The Gentle Art of Starting Over
How Jiu-Jitsu changed my life, how I changed my life for Jiu-Jitsu, and then how I found some degree of harmony in them.
When I walked into my first Jiu-Jitsu class, there were three things that were believed about me by “the old guard” at my old gym:
That I was fat.
That I was domestically abused.
That I was never going to come back for a second class.
The first was unequivocally true. I was about 20 pounds overweight and drinking to excess to cope with a burnout job and a broken heart.
The second thing was half-true. My dad was a lawyer and an alcoholic. The verbal abuse never turned physical, but I grew up in a household where the climate was combative, and in which every fight I took was a losing one.
The third thing would be dead wrong.
Jiu-Jitsu: How I Got Gripped (2017-2019)
My father had his defects, but he raised me to believe that if I worked hard enough, I could achieve anything. The man valued education, and in efforts to make him proud, mitigate his anger, and also live up to the values he instilled in me, I set my heart on a primary ambition while growing up: academic achievement. Teachers loved me. School came easily to me. I went to Princeton, then worked at Harvard for two years, and then got my MBA at MIT.
I had believed that good school after good school would set me up for a certain kind of success afterward, the stuff of Ivy League alumni pamphlets, keynote speeches, and corporate press releases. So when I graduated from business school and entered the corporate world in 2016, I was shell shocked, rudely awoken to the fact that it didn’t matter how hard I worked or what I’d achieved in “The Ivory Tower.”
On paper, my life was great: I had two blue-chip degrees and worked at a name-brand company. I made enough money to live in a fancy high-rise apartment and go to nice dinners in downtown Boston. But on the inside, I was miserable, angry, and disappointed. Every day I went to work, I was reminded that the qualifications I’d spent my life working for didn’t matter, that the impressiveness of my credentials didn’t matter, that my hard work didn’t matter. I worked my ass off, 9 to 9, only to get surpassed by people who weren’t as smart but were shortcut takers and smooth talkers, who were less competent, but better able to get ahead.
So when I discovered Jiu-Jitsu in 2017, two things immediately appealed to me.
The first was it took my mind off of the frustration: of the false promises of success that academia had instilled in me and of the unpalatable-to-me corporate reality that “‘A’ Students work for ‘C’ Students.”
The second was that Jiu-Jitsu was meritocratic in a way that my professional life wasn’t and never would be—this culture of meritocracy was, in large part, due to the values of my first coach. My first gym was an environment where it didn’t matter if you were smart or dumb, rich or poor: hard work got rewarded. No one got their stripes, literally or figuratively, without earning them.
Jiu-Jitsu did not come easily to me, but I noticed that the harder I worked, the better I got. In this way, Jiu-Jitsu was a relief and a contrast to the Corporate American madness. I started off with just the white belt classes, but before long, I was in the gym six days a week, sometimes for multiple classes a day. Eight months into training, I began to compete. The results started off as bronze but the more I worked, the more they began to turn gold.
Finding Myself in “Fight Club”: Getting More Serious About Jiu-Jitsu (2019-2021)
Fast forward two years later to 2019: I was a feminist millennial version of “Fight Club,” leading a double life as a desk jockey by day and a “killer competitor” by night.
My job still gave me displeasure, but I could deal with it better. I started caring less about my performance reviews when I became confident that I could choke out my coworkers—and they knew that I spent my nights and weekends improving the skills to do so.
I wore my bruises as badges of honor, took any black eyes in stride and with pride. I didn’t bother with concealer. The agendas of my project meetings might have been polite, but the subtext of them might as well have been, “You may outrank me and make more than I do, but I’m tougher than all of you. Don’t f— with me.”
In 2020, the world fell apart, but I still managed to compete: I placed third at Pans and No Gi Pans at Adult Blue Belt. I dominated my division at World Masters, winning all my matches by submission. In the upheaval of the pandemic, of my father passing away, of turning 30 and knowing my window of athletic achievement wasn’t getting any wider, I was beginning to think that these tournaments were a sign that maybe I really had something with this Jiu-Jitsu thing.
I started to wonder about what it would take to win Adult Worlds.
Boston was still locked down intermittently. I figured that if I was serious about winning Worlds, I would need to go to other rooms to train: rooms where I wasn’t a favorite student or beloved among my peers, rooms where my ego and game could be broken down and either proven as world-class or made into something world-class.
I needed to know how good I actually was, and I was willing to do anything in order to determine it. This resulted in my leaving behind everything: the entire world I knew, the person I was, and last, but not least, the job, too.
Thirty years on the East Coast, my friends, my family, a gym where I was a hero, and the corporate identity: in April 2021, packed it up and drove away from that version of myself and my life, all of it in efforts to become a world champion.
