Mary Fowler reveals extent of her mental health struggles in new memoir
Matildas star Mary Fowler has revealed her hidden battle with suicidal thoughts and self-harm detailing her darkest moments in a new memoir.
Matildas superstar Mary Fowler has revealed she almost took her own life one night as she struggled with loneliness, growing up too fast and the pressure to perform.
Fowler has cited mental and physical fatigue for pulling out of soccer matches before but, in her new memoir Bloom, the 22-year-old reveals the full depth of her struggle with self-harm and suicidal ideation.
In an exclusive interview with Stellar ahead of the book’s release, Fowler says she decided to share the full extent of her mental health because “the rest of my life doesn’t make sense unless I’ve touched on that. It was such a life-changing journey for me and it still changes my life. I’m still dealing with it”.
Fowler says she first started having suicidal thoughts when she was 17 after moving to Montpellier in France to play with French club Montpellier HSC. It wasn’t until just before her 20th birthday, the dark thoughts turned potentially deadly.
“One night, I got closer than ever before,” Fowler writes in Bloom.
She describes struggling with how quickly she was growing up and feeling a “sense of loss’ with not being a regular teenager. There was also financial pressure and feeling like everyone wanted a piece of her.
“In that moment, I didn’t follow through,” she writes.
“But I did sit there for most of the night pleading for anyone up above who would listen to please just take me.”
It was also during this time that Fowler writes she “genuinely considered quitting football.”
She says her dream life as a star athlete on the rise turned into a nightmare when she moved to France.
Away from family and friends, in a country where she didn’t speak the language, it was “the first time I self-harmed,” she writes.
“The motivation was to divert my emotional pain. Looking back on it now, it’s bizarre that I thought physically harming myself would feel better than dealing with my emotions, but I was young and didn’t know how to cope with the situation in front of me. I was having a bit of an identity crisis, trying to deal with the expectation to perform and struggling to navigate a difficult work environment.”
Through professional help, as well as a strong support network of family and friends which includes her partner – NRL superstar Nathan Cleary – Fowler now feels she’s “healed” from that time.
“But I can’t lie and say that some days it doesn’t affect me. In trying to understand more about how I got into that position, I was doing research online about the current statistics in Australia around mental health and suicide. It just blew my mind how big those numbers are.
It really connected with me that, in a way, I could easily have been one of those statistics.”
Fowler now believes the purpose of her enormous profile (she has close to half a million Instagram followers) is to shine a spotlight on her head rather than her boot.
“I’m a bit anxious about people reading that and maybe seeing me a bit differently but that’s OK, because this is more real and it’s authentic to who I am as a person,” she said.
Fowler, who is playing for Manchester City and was reunited with Cleary during the Rugby League Ashes series, is recovering from an ACL injury.
She’s expected to return to the field next year but she’s also been thinking about her life post-football. It’s no surprise that she envisions working in the mental health space and shares the lessons she’s learnt from her life.
“Despite all those challenges in Montpellier, it changed me in beautiful ways. It burst the bubble of my football world and opened my eyes to all the life around me I was taking for granted in pursuit of fame. My idea of success was erased and rewritten in a more holistic way,” she writes, adding “life has become so much more than I could’ve imagined, which has made me incredibly grateful to my past self for choosing to keep trying. Losing your way can happen to anyone, no matter how good their life may seem from the outside.”
Bloom by Mary Fowler ($36.99, Penguin Random House) is out on Tuesday.
See the full shoot and cover story with Mary Fowler in Stellar, via The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (Victoria), The Sunday Mail (Queensland) and Sunday Mail (SA).
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