The Kind of Person I Want To Be

“I like to think that I’m the kind of person who picks herself back up after something like this and keeps fighting, but this time I didn’t, I couldn’t, and that’s what hurts the most.”

Whenever I tell people that I do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, especially people that don’t have a clue what the fuck it is, they probably think that I’m kicking, punching, or otherwise beating the shit out of someone, maybe in some white-walled room full of people in uniforms and international flags on the wall, maybe a street fight. I don’t really know what other people think. Hell, if you asked me what I thought BJJ was before March of 2017, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to imagine exactly what it is I now do when I say I practice this sport.

The long and short of it is a lot of people think I’m tough, both on the mat and off of the mat. When I’ve asked people I work with about their first impressions of me, I’ve heard I’m cold, intimidating, and a little bit prickly at worst, and badass and tough at best.

At the gym, I’m probably known as as one of the toughest and most consistent people who comes in to train (among those who aren’t pursuing some sort of future on a competitive circuit): I’m there six days a week unless I am legitimately injured, and I put almost everything else in my life second to my jiu-jitsu schedule. I am uncompromising about it, and those who knew me before I started this sport generally don’t mind — they recognize how good it has been for me, even if they don’t understand it.

This story of “the tough girl who does tough things” hangs together nicely, but it’s not that simple. In the same way that you see people who were bullied in their younger years (whether for being nerdy, fat, poor or something else) overcompensating for their outcast status in adulthood, I, too, overcompensate. They tell you to “fake it until you make it” and I am in a perpetual state of faking toughness because there is nothing more I want to be than the person who is actually tough, resilient and unshakable.

This weekend, I wasn’t able to keep that appearance of toughness up: not to myself and not to anyone around me who would’ve caught a glimpse of me leaving the gymnasium, cloaked in a hoodie and trying to hide my face from my opponents and teammates and strangers alike. The only thing I was fighting at that point were the tears.

One of the things that I love about jiu-jitsu, and what made the sport so addictive to me at the beginning was all the ways in that it turned my brain off. When I didn’t know what I was doing, all I could do was think about how to not get crushed by someone bigger, stronger, and more experienced than I was. The moment I started having a clue and caring about actually being good at jiu-jitsu (and not just about getting a good workout) the thinking started to creep in again. Some of that thinking was purely logical and tactical, focusing on how to get out of bad positions, or at least not get completely smashed. Much of that thinking was the product of fear about all the ways in which I might get injured and how badly an injury would set me back physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Stick around in this sport long enough and you’ll have hundreds of little everyday pains and at least one condition that will force you to take significant time away from training: Nubby joints and fingers that no longer bend the right way. Cracked ribs. Cauliflower ears. Broken arms and ankles and wrists. Torn ACLs and MCLs. Pregnancy. I don’t worry so much about the injury as much as the spiral of what happens after the injury. If you read what I wrote last month, you already know how much training jiu-jitsu is tied to managing an eating disorder, and if you didn’t read it, now you know.

In March, I took a bad fall in judo from an outer knee reap. It was a total accident, and of all the people who could have been involved in the fall, it was one of the four people I train with who would want to hurt me the least and would feel the guiltiest about injuring me. It was the day I was supposed to board a plane to Peru, and I should have been concerned about the fall preventing me from hiking the Inca Trail, but all I could think about was how my knee would affect my ability to train when I got back. Over the next ten days of being somewhat active but not doing jiu-jitsu, all I could think about was how this injury could sideline me, how upset that would make me, and how likely I’d be to binge eat over it.

This is the fear that consumes me and holds me back more than anything else in jiu-jitsu: right now, I generally like the way I look, am in the best shape of my life, and am getting better at a sport I enjoy. I am terrified that one bad fall is all it would take to light the fuse and explode me back into last year’s version of myself, 20 pounds heavier, deeply depressed, and obsessively self-loathing.

Every time I come remotely close to being injured to the point of not training, that’s the fear that comes in. And that’s the fear that came into the picture during the competition on Saturday.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to know nothing about my opponents so I think about nothing and expect nothing — that way, I have nothing to think about. If I focus on myself and play my own game instead of spending all my time thinking about hers, I’m probably better off. Paraphrasing training partners far more experienced than I am, “If you start a match on your terms, with your grips, and you’re the one who’s one second ahead, even at the highest level, the match is in your favor.” Unfortunately, I’d already fought two of the girls I was about to fight again and I couldn’t prevent my brain from analyzing my previous matches, sizing up my opponents, and evaluating my odds for the upcoming matches.

The first girl I was slated to fight I’d lost to by referee’s decision earlier that day, although according to my two teammates watching, and even her coach, I probably should have won. Blonde hair, blue eyes, big cheeks, with a braid in her hair, she’d have looked like a character out of a Sound of Music holiday card. She was 18, making her a decade younger than me. Based on what she was wearing for this competition and watching her in another match, it was clear she came from a wrestling background. I remember looking at her and thinking I was more athletic, in better shape, had better cardio, and that fighting me again, she should be prepared to fight her hardest because she won our last match by a very lucky decision.

