An England international has spoken openly about one of the darkest periods of in life. During Covid, most people struggled with isolation.
The England star has also battled through isolation, rejection, and emotional struggle during the Covid lockdown.
The story began in 2020 when the player was left out of the final England squad before the world came to a standstill.
This came in as a shock. Moreover, the pandemic that followed made things tougher.
In her book All In: Football, Life and Learning to be Unapologetically Me, Mary Earps describes how she coped when everything around her stopped. She wrote in an excerpt shared by The Guardian:
“I was piling on pounds and annihilating my fitness. And that old body-consciousness about being big and bulky was back with an angry vengeance, so I stopped eating as much.
“Not eating was also getting me drunk and therefore numbing my feelings quicker.
“For two weeks straight, I ate nothing but soup, drank Echo Falls at night, and continued trashing my body and my self-confidence.”
Furthermore, she admitted the pain reached a point where she questioned her own existence. She confessed.
“For the first time in my life, I wondered if there was any point in me being here any longer.
“I don’t believe I was ever going to end it all but I thought, too many times, about how I could.”
Also, the former Manchester United keeper explained how alcohol became a temporary escape. She said;
“I wasn’t drinking myself into oblivion. But for someone who usually didn’t touch it at all, it felt too much and completely out of hand.
“I’d never drunk like that in my life, but for now it was the perfect way of numbing, of not feeling, and that, I decided, was what I needed above all else.”
Since then, Earps has worked to rebuild her confidence and protect her mental health.
Thus, she took another brave step recently by retiring from international football just five weeks before Euro 2025.
So, after years of battling her inner struggles, Mary Earps has chosen peace over pressure.
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