The year 2008 is a special one in my football life. That one year quietly, but unmistakably, pushed me toward the “next version” of myself. The questions that had started to sprout in 2007 — “Who am I?” “Where do I want to go?” — began to show faint traces of answers in 2008. University, club, and one more stage — the national team. While swaying between these three environments, I kept searching for my own “axis.” I didn’t know what was right, and I didn’t have anything firm

Why share these journals now? I’ve been writing in notebooks every single day since 2006 — about football, about life, about myself.Frustration, fear, inferiority, joy, determination — all of it lives inside these twenty-plus volumes. Recently, I went back and read those old journals.And I was reminded of just how clumsy I was at twenty, how desperately I wanted to grow, and how fiercely I was fighting myself every single day. There were countless moments when I thought: “I w