Eight years ago, in a small, half-empty bar somewhere in Greece, Chloe Logarzo realised she had hit rock-bottom.
Slumped over a cheap beer, and sitting alongside a partner she knew wasn't good for her, the 20-year-old gazed up at one of the bar's only televisions, which happened to be showing the 2015 Women's World Cup.
On the screen, she watched with a heavy chest as her Matildas team-mates made history in Canada, qualifying for the Round of 16 before winning their first-ever tournament knock-out game with a famous 1-0 victory over Brazil.
And all of it had happened without her.
Logarzo had known, deep down, that this moment was coming. How could it not, when football was the one thing that had defined her entire life up until this point?
With Italian and Scottish ancestry, the midfielder often jokes that she had no choice but to become a footballer. Her childhood was a blur of western Sydney football fields, running around with her all-male cousins, and always accompanied by her coach-dad and manager-mum.
She was smaller than most kids her age, so struggled getting picked for teams as she got older. But she never gave up, working on her speed and her skills, putting in the extra hours by herself to make up for whatever weaknesses she felt she had.
As she reached her late teens, all that effort began to pay off. She made it to the W-League, representing Sydney FC as they won their second championship title in 2012-13. The following year, she joined the Colorado Pride in the USA's second division, winning the league's Best Young Player award in her first season.
She was a rising star of the Australian game, fulfilling what she always felt was her destiny.
But then, a few months out from the 2015 World Cup, it all came crashing down.
"That's when I went off the rails," Logarzo, now 28, tells me on a blazing February morning in Sydney.
"I resented football for a really long time.
"I resented it for taking away a normal childhood for me: going out to parties, hanging out with my friends. I missed a lot of birthdays and funerals, missed countless events where I lost friends because of my dedication to football.
"That, combined with a bigger identity crisis — not being able to distinguish Chloe Logarzo the footballer from Chloe Logarzo the person — that put me into a major spiral."
Heartbroken, the 20-year-old did what she had taught herself to do whenever something she loved hurt her: cut and run.
Logarzo quit football altogether, and instead turned to partying hard and working odd jobs as an apprentice landscaper to fill the existential hole the game had left inside her.
Eventually, she earned enough money to take herself off for a months-long backpacking trip through Indonesia and Europe. By that point, her fitness had tanked, her drinking increased, and her mental health had almost entirely unravelled.
For the first time in her adult life, Logarzo had to figure out who she was away from football: away from the one thing that had given her life shape and meaning and direction, the one thing she had clung to like a desperate swimmer to a life-raft.
She found comfort in destruction; all the parties and substances distracting her from the question she was struggling to confront. Who was she if she wasn't a footballer?
In the most secret parts of herself, she knew the answer. But it was one that, for decades, she had been terrified to put into words, as though speaking it aloud would make it real: she was gay.
And it was in that little bar in Greece, totally unmoored from the person she thought she was, that these two parts of herself finally collided.
"In the process of me losing my shit, I started to realise that I needed to make myself happy; I needed to be who I am," she says.
"But I needed to do it in a way that was going to give positive things back to the world. I needed to stop doing all the dumb stuff like going out partying, living for the weekend, being part of a scene that could be so toxic.
"I think, through that process, my parents didn't like the person I was becoming. But I had merged me coming out with the person I was becoming, as though they were the same. I didn't speak to my family for a long time after I came out because I thought they rejected me for who I was.
"When I look back now, it was ridiculous. It wasn’t my sexuality that my parents didn’t like; it was the environment I was in and what I was doing to myself and who I was trying to be, or trying not to be.
"I think it was just me figuring all that out. I just didn't give them time to process it."
Like a lot of queer people, Logarzo knew something was different when she was around 15 years old. She had dated boys before, but it was when she met her first girlfriend that she realised, "this is how it was meant to be."
But the joy and recognition she felt then was tangled up with fear, doubt, and self-loathing.
Coming from a traditional Catholic family on both sides, she didn't know any openly gay people. She had no role models, no anchor points, nobody she could ask for help. She had also internalised a lot of homophobia that, even these days, she is still trying to unlearn.
