For two decades, Theresa Goh was synonymous with one thing: swimming. A Paralympian, national record-holder, and decorated athlete, she carried an identity that sparkled in medals and headlines. But when the cheering stopped in 2019 and retirement set in, she faced a quieter and more difficult question: who am I without the pool?
In this episode of Clean Your Toilet, Theresa sits with Susan Chen to talk about the identity shifts that come with leaving behind the one role that once defined you. For athletes, retirement often feels like free fall — not because the training stops, but because the mirror does. The world remembers your lane lines, your splits, your podiums. Few are ready to meet you as a human first.
Theresa shares how she navigated that liminal space: experimenting with shooting sports, working at the Singapore Disability Sports Council, and refusing to let her story calcify around a single chapter. She speaks candidly about the stubbornness of public perception — how strangers still ask if she’s competing, and how retirement can feel like a refusal others won’t accept. Susan reflects on similar transitions in business and identity, drawing out how reinvention isn’t about discarding the old self, but layering it into something broader.
This conversation also touches the deeper currents beneath sport: disability advocacy, the invisibility of emotional labor, and the cultural fixation on external achievement. Theresa reminds us that medals are powerful symbols, but they cannot replace meaning — and that meaning is built in the quieter hours when no one is watching.
Key questions emerge:
How do you step beyond a label that others refuse to let go of?
What happens when the public clings to your past success more tightly than you do?
How do you find identity not in medals, but in the everyday work of growth and care?
Theresa’s honesty reframes retirement not as an end, but as a beginning — a chance to keep moving, to keep discovering, and to build a self that no podium could ever contain.
🧼 Curiosity is the clean water.
🚽 Old labels are the drain.
💩 Nostalgia and fear of change? That’s the clog.
Step out of the pool. Step into yourself.
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