme of things, it is insignificant, and it is not an excuse for things I haven’t done. Writing this was extremely challenging but, in reality, no one really cares as much as me about this, and that’s okay.

Across fourteen years, I have seen a dozen different psychologists. Every single one told me the same thing: the severe mental health problems you are experiencing are ‘normal.’ I disagree. But that’s alright. Fixing, overcoming, or even managing things that are abnormal is not something to be ashamed of, it is ultra powerful.

There are many prominent places I could begin. The twenty-hour non-stop bus ride with my youth soccer team where I first experienced panic attacks, anxiety, and what would become emetophobia, an intense fear of vomiting or witnessing others vomit. Missing multiple months of school, important soccer opportunities, and other formative life experiences from fifteen to eighteen because I couldn’t leave the house. My problems were preventing me from not only traveling out of state for college, but nearly stopping me from going forty-five minutes down the road to a school in which I was never satisfied. Or maybe at twenty-two years old, sitting at the airport with my dad about to start my soccer career in England only to turn around and leave with my bag already on board.

Failure, that’s what every single one of these situations meant to me. I had the classic ‘why me?’ thought all the time. Why were the issues I faced happening to me? My problems surely had to be unique and different. It was also extremely sad and frustrating to disappoint my parents. Two individuals who supported everything I did, and saw the light at the end of the tunnel when I never could; many times displaying exceptional mental strength to handle a troubled son like myself.

But also embarrassment, that’s what many of these moments bring with them. Was this a disability? Would I ever be able to leave home? Would I ever be able to lead a normal life, and could I handle that? These things ate away at me, as I saw friends and family chasing dreams while I sat watching, immobile. But these are all stories for a later date, instead I would like to start during a six-month period between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-three.

Being a professional soccer player in Europe typically means being in Europe! Unfortunately, we don’t have the technology yet to play a sport professionally across the world from your living room in Illinois. But in mid-2019, I found myself not only finding it a challenge to get out of the state, but around the block. I was back to where I was at the age of sixteen. In spring of that same year, I graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree and felt like I had my agoraphobia, generalised anxiety disorder, and panic disorder under control. I did not. I hadn’t seen a psychologist in a couple years, and that was a big mistake. One month later, my plan was to continue my soccer career in England as I had dual citizenship. That didn’t happen. I was extremely embarrassed and fearful that my dream of becoming a professional soccer player would never amount to anything. But I told myself that it was logical to think that. These people I watched on TV could travel at any point, they could stay away from home, they could get on a plane, they could live normal lives. I couldn’t walk around the block without feeling extremely nauseous and panicking.

So, I went back to therapy. I had taken a couple years off while I was at college, because I thought things were better. Unfortunately, I was just in a comfort zone. This time, I tried various approaches, everything from EMDR to constantly blaming my upbringing. I took anti-anxiety medication again for the first time in several years. Much like in high-school, I hated taking pills and felt like I had to figure out a way to manage my problems on my own. I was grasping at straws and desperate. ​

In late-October 2019, I went back to an old therapist who had helped previously in high school. I will call him “Dr. V.” This is when I first mentioned the idea of emetophobia. This was a radical change in the way that I had approached things, as everything prior had been around travelling, being away from my parents, general anxiety, etc. In therapy we started by trying to uncover if there were any traumatic events surrounding throwing up. I had only seen one person throw up on the bus in middle school, and been sick myself a handful of times. To my knowledge, there was nothing traumatic there. No one in my family suffered from the problem either. But often, attached to my panic and worry was this intense feeling of nausea. I began to theorise and read PubMed peer reviewed journal entries about individuals with the same condition. Ultimately coming to the conclusion that this wasn’t a symptom but the thing I feared most. It’s also important to note that I was truly in a state of desperation. I had no idea if I was going down the right path. All I knew was that I felt like I was on a stationary bike, not moving anywhere for the decade plus prior. Dr. V was of specific interest to me because he specialised in something called exposure therapy. It sounds simple, you put yourself in situations in which you feel the most fear around a specific phobia or worry. Gradually building up over time to the point where you are no longer apprehensive of a particular activity, object, topic, etc. Nothing about our approach was gradual! According to Dr. V, what we did in just over two months, most people do in a year or more.

When I missed the flight in May of 2019, my parents and I decided that the next possible time for me to go would be Christmas. Having tried many unsuccessful, desperate methods to get myself to a place where I wanted to be, I didn’t come to Dr. V until it was almost too late. Even then I can remember sitting in the waiting room before my first session. Panicking, feeling nauseous, thinking, “Fuck me, I don’t even know if I can get to therapy regularly”. Dr. V expressed in the first session that getting to England by Christmas was going to be like my ‘furthest reach school’ if I was to compare it to college recruitment.

So, I broke up with my girlfriend and quit my job, which I was barely showing up to anyways due to my mental health problems. There is a good chance I would have been fired in the coming days. My girlfriend and I had been together for four years. Things were phenomenal at times, and it’s sad because I feel if I met her at a different point in my life things could have worked. But I was a very bad partner at times, especially living with ongoing mental health problems. The main issue being that I was so discontent with my life, I could not be happy for her athletic, academic, personal achievements. Of which she had many. It was really quite sad, and luckily we are still quite close friends today. Ultimately though I knew to avoid treating a relationship that way again, I needed to be all in on trying to manage my mental health problems better. I was at a breaking point with it ruling my life and preventing me from the things I wanted to do on a soccer pitch. Dr. V and I embarked on the exposure therapy road, and it was not fun (nor is it supposed to be). For two straight months, several times a day, I would note down and act upon different types of exposures. In the beginning, it was quite easy as I knew stepping out of the house, going down to the supermarket, training for soccer on my own, etc., would elicit a high anxiety response.

I’ve actually attached a photo below of one of the first few weeks during our therapy. This provides a better framework of what a typical week looked like during that time. Essentially everything we did, along with so many other things that would put me in positions where I thought I might panic and throw up, the thing I hated the most. For the entire duration of therapy, I was intensely nauseous every single day.

It was a winding road with a handful of setbacks, and in moments made me question whether I made the right choice. In that moment, probably five or six sessions into the therapy, Dr. V said something that helped immensely. I was complaining about white knuckling it through my issues, not necessarily feeling like I was getting anywhere. His response, “white knuckling it is the therapy. Sometimes we aren’t going to be successful in an exposure, and that’s okay. So long as the next day, we take one further step towards our goal. So, if you can’t get all the way into the supermarket today, tomorrow you take one step closer until you’re browsing the aisles with ease”. For some reason, that was like a small light bulb moment, and I continue to use that to manage the anxiety, emetophobia, and panic attacks that I still struggle with to this day.

In two months, I went from barely being able to leave the house to crying with my mom, dad, and brother at O’Hare airport. Not because I wasn’t going to get on the plane, but because I could finally do it. I recognised that I was no longer a prisoner to my problems. So much of what I felt like was out of my control, was starting to land in my grasp. I arrived in England on the fifteenth of December, even then with the plan that I may not stay if things went poorly and could not handle the move. I stayed for four years, through a fucking pandemic three months into my journey and had many highs and lows. There is so much more to this story as I sit in a small Finnish apartment, a place I could never have imagined I would be just a few years prior. But on we go! One more step.

​EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR / EDITOR: Gabriel Nathan | DESIGN: Leah Alexandra Goldstein | SITE ORIGINATOR: Bud Clayman