"It was a good four or five years that I was figuring out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to give to this world, because I felt like I still didn’t want to be gay," she says.
"I could feel the resistance from a lot of my external factors: I thought that people would judge me for my sexuality rather than what I was doing, the things I wanted to bring into the world.
"So when that happened, it was like self-sabotage: I would end up not doing good things in the world anyway because I was just denying my true self. It was a double-edged sword."
For the first few years after she came to consciousness of her sexuality, she kept that part of herself hidden. She'd sneak around with girlfriends, avoid conversations, or lie entirely.
She was already bullied in high school, mocked for her appearance and called a "dyke" — even before she'd told anybody. Her worst fears were realised when she first came out, confiding in a close school friend, who then didn't talk to her for three or four months.
"High school is cruel," she says.
"I was the first openly gay person in my high school to graduate. I couldn’t bring my partner to the school dance, all that stuff. So my first experience of telling someone I was gay didn’t go to plan.
"I hid my relationship with my first girlfriend for a really long time, until I got to the point where I was like ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t want to sneak around and have this hidden life.’
"It got to a point where I didn’t care, but I really cared internally about what people were saying. I just wanted it to be out there and be open."
That was when, at 17 years old, she told her parents. She remembers the scene vividly, the hot flush of emotion burned into her memory.
"One day I was speaking to my partner on the phone and said, 'I'm just going to go and tell them.' She hadn't told hers, either; we were both from traditional backgrounds, so we were both terrified.
"I walked downstairs, my parents were sitting on the couch. I walked up, turned off the tv, sat down in front of them, and I just started bawling my eyes out.
"I said, ‘I have something to tell you. I’m dating a girl. I don’t want you to be disappointed in me.’
"My dad didn’t say a word, he just stared through me. My mum didn’t say much, just like ‘where did this come from?’ Then I just got up and left. And that was it, that’s how I told my parents."
That was where Logarzo learned to cut and run. Feeling abandoned by the people she loved most, she slowly detached from her parents, shutting them out of that part of her life.
Instead, she turned elsewhere for love, support, validation. Her three best friends — Jessie, Kate and Jake — became a second family, helping pull her out of some of her darkest moments.
"When I went into dark places, I lost relationships with a lot of them because I went down this path that wasn’t me at all," she says.
"I needed that harsh reality check to be like, 'get your shit together because you might not be here any longer on this earth'. That was a dark place.
"I feel like every queer person has been through that, as sad as it is. But I also needed that really important place to be by myself to be like, ‘OK, I really do need help, I don’t want to push these people away, and I don’t want to lose them because they’ve been here through every step of the way.'"
It's a familiar story for many LGBTQIA+ people: rejected by their birth families, they often turn to others to cultivate a new one, a chosen family, a community of people who love and accept them for who they are.
For Logarzo, that family has also included the Matildas. Because while the players running around on that television screen in Greece were a reminder of what she no longer had, they also showed her what she could achieve if she set her mind back to it.
"Football definitely saved me, the Matildas was the thing that brought me back into being me as a person," she says.
"I always speak about how we spend more time with the girls than we do with our families; they become an extension of who we are and we all have a common goal and it’s nice to be able to have a family away from family.
"The Matildas have been great over the last couple of years. They’ve taken leaps and bounds to support us in who we are as individuals.
"This team is a safe space, and it has been for the longest time. It’s just never been spoken about outside of us. So for us to feel safe enough now to start coming out and talking about ourselves and our lives is really special."
Over the past few years, several Matildas have become gradually more public with their sexualities and relationships, including captain Sam Kerr.
Indeed, women's football more generally has long been a safe haven for LGBTQIA+ people — players, coaches, staff or fans — bound together, perhaps, by a shared experience of living on the margins of the mainstream.
"I think we're just tough bitches," Logarzo says.
"It's one of those sports that's so appealing because we get to be that: we want to be physical and aggressive and break out of the cookie-cutter mould.
"Football is the world game, so of course it’s always going to attract more diverse people to it.
"It’s a great team sport, and that’s what we need, deep down. We need the togetherness, to be able to feel that we’re part of something that we love.
