Freedom to Fail

I recently received a text message from one of my teammates.  It simply read, “I’m sorry Joel.”

There was nothing to be sorry about.

I’d watched him fight.  He’s young with a lot of drive and desire.  I’ve worked with him a fair amount, trying to find a way to leverage my years of experience into something of value for the next generation.  He’s been a pleasure to work with—a great work ethic and willing to listen.

But that night things didn’t go his way.  He fought a hard fight and came away with a loss.  He seemed to think it was important to apologize to me.

It was not, but I understand.  I’ve lost plenty of times in front of my team and I hate the way it feels.

It had almost gone exactly according to the game plan up until the very last moment.  I had done everything I thought I was supposed to do—all the things we had practiced and drilled.  He was a good striker with decent takedown defense.  The plan had been to keep the fight on our feet long enough that I could create an opening and hit the takedown.  I was a better grappler than him and the plan was to take this fight to the mat but to take my time doing so.

Everything seemed to go according to plan.  I knew he was a good kickboxer, so I made effort to stay extra vigilant with my guard.  We exchanged some punches and a couple kicks—he hit hard, but my defense was on point that night.  I touched him a couple times, too.  We moved around the cage trading offense and defense until I saw the moment I was looking for—I shot in and snagged a single-leg.  He defended with solid hips, questing for an underhook and pressuring my head, but I bounced his back to the cage and, as we rebounded away, pivoted him to the mat.  I landed him on his back with me in his closed guard—a place where I knew I had an advantage.

I could feel a bit of his desperation—he also knew I was a better grappler.  He started throwing wild punches and elbows, shifting his hips with an almost erratic abandon.  I cracked a couple of short punches and built posture.  I pressed a hand into his hips and started my knee-cut pass, feeling for the technique.

He threw up a desperate armbar that landed deep.  It surprised me.  I hadn’t expected it.  He caught my arm and extended.  I made some loud noise—a cry or a shout.  The referee heard my sound and considered it a verbal tap.  He stopped the fight.

It was over that fast.

There was nothing to argue and nowhere to protest.  With all those bright lights on me, with all the noise around me, I looked out over the convention center on the other side of the cage where I had fought.  I wasn’t sure where my team was sitting, but I knew they were there.  They had paid to come watch me fight—the tickets were not cheap.  Many of them had been in my training camp—they had shed their own blood and sweat to assure that I was prepared.  I had coaches out there, too.  They had done so much for me and I had failed.

I managed to find way back to the dressing room area, wishing there was a way I could rewind time and try again.  But time can’t be rewound.  I had to live, now, with what had happened.  I found my phone and scribed a short message to the thread for our competition team.

“Sorry, team.  Terrible performance.”

I was sitting on a bench with my phone in my hand, despondent over my humiliation.  I should have done better.  I could have done better.  I was frustrated and ashamed with myself.  I hate losing and I hate losing in front of the people I love.

My phone started to buzz—I guess I had remembered to silence the ringtone at some point.  I looked down at the messages as they began to arrive.

“Joel, you’re the most valuable member of our team.  There’s nobody I’d rather fight with or fight for.”

“What a great fight.  I’m so proud of you.”

“You’re a true warrior.  That was amazing to watch.”

Of course, I hate losing—I don’t think I would be OK with myself if I enjoyed it.  Losing is a natural element of the combat arts.  This is not a sport where teams face each other.  It is a place where two warriors face each on the field of battle and only one can win—or both can lose (we call that a draw)—and one must lose.  There can be only one winner.

Defeats are common in this space.

I lost my last three MMA fights.  It was a terrible feeling.  I had earned enough reputation in the fight community that I wasn’t getting easy opponents.  I fought some really tough fighters, every one of them younger than me.  When I knew my MMA career was finished, I tried to fill the void with more Jiu-jitsu tournaments.  I was a newly promoted black belt and my competition was staunch.

With every loss I looked out into the crowds—or to my corner or up into the bleachers—and I imagined I could see the disappointment in the eyes of those who had come to support me, the ones who had trained at my side, and the people who paid money to watch me do this thing they thought I was supposed to be good at.  Every loss took a toll—not the losses themselves, but the way I thought others were perceiving me in the context of my losses.  I grew weary with disappointing them, so I stopped placing myself in places where I could disappoint them.  I stopped competing.  What I didn’t risk couldn’t be lost.

I invested myself in coaching and teaching, instead.  These are honorable pursuits that I remain passionate about to this day.  I have knowledge to pass on—most of it earned from inside of the crucible.  But part of me—a large part of me—was using those roles as a shield, as something to hide behind.  I exploited them as an excuse, telling myself and others that I was too invested in my coaching to train properly for any more competitions.

I was lying to myself—or maybe just being less than honest with myself.  I was frightened.  I was frightened of disappointing my people again.  I had gained a certain status in my circles and my team thought I was good at this fighting stuff.  The thought of proving them wrong terrified me.  I was the guy who taught them the things and failure would immediately undermine my credibility.

That’s what lived in my mind.

For some people, for the people like me—for the person who is me—defeats can become terribly isolating things.  So much of me is desperately entangled into what I do and how I perform.  It’s a stronghold of mine.  Some broken part of my mind has learned to link my value to the way I believe others perceive me.  When I perform well—says my broken brain—I am loved and accepted.  When I perform poorly—says my broken brain in a much louder voice—I am despised and rejected.

