What Professional Soccer Player Midge Purce Can’t Live Without

It’s hard to find good lip balm that simply does its job without being sticky or without somehow drying out your lips and making you even more dependent on it. But Blistex is really moisturizing. I have the daily moisturizing one and this repair one that I put on before bed. My lips feel great when I wake up, and I sleep really comfortably.

My boyfriend introduced me to it, oddly enough. I really like lip oils. I like theDior lip oil,and I have probably tried every lip-oil-balm combo that you can think of, but leave it to a man to get a drugstore lip balm, and it’s the best and top-tier above all the things I’ve ever tried. It’s the holy grail to me.

My first Kindle was a gift from my boyfriend for Valentine’s Day a few years ago, after I told him that’s what I wanted and that I wanted him to get it for me for Valentine’s Day. Then I lost it on some soccer trip, and I just got a new one. My entire team has a Kindle. Rose Lavelle, who’s a fellow reader, gifted the whole team Kindles when she got a deal with them, which was extremely generous and amazing. I go everywhere with my Kindle. I am the type of person where my mind will keep going and keep thinking about what I have to do the next day. What was I working on today? And like, it just won’t stop. So being able to read at night without blue light and fall asleep reading and not watching television or being overstimulated by something … it’s been game changing for my nighttime routine.

I researched a lot ofred-light masksbefore buying this one, because I wanted to make sure that I was using the right one. I’ve gone through a couple, and a bunch of brands have sent me different ones. With this one, I wake up in the morning and feel like I actually see a difference. Like I look brighter. I have a lot of events where I have to put on makeup, or I don’t have to, but I choose to put on makeup. I have skin that’s decently sensitive, not too sensitive, but makeup will make me break out.
Plus I’m sweating all the time because I’m playing sports, so the blue-light setting has been really good at calming my skin when it gets irritated. And I get a lot of compliments after using the red light. I shower, use cleanser, and then go straight into the mask, because otherwise what happens is oils and moisturizers can cause the light to reflect so it doesn’t actually penetrate the skin. Then I’ll read or do a LEGO set or do some work or watch a show with my boyfriend while it’s on.

I do not drink coffee. I’m a huge tea drinker, and I think potentially because I romanticize most of life, I have a few tea sets. I’ll have my dad over and we’ll have tea. I’ll have tea with one of my teammates. I like to have tea parties with my niece. I really enjoy not just the tea itself, but the experience that I create with it.

This is probably the tea I drink most. I love green tea. I really love, oh my gosh, golden oolong. But English breakfast is the one I drink most with my dad. When I was younger, if I was studying, he would always ask me if I wanted a cup of tea, and that’s the one he would make for me. So I think I’m a bit emotionally attached to it. He’s not British or anything; he’s from Washington, D.C., and he drinks coffee. But it’s our family thing. It’s intimate. One time, I remember I was upset about something, and my aunt said to me, “I’m gonna make you a cup of tea. A cup of tea makes everything better.” And since then, I feel like it does.

I don’t drink alcohol either. But I do love ginger beer. It is so refreshing. I buy the big pack of Fever Tree ginger beer at Costco; that gets you 24. It’s my version of having something really refreshing at the end of a hard day. I also like to eat pretty well, and I don’t drink a lot of soda. But it’s like how everyone always says Coke tastes better out of a glass bottle — this comes in a glass bottle. Or I’ll pour it into a nice glass and enjoy it.

Thissleep maskis amazing, and I’m not just saying that because I knowDr. Jason. I’m someone who is very sensitive to light in the morning, so I wake up with the sun; it’s been inconvenient at times, when you’re an athlete and you’re coming home from away trips and whatnot. I do have blackout curtains, but the Therabody mask is weighted on the outsides, and it has these eye craters so that it’s not flat on your eyes and gives you some space. So there’s no pressure on your eyes, and then the rims kind of close in around the edges. It blocks out any light that could seep through. You don’t even know what time it is when you have it on. I have never had a sleep mask that’s this efficient. And it’s absolutely the best on away trips when I don’t have amazing blackout curtains. I only use the mask. I never turn it on. I have teammates who use the vibration settings and love it. But I never need to turn it on because it’s so good at blocking out all the light.

I really love candles and incense. But this one was probably the first candle that I actually spent more money on than I would usually justify spending on a candle. And it has been absolutely delightful. When I light it, I get sleepy somehow. I find it really soothing. I’m a cozy, cozy girl. There’s this amazing bookstore at New Jersey’s Mall at Short Hills,Indigo, and they had these candles for a while, and I would always walk past them. And then one day, I stopped when I was buying a book, and I was like,Well, let me get a candle. I was smelling them all, and I was like,Wow, these smell really great. So I bought three different ones, and this was the one I loved the most.

A lot of my teammates journal and I journal as well. So I was on the hunt for a really good pen. I always say I don’t steal, but if you leave a really good pen around me, I’m gonna take it. And this pen is so amazing that I ended up giving one to all of my teammates who journal. I bought it in bulk. It’s also one of the pens I use on thepodcast.I take notes and come up with a lot of questions on the fly. I think that’s something that separates my podcast from a lot of sports journalism that you usually hear. At least that’s the feedback I’ve gotten from the interviews that I’ve had — that it really does feel like a conversation between athletes rather than just a reporter or a journalist having the intended questions.