The match began and she got a takedown. I felt my knee twist, my remaining “good” knee, not the bad knee I hurt in March, and I already started feeling the fear that plagues me every time I get close to a debilitating injury in this sport. I couldn’t remind myself in that moment that I should’ve just let her get the takedown, it was only two points. I was better off abandoning ship there and starting my own game from the best place I could given the circumstances instead of resisting some technique over which she had more control and more obvious experience doing. I remember getting in a position I had been in on Thursday night while training and asking one of the black belts at our gym how to get out of it. He showed me and I didn’t think of practicing it too much more because I had made the mistake in previous tournaments of drilling something that appears less frequently among girls of my size and level. When I found myself in that position again, to my surprise, I was scrambling to remember what to do and I couldn’t think my way out of it. When she got an ankle lock on me, I similarly tried to cobble together the escape paths that I had practiced months ago, only to think, “Fuck! If I hadn’t been in Peru on that miserable vacation, I would’ve had this escape drilled into me. I am going to tear my knee if I try to get out of this the wrong way but I don’t remember what to do, and I don’t want to tap out of this but I am so scared my knee is going is going to get torn by this 18-year-old.”

At some point, I am told, after I had gotten out of the ankle lock, swept her and held my fucking ground for the full 3 seconds for the referee to award me two points for the sweep, she had climbed onto my back and sunk her arm in for a choke. I remember resisting because I felt my neck crack like someone running their fingers down all the keys of a piano. I remember wanting to tap but also not wanting to and I was so baffled and pissed off at myself and how it had gotten to the point where this girl had climbed onto my back. This was the girl I should’ve beaten a couple hours ago. I didn’t think she was as tough as I was, as she had been crying shortly after one of her lost matches and I wanted to be another reason for her to cry today because I would’ve beaten her, fair and square, given the second chance to fight her. Instead, I was the one who would leave in tears.

I don’t remember tapping but I am told I tapped right as I went unconscious for a few seconds. I remember feeling lightheaded, only vaguely aware of where I was, and very confused as the referee gave me a hand to help me up and stood me up next my opponent to give the final decision. I saw the score was 2–2, and at first I thought he was standing us up to restart — maybe we had gone out of bounds — but the match was over. I had been choked out and put to sleep and I felt absolutely humiliated and scared and upset and all I wanted was to go home.

The thing that hurts the most from that day isn’t my knee from getting twisted, even though I cannot walk straight or without pain and will probably have to go lightly as I train this week as I haven’t since I got oral surgery 3 months ago. It isn’t my neck, even though I can’t move it quite right or lie down without shrugging my shoulders to be in a more comfortable position. It isn’t my pride, even though it did sting that I lost a match I really wanted to win and I got put to sleep by an opponent who I felt I could have beaten — or at least not lost to by submission.

What hurts the most is that I had two more matches that I was supposed to fight on Saturday and instead of being on the mat to tap hands, look my next opponent in the eye and, unshaken by my previous defeat and fight again, I was full of fear and shedding tears in the parking lot trying to write down everything that had happened and why it was all so painful. I had the choice in that moment to be the person I wanted to be and I couldn’t find the courage for it. The fear of injury, the feeling of shame, and anxiety of what worse things could happen with two more rounds on the mat and my head out of sorts beat me out of stepping back on the mat.

The person that I want to be is the person who, after taking a break and a sip of water and listening to a song, could get my head screwed back on straight and could be ready to fight again even though the next two matches would only have been harder in many ways. The person I wanted to be, even if I lost the next two matches, would’ve been the one about whom the girls I fought and their coaches or significant others would’ve said “Damn, I couldn’t have picked myself up the way that girl did. She has a lot of heart.” The person I wanted to be would have cleared her mind of all fear of potential injury and internal chatter telling her that to get up and to fight again was pure insanity.

I remember as we pulled out of the the parking lot, we passed by at least three people we knew. I buried my face in my hands as I thought, “What am I going to say on Monday to these people from the gym? What am I going to say when all my friends and coworkers ask, ‘How did it go?’ What are they going to think and what are they going to say?

I thought back to the words of a friend of mine: “People don’t think about you as much as you think about them thinking about you.” No matter what story I tell them, no one will think very much of it. This is a story and a memory and a moment that is really just mine, and it only defines me (for better or for worse) as much as I allow it to. Whether I say, “It didn’t go great don’t want to talk about it,” or I provide detailed play-by-plays of every match doesn’t matter. By this time, next week, no one will remember this except for me. The question on the table is what do I want to take from this experience. There are a few things:

1. Everyone who watched my matches tells me I have should be proud of how I fought in the the first part of the tournament, and that it was a matter of small details that could have changed where I ended up standing on the podium. My jiu-jitsu looked good out there and the hard work I’ve been doing is showing.
2. I didn’t choose to stop fighting forever. I chose to not keep fighting that day. Even as I walked out of that gymnasium, I knew that I’d be back on the grind on Monday and preparing to sign myself up for another competition in a month or two.
3. While I have to live with the choice I made that day, I don’t have to make the same choice again.

On Saturday, I wasn’t the person I want to be, and now, all I can do is try to capture this feeling. In order to be the person I want to be I have to reckon with the person I was this weekend and remember how much stronger my fear was compared to my resolve to keep going. I have to accept that this will not be the last time I will be shaken and broken, and I have to prepare myself for the next time I have this choice, when I hope I’ll choose to stay instead of run and fight the fear instead of letting the fear win and keep me from fighting. For today, I’ll resolve to make peace with the person I was this weekend and take steps today to be the person other people believe me to be and, more importantly, the person I want to be.