"There isn’t anything else like football. It allows us to be able to find each other."
That's not to say that the women's game is all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to inclusion, though. Homophobia and transphobia still exist, sometimes even coming from within the football community itself.
She remembers the discourse that emerged during the Lisa De Vanna abuse allegations, calling the whole thing "a shit show".
"It made people in the queer space look like predators," she says, shaking her head.
"It was so detrimental to everybody in the Matildas and outside it. I was heartbroken."
Even in her own life, she tries to shatter the stereotypes that still exist around queer women in sport: what they look like, how they behave, what they do, where they belong.
"What I want to do is normalise being gay. Because it is; it’s normal. I don’t think about being with woman any differently to a heterosexual relationship. Love is love to me.
"People sometimes say to me, 'you don’t look like a lesbian', and I’m like, what does that even mean?
"This shouldn't be about how you look or how you act. I want to break down the stereotypes of that. Do you have to look a certain way? Do you need a shaved head and flying the rainbow flag? Is that what’s necessary to be part of the community? No. I don’t want people to put us in boxes; that’s not what it’s about."
Indeed, the stereotypes haven't stopped her or the team from being proud of who they are and standing up for the community they represent.
Last weekend, the Matildas became the first Australian national team of any code to wear Pride numbers on their jerseys during an international fixture, with several players speaking afterwards about the importance of visibility not just for themselves but for those who come after them.
While Logarzo didn't play that day as she continues to nurse a foot injury, she was at CommBank Stadium to receive her Rainbow Champion ambassadorship for 2023 Sydney WorldPride in recognition of the LGBTQIA+ and youth advocacy work she has done over the years.
That, she says, is the bigger legacy she wants to have in football.
"If there’s anything I want to leave the game with, it’s more off the field than on the field," she says.
"I want people to know that there’s so much to learn through sport, whether it’s at the highest level or not. It teaches you so much about who you are and what you need to learn about your body and your mind and your soul.
"The Matildas and the federation has allowed me to extend everything that I've learned through my career and have a platform to tell my story and help other people who may be going through the same thing.
"I want all younger people who were in my situation – who didn’t have people to look up to – to see that there's someone like them, and that they can aspire to be like them. I never had that. I want to be what I couldn't see."
And that is why we're here, on this blazing hot Sunday morning, at Tempe Recreational Reserve in Sydney's inner-west.
At the time of our interview, the sprawling football complex is set to host the International Gay and Lesbian Football Association World Championships: a football tournament run by and for the LGBTQIA+ community.
Logarzo is here as an ambassador for UnderArmour, helping the company launch its new Pride apparel collection.
She leans back against the cool metal of the bungalow post, dressed head-to-toe in rainbow patterns: singlet, shorts, even the soles of her shoes are a splash of colour.
Marching in Mardi Gras for the second year running, she represented one of the Australian LGBTQIA+ clubs that participated in the tournament, The Flying Bats.
She's now engaged to her partner, McKenzie, with whom she is planning to have kids as soon as she retires. And she's closer with her family than ever before, sharing all the parts of herself that she used to keep hidden.
The Logarzo who sat in that small Greek bar eight years ago, consumed by doubt and self-loathing, is now a distant memory.
She has found a way out of her own darkness; by living her truth, she has illuminated herself from within.
"I’ve been through a lot with finding out who I am," she says.
"I think it was one of those feelings that I never thought I would be in that position to be able to tell my story and inspire the next generation.
"For me, individually, to be in that position where I accepted myself was amazing. So to be able to speak on behalf of the federation – to be in the position I was in as the first [national team player in Mardi Gras] – it was all of those things I wanted to do off the field that’s making the biggest impact.
"Coming towards the end of my career, it’s all falling into place with what I’ve wanted to do. I feel like I’m making the change I want to. And that’s what makes me so emotional – because I’m so heavily invested in wanting to make people feel good about themselves.
"I'm just a normal person who came from a normal family and a normal childhood, and I went through all the trauma that I did, and I still came out the other side.
"If I’m somewhat of an inspiration, you can all do it, too."
