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I don’t know that my face would have ever been considered pretty, but it’s a whole lot less pretty than it could have been. My nose is visibly crooked, my ears look like chewed bubblegum, and a patchwork of scars lends some kind of character to my façade. I remember the origin of every one of those scars, and I can put a name and a place to them all. Every one comes with a memory. I remember standing on the apron of the ring with a couple other aspiring fighters while on

I don’t always know the difference between the surreal and the unreal. Maybe there is no difference. I’m not sure, and this was a moment where I was doubly unsure. I looked out over the group that had gathered at the end of our belt-testing session and found myself weighted by a heavy significance. It had been a large testing group, and my academy still holds standards and expectations, so everyone had worked hard. Before any one of these individuals could progress to t

At that moment I was a little bit impressed with my own insanity. I didn’t regret my decisions, but I was reveling in their consequences. I wouldn’t have it any other way. In a moment of impulsivity, I’d signed up to compete in this tournament. I do that kind of thing. My brain gets weird and I decide to get spontaneous. I clicked a couple online boxes and signed up for an upcoming tournament that several fighters from my team were scheduled to participate in. I was g

I was ready to be done torturing myself and had come to the end of a thing. Now my mind was trying to bring words to it. Fortunately, there was a good person on the other side of my conversation. I was fumbling and mumbling, which is especially frustrating to someone like me who sets so much store in the power of language. In trying to find the right words I was, instead, finding a lot of them. Most of them weren’t the right ones. Thankfully, he is a patient man and allo

I was recently sitting in a small room with a few people and speaking directly with a man that the years have taught me to admire and trust. We were having a deep conversation about life—my life—and challenges and difficulties and all of the things that those things include. After some very intent consideration on his part, he looked up and told me that I should look into the story of Gideon, because something about me brought the story of Gideon to his heart. I’ve read t

Most of my fighting career was spent travelling the Northwest with my friend Joey. We trained with—and against—each other almost every night. We travelled to gyms and academies all over, attended seminars, and competed in the same events. When I look back it’s not hard to identify that he was the training partner I spent the most time with, traded the most blows with, a shared the most blood with. He was there for my first fight (a disastrous endeavor) and still there thr

Give me the gift of your vulnerability and I will galvanize you into something undefeatable I heard this from a very influential and well-known teacher with international influence. He had a lot of good information. He also had PowerPoint slides—so many of them. My brain had a lot of time to think about this while I tried to pretend I was paying attention to the material my workplace had paid for. My thoughts did what they tend to do when left unsupervised—they led me d

I was smart enough to pull off the road when my cellphone rang. I remember that I pulled off into the parking lot of a bowling alley. It’s strange the things that I remember. I had heard my phone ring and quickly glanced at the screen to see that it was my manager calling. I had been expecting a phone call from him and spark of anxious excitement flashed in my chest. He wouldn’t be calling if he didn’t have the news I was waiting for. I was fresh off a good win agains

I’m not necessarily the most observant guy. I live in a relaxing form of oblivion from time to time. However, I do notice things eventually—like certain themes that keep occurring near me or around me. Eventually I have to notice them if they show up enough. Maybe the theme isn’t popping up more frequently than any other time. Rather, it might be that I’m noticing it where I didn’t notice it before. I think that’s the sort of thing I must pay even more attention to. I

I remember standing next to him for the photo op and realizing how outsized I was. I think the moment of anger and frustration I experienced was completely natural. This was an obviously shady transaction. Preparations for this fight had been weird. I was told that I needed to weigh in on the day of the fight rather than the night before. Standard protocol was to weigh in the night before, but I was told that the venue was only available for the day of the actual fights

I’m sure his intentions were good. I think he meant the best. His best was just a bit awkward. I met him early in my fighting career. He was a coach and promoter, and I was a young fighter who fought on many of his cards against many of his fighters. He had been around for my first fight (it was on his fight card against his fighter) and had hovered near most of my subsequent fights. In all honesty, he had done me a bit dirty a few times over the years—things were a bi

There is so much sound that there is no sound. It’s like background noise, but a deafening sort of background noise. I am trying to focus on my coach. He has something to say, but there is nothing but chaos in my mind. I see only narrowly. My hood is over my head, trapping the heat and sweat from my warmup rounds. I flex my hands, feeling the tape and the gloves that were painstakingly prepared. I see the curtain in front of me. There is light beyond it—the dancing c

I know my place in the Jiu-Jitsu hierarchy. I know how good I am and how good I’m not. I’m not a world-class competitor, but I’ve had many opportunities to train with world-class competitors. That’s how I know I’m not one of them. But I love how many times I’ve had the honor of training with the best my sport has to offer. It’s one of my favorite things about combat sports. I remember the first world champion I met. He was, at the time, an absolute pinnacle of the sp

There’s something in me—something about me—that loves to fight. I love the challenge and I love the confrontation. I love the process—the misery of training camp and the joy of small victories that are found in exhaustion. I love the camaraderie of hard rounds with teammates aned the mutually agreed destruction of for the betterment of one another. I love the way the fight hones me and sharpens me and makes me stronger. I love fighting. I love to fight. And I can’t

Sometimes conversations remind of things that I once spent a lot of time thinking about. I was drilling technique with a friend in preparation for a soon and upcoming tournament that we were both preparing to compete in. Our preparation was technical and tactical, of course, because that’s how we prepare for these kinds of things. In the middle of our practice she paused, looked at me, and said, “I don’t understand why I’m doing this to myself.” It caused me to pause, to

It’s a thing I tend to do because it’s the way I am made to be. Sometimes it works in my favor and sometimes…well…not so much. I’ve got a stubborn streak and a slight compulsion toward obsession. It makes things interesting. I had taken a Saturday with my coach and a few teammates to attend a seminar being presented by someone who, at that time, was considered as one of the best Jiu-jitsu players in the world. I was fascinated by what he was teaching and, to be honest,

I think about my anxious mind a lot. It’s come up in the things I write frequently of late, which is probably an indicator of how much I’ve been thinking about it. That’s one of the symptoms of an anxious mind—it thinks too much. At least, some people might think that it thinks too much. Most of the time I’m one of those people. I think my mind thinks too much. I think anxiety is the label we put on the idea of thinking too much. When I decided to explore the idea of

One of the first lessons I learned in Jiu-jitsu was the importance of posture. It was drilled into when I first started training all those years ago in that old warehouse somewhere in some industrial area of Portland. My coach was insistent that all of his students learn to find posture. He drilled us relentlessly. I was confused when I first heard the concept—I thought of posture as sitting up straight and paying attention in school. But, after I had stuck around a lit

I have an overly active mind. At least that’s how it feels to me. I’ve never had anyone else’s mind, so I don’t have a point of reference. I just know that my own mind is always on the move and never settles down. It’s always loud and it’s never quiet. I’m bad at silence. I barely remember my first several fights. They kind of all blend into one event. Everything was action versus reaction and pure adrenaline-fueled instinct. I didn’t have the discipline or experie

I was talking to a young man who was having a rough day. He was one of our youth competitors—a talented young grappler with excellent skills who worked incredibly hard at his Jiu-jitsu. But today had been a rough one. He had lost all his matches. He had recently promoted in belt rank and this was his first tournament at the new level. It had not gone well for him. As someone who had cleaned up his previous brackets with impressive wins, he’d had an expectation that he