She chose herself over her soccer career

My name is Mana Shim and I'm a tryhard.

Yay.

I'm so excited to talk to you.

So I want to start this story way at the beginning, childhood Mana.

Can you tell me about when you started playing soccer?

I think I was three or four.

So I have two older sisters and one is 10 and a half years older than I am.

And I she was playing high school soccer or middle school soccer around the time.

So I just was at the soccer games and on the sideline and I started kicking the ball around.

And then I played, I played, I started playing like on an organized team when I was five and immediately loved it.

And here we are.

Do you remember like what you loved about soccer in the before days, like when you were little before it was serious?

Yeah.

I really love learning skills, like picking up new skills and specifically like juggling a ball.

My coach was really good at saying like, okay, you know, first one to get to this gets like a sticker on their notebook or something.

And my dad was very, he pushed me and he would say things like, I bet you can't do 20 juggles.

And I remember the first time I learned how to juggle, I was like, I am not going home until I get 20 juggles.

And he had to turn the car lights on.

And like, I was there for hours, but I really love that feeling of like accomplishing, um, or just like being successful at a specific task.

And yeah, Now that I'm doing EMDR,

I've

learned about like the bilateral stimulation.

And I think there's something about sport and specifically soccer that was allowing me to like work through things and be distracted.

So I didn't have to focus on all the hard things in my life.

Oh, wow.