How Jiu-Jitsu Ruined My Life
Everything stinks and it's all my fault.
At 19, I fantasized about a dream.
I wanted a life that allowed me to train martial arts all day, travel, think, and tell stories.
It was a simple, but difficult dream.
I also, somehow, wanted to be paid for this. I did not have any idea how I was going to do this, and I had little hope that it was possible. I was always a realist and thought my dream would always remain a dream. I was not cynical, but I was not confident.
Times have changed, however. I’m much less of a realist these days and much more of a dream-chaser — for better and for worse.
In hindsight, when I think about my choices over the last few years, the biggest difference between my dream and the dreams of others is that I didn’t view this as a “dream” life. I viewed it as an obligation to myself and my future to create the life that I had fantasized about.
I knew what I wanted, and I was willing to do whatever I must to get it.
This decision has almost ruined my life, and it continues to do so every single day.
Jiu-Jitsu ruined my life, and I’m pretty happy about that.
Corny motivational platitudes are not real life.
In the Jiu-Jitsu community, people always say “Jiu-Jitsu saved my life” to express how deeply they feel about the value martial arts training adds to their life.
This was not my experience, probably because from the start I chose to make Jiu-Jitsu my entire life.
Choosing to go down this path of martial arts and later writing and storytelling, and somehow wanting to do it for a living has nearly ruined my life many times now. It’s cost me friends, partners, money, and more.
There are moments where I feel like I’m cheating real life and moments where I feel like I’m running from it. More negatively, there are moments when I’m engulfed in the agony of what I can only describe as “the consequences of my choices”.
Choosing to follow my passion is cute, it makes me mildly unique, and it makes my taxes a bit confusing, but this did not “save my life”.
“Jiu-Jitsu saved my life” wouldn’t just be an oversimplification — it would be wrong. The story has not been that pleasant.
“My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams-like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.” — Herman Hesse, Demian
The real thing is stinkier.
My actual life is a bit stinkier than it looks online.
It’s a lot of sweat, mostly. But there’s more to the stink than just the scent in my backpack after a hard training session.
Sometimes the amount of money that I made that week stinks. Sometimes my performance in a Jiu-Jitsu match or tournament is what stinks. Sometimes what I wrote that day stinks. Sometimes the choices that I make are what stinks.
Stink is everywhere, it’s just that usually people only pay attention to the highlights.
Instagram is a big culprit of this, but it’s not just social media. Any digital medium (even writing) blunts out the stink of my life for your viewing pleasure.
You don’t see my atrocious first drafts, my losses don’t get talked about nearly as much as my wins, and when I’m struggling to make money, no one hears about it except for my mom.
That is the reality of chasing a dream.
The reality is that it stinks, a lot of the time. You need to be okay with this if this is what you want to do.
You need to get comfortable in your own stink.
Sometimes, the stink is unbearable.
It hurts. You cry. You scream.
Your body aches, but you don’t notice because the existential burden is far heavier. You want to give up, but you’re in way too deep to give up.
You’ve dug a hole so deep that you’re closer to the other side than you are to where you started digging from. That’s kind of where I’m at.
Last week, when I accidentally got charged $1000 extra dollars for my rental car here in Austin, I nearly lost my mind. In May, when I trained my ass off down here for 6 weeks only to tear my hamstring on the second to last session, I was ready to jump off a goddamn bridge. Luckily, I couldn’t really walk, much less jump.
In the end, in both of these instances, things worked themselves out. I got my refund for the car and my hamstring is pretty much healed, but at the moment? It sucked. These things all sucked.
If I just went down a normal path, I probably wouldn’t have these problems. But also I probably wouldn't be this happy and this motivated to keep moving forward.
So in some ways, Jiu-Jitsu did ruin my life. However, right now, despite having a ruined life, I’m pretty comfortable with the consequences of my choices.
I can’t imagine living any other way.
Closing Thoughts
I guess the point of this article is that social media is a terrible expression of how things are going. It’s a highlight reel, and though we always say that, we often forget it.
Life cannot be contained to or explained through an application on our phones or laptops. If anything, social media is a strange new art form that we’re all using to document our lives, and it doesn’t work.
This art (poorly) imitates life, it does not duplicate it. Real life is infinitely more complicated and difficult than the social media apps that we use on our phones can express.
The stories that we tell each other are romanticized and fabricated in many different ways. Even this story — which I tried to write as honestly as I possibly could— has elements of fabrication due to the unconscious error of the author (sorry). I probably won’t figure out what I miswrote until I reread this article several months from now.
So what does that make me besides an unconscious liar?
Everyone is lying. Even when we try not to, we’re lying. We’re falling short. Perfection is the goal, but you’re never going to seem perfect enough to yourself or anyone else.
You might as well make some hard choices, do some hard work, and get comfortable in your own stink.
The stink you own is the best stink there is.
“Find what you love and let it kill you.” — Charles Bukowski (allegedly)
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