In moments—my many moments—of loss, it is my tendency to alienate myself away from those who love me the most.  I wrestle and struggle in isolation with feelings of shame and guilt.  It is a battle I cannot win by myself.  It is the worst place I can exist, in that place of aloneness.  It is the worst place I can be, but it is the place where I compulsively drive myself.  I convince myself to crave it even though I have no desire to be there.  I withdraw into myself—into the place where only my demons live despite knowing that I cannot live with my demons.

There are lots of words that live inside my head in times such as these.  They fight for preeminence, looking for a way to be first to the front of my thoughts.  They each seek to plant a flag of victory and to claim dominance over the way my mind processes.  They bring with them thoughts of condemnation and self-loathing.  They tell me I don’t deserve the acceptance and love of others.  They scream accusations into my ear—sometimes silently and sometimes as loud as thunder in the still of night.  They tell me I am undesired and undesirable.  They tell me that I have wasted the love and admiration of others and that I deserve the misery of the place where I must be alone, by myself, with the sounds of nothing but the shadow places of my mind.

It is a terrible place.   I tell myself I deserve to be there.

I am wrong in every respect.

God has been dealing with me in this area so much of late.  I struggle to reveal my failures in front of those I know.  I horde my vulnerability and build my facades.  I choose to hide the hurts and only reveal them in deliberate moderation to a specifically chosen few—and even with those whom I choose, seldom do I give complete honesty.

Since you put away lying, Speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. (Ephesians 4:25) 

Something changed recently.  I don’t really know what it is.  Maybe I do and I just can’t find the words to describe it.  It didn’t happen overnight, necessarily, but something in my spirit turned an expected corner when I realized that I had been secluding myself without even realizing what I was doing to myself.  I was trying to hide my failures behind pretenses of indestructibility.

Those who have chosen me—the ones who have been chosen by me—deserve more than my facades.  They deserve my failures as much as they deserve my successes.  They have a right to my losses as much as they do to my wins.  They have chosen me and they are a chosen refuge.  To hide myself from them is to rob them of what I have to offer in my worst moments.  It is in my worst moments, I think, that I might have the most to offer.  When I am broken and shattered my authenticity somehow moves to the front.  When I feel strong, I feel like I can hide my flaws—probably because that’s when I’m best at lying to myself.

Carry one another's burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2) 

I can’t pretend that the choice to share my failures is ever an easy one.  I don’t have a switch that allows me to turn my anxiety off and on.  I have to live with the mind God gave me and pray that He can turn it to our advantage.    The choice to step forward into my failures is never easy, but it is always fruitful.  The choice to share my failures compounds benefits to an incalculable degree.

The price of success is failure.  I cannot learn to win if I don’t first learn to lose and sometimes the cost of a single win is several losses.  I desperately need room to fail, because failure is the natural path to eventual victory.

There is an indescribable freedom to be found in knowing that my failures do not cost me the love of those who have chosen me.  Their choice of me—their love and acceptance—is not predicated on my performance.  It is predicated upon nothing more than their chosen love of me.  I can’t fail my way out of their love.

That allows me to be real.

I remember hearing…salty…language fall out of one of my spiritual leaders’ mouths.  I’m not advocating for the use of harsh words, by any means, but that moment signaled an intense rawness.  The mutual friendship between the two of us allowed for genuine conversation—no filters, no lies, no minimization.  Sometimes our emotions spilled out in seemingly sordid language due to the unfettered nature of our emotion.  We were sharing our real selves, and our real selves were the selves that weren’t carefully curated, forward facing cardboard cutouts.  The real selves we shared included the failures we had so often fought to conceal.

Willingness to share failure is seldom pretty.  Maybe that’s what makes it beautiful.

Once I shed the burden that is the fear of failing—the fear of losing the love of those I love—I experience a lack of inhibition that can only be found in true liberty.  I found that when I started competing again.  I’d had an epiphany of sorts, I think, when I stepped back into the realm of competition.  I realized how much my team loved me and how much they wanted for me.  I suddenly recognized the steadfast fact that they weren’t going to disown me in my losses.   That knowledge relaxed me to a point where I was able to start enjoying competition again, but without the weight of fear.

I found joy in it once more.

I was sweating, and I was tired, but I was smiling.  I had entered what had proven to be a tough bracket full of tough competitors.  My body was exhausted but my mind felt sharp.  I was moving well and had managed to get to an advantageous head-and-arm position on a difficult opponent who had made me fight for every inch.  From here I had a chance to earn back the two points that separated the two of us on the scoreboard.

As often happens at black belt levels, we were fighting for every inch, and every inch was a small war of its own.  Our match was nothing if not a series of small wars chained into a longer narrative of larger battles.  He was fighting my hands, and I was fighting for grips.

That’s when I heard my coach yelling from the edge of the mats.  “If you don’t throw it, you’re not a man!”

Now, I knew he wasn’t questioning my manhood, but I did know what he was talking about.  There is a technique from that position that I’ve used for a long time.  My coach knows I love that technique because I’ve used it on him hundreds of times—literally—over the years.  It’s kind of a thing I’m known for.  My hand-position wasn’t quite there, and my body was a little bit out of position.  But I figured I might as well take a shot.

What did I have to lose?

Once I realized that I can’t lose the thing I love most, what really is there to lose?  There is nothing I can do that can separate me from my God and my God’s family.  My God will always love me, no matter how poorly I perform.  The family He has designed for me will always love me, too.  Knowing that I can’t underperform my way out of being loved might be what allows me to eventually perform to some level of exceptionalism.  If I’m not afraid to lose, I might eventually learn to win.

For I am persuaded that not even death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come, hostile powers, height or depth, or any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord! (Romans 8:38-39)