“Tapped Out”: The Reality of Being World Class at Jiu-Jitsu (2021-2022)
I spent six months on the road traveling and training in Texas and Oklahoma. The training experiences there hadn’t been anything too crazy: I’d gotten the chance to work more female training partners than I had at home, but for the most part, I’d been able to hang with them. I won a handful of small, local tournaments, and while I couldn’t put together a good performance at an IBJJF, those losses weren’t unwinnable.
My confidence was still high despite the losses. One of the coaches I trained with in Texas had told me, “In order to win Worlds, Jiu-Jitsu has to be your everything and only thing.”
I had thought that Jiu-Jitsu was my everything and only thing–I’d left my home and quit my job to do it, after all. All I had to do was fix the tactical errors, and I could still have a shot at Worlds.
Then I moved to San Diego and started training at one of the top academies in the world: Atos Jiu-Jitsu Headquarters.
At every belt and every age at Atos, there was someone who already had or was on their way to sacrifice more than I ever could in the name of Jiu-Jitsu. Kids took hours of private lessons and competed every weekend. The teenagers were homeschooled and studied Jiu-Jitsu the way that I had studied for the SATs. Some adults lived in vans or with multiple roommates just so they could continue to afford living in San Diego–all to train at this academy.
That sacrifice was apparent every single day. I wouldn’t have a “good round” for three months. Kids embarrassed me with both the most fundamental techniques and techniques I’d never seen before. If you scroll far enough on Instagram, you’ll see me “being a valuable training partner” (AKA: getting styled on).
Needless to say, in December 2021, I did not become an Adult World Champion. I lost the first round against someone I’d faced earlier in the year. It wasn’t a horrific loss, but after watching the rest of my bracket, I was under no illusion that I would have made it any further than that first match.
I left San Diego with an appreciation for what it takes to have Jiu-Jitsu be your everything and only thing, people for whom Jiu-Jitsu was never simply their hobby alongside their career but their career unto itself, their complete sense of purpose.
“The Middle Way”: Reclaiming Balance and a “Normal” Life (2022-present)
Training at Atos dispelled any illusions I had of winning Adult Worlds, but it gave me my first real technical education in the style of modern Jiu-Jitsu.
Looking for a spot that taught in a similar style but at a lower cost of living than San Diego and closer to family on the East Coast, I moved to Atos’ outpost in Atlanta. I decided to stop moving around and have a more “normal” life again.
I got a new corporate job, and while I trained every day, Jiu-Jitsu transformed back into a reprieve from work rather than being the work. It felt good to be good at a job again, to have conversations with people who had nothing to do with Jiu-Jitsu, and to have health insurance–I’d really end up needing that.
I made peace with the fact that I was too old and too late-starting to be “the best,” but I could still be at “my best.”
I stopped worrying about winning rounds. Losing genuinely felt like learning, and I finally felt safe enough to lose in order to win.
I signed up for Masters Worlds on a whim, and after months of stable training partners, stable income, and a stable life, I had the best technical performance of my Jiu-Jitsu career so far. Stability–literally and figuratively–gave me the courage to “open my guard.”
Closing Out
It’s been almost four years since I hit the road and eight since I started Jiu-Jitsu. I know now that while I couldn’t hack it as a “professional fighter,” trying to become one helped me figure out what in my life was worth fighting for.
There’s a lot of romance, especially around blue belt, around the time you consider putting ‘bjj’ in your Instagram handle of what it might be like to live the #jiujitsulifestyle: how fun it’ll be to train all day and compete all the time. It’s not so glamorous or simple. Progress isn’t linear and comes with a lot of beatings. Talent and luck matter because everyone is working hard. Drop into one “supergym” like Atos and you’ll quickly realize that the professionals are truly professionals, and unless you’ve had the same dedication and approach for many years, your odds of hanging with the likes of them are low.
I’m thankful to the people I met and relationships I developed on the road for many reasons: most of all, for helping me eliminate the “what ifs” of full-time Jiu-Jitsu and helping me find fulfillment in a more “normal” life.
From that journey, I learned too many things to count, but if I had to pick one, it’s one of self-awareness involving the limits of hard work: to feel most fulfilled, I need to work hardest not for the corporate machine or for the medals, but for myself.
Quoting a movie I watched while on the road:
“Everybody tries to win the gold but just because you win the bronze doesn’t mean your life will be a bronze medal life.
And just because you win gold, it doesn’t mean your life will be a gold medal life.
If you try your best and don’t give up, your life itself will be a gold medal.
That in itself is priceless.”
Today’s post was written by Erica Zendell.
Erica is a writer and Jiu-Jitsu brown belt.
If you enjoyed this piece and want to read more of Erica’s work, check out her Substack newsletter, The Submission Artist, here:
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Already loved Erica’s work and this post/story only gives her more credibility and makes me like her more. Great piece
Awesome guest writer today!