Here We Go Again
Will this endless stretch of desert road get me back where I belong?
The past few days before a competition have always been marred by some hilarious or sad events. There was the time that I forgot my medication and spent the night trying to fight off hives before my host finally told me that they had some anti-histamines the morning after. That time that I went to the wrong hotel at 2AM (somehow managing to make this mistake for the second time) and had to call another Uber to take me what was the equivalent of less than a quarter mile away but definitely not walkable highway urban hellscape. And how can I let anyone forget about my air conditioning breaking down on the hottest day on record, while I was hosting my sister, and then trying to explain to the third time to a grumpy EMT why I needed yet another bandaid to address my “that’s a lot of blood” toe that I had somehow run over using the hotel bathroom door at 4AM.
What I didn’t understand about competitions, that I’m trying to do now, is to set clear goals and intentions for what I want to get out of the entire experience. Competing is obviously a deviation from my normal schedule. I have friends who are traveling to different cities, celebrating birthdays, going to brunch, or just plain old sleeping in this weekend. I used to get to my hotel room and wish that I was anywhere but waiting for a competition to start. Now I understand that the experience has already begun.
I also used to fight against the notion that I had a “competition mode.” In some ways, I still resist it because I’m not really sure I’ve experienced my competition mode enough to enjoy it. Though perhaps the point isn’t to really enjoy it, but to allow the moments to unfold and to not judge them as good or bad either way. Call it “locked in” or “in the zone” — I have come to understand that when it comes to dealing with another physical opponent, you have to get physical. All the meditating, journaling, mobility, visualizing — all this stuff in the mind eventually condenses into one moment of just you and your opponent.
I have been crying a lot after practice. Well, at least definitely above average for me.
My coach tells me that it is okay to cry. He has told me this on a Sunday, a Tuesday, and Thursday. I fill in the gaps myself on some Saturdays just for good measure. He tells me this because I talk about crying like it is a bad thing, because my brain can’t logically wrap around the idea that sometimes my body needs to have that physical release of emotion.
Crying is not a weakness. It is, however, for me, a sign that sometimes I’ve been putting myself through too much a lot. Jiu jitsu is weird in that way because it can be an incredibly stressful experience, if you choose to go down paths that are more stress-inducing than not.
The first few weeks after signing up for a competition aren’t really that different from normal training. For me, I think it’s a combination of denial that I will need to put in the extra work and the desire to ride the temporary win of having done a “hard thing,” which is to go through the financially painful step of dropping $100+ on a single elimination event. I daydream a little about winning, or maybe dropping in at a new school, or what luxurious food I’ll get to eat as a reward for competing. It’s not a bad time.
But inevitably, the doubts and thoughts start to creep in. I start to worry about mundane things like if my competition belt has shrunk too much (even though I air dry it and wear it only once a month) or how I’m going to avoid the temptation of the 3pm daily snack hour at work (even though I usually forget about it by the time it rolls around because I’m writing yet another polite Slack message “just following up / do you mind giving me the status of”). Those tiny little anxieties, the brief moments of heart palpatitations — they snowball into major worries, like fears of being submitted in less than a minute, the fears of performing poorly in public, and the fears of disappointing my coach and my teammates.
It’s at this point where I start to spiral into an existential cycle of despair, of which crying after practice is the tip of the iceberg rapidly approaching the edge of a supposedly unsinkable ship. It’s at this point where I really start to wrestle with the mental and physical challenges of preparation. Where I am, on some days, physical and mentally ravenous because I don’t have enough: not enough cardio, skill, mat time, will to win, motivation, speed, timing, urgency, fight — whatever it is, I don’t have enough.
I don’t always like writing about these unpleasant emotions, but sometimes, writing about them is the release that I need. In a way, writing about the challenges that I deal with is a way that I hope to emotionally connect to people — to know that I’m not alone in the struggles that I deal with. To reassure myself that I don’t have to be alone in fighting those struggles too. We may not have the solutions, but at least we both have the same understanding of the problems.
There is a small part of competition that is stressful because of the competing itself. I do think that going into one-to-one physical challenge with a stranger is tough, but it is incomparable to the challenge that my mind can bring. If those feelings were already there — but just dormant — then they sure as hell bubble to the surface when a competition is there to shake the can.
I think that is what engages me to do jiu jitsu, not because I’m good at it, but because some days, it makes me feel any emotion that’s the opposite of being comfortable. Competitions are there to improve my skill, but it’s also in those moments in preparing that I am forced to take a good, hard, and honest look at myself. To admit to myself what is true, even if it hurts, because it will be the first step to growth.
I am not a lazy person. Years of therapy has gotten me to that point where I can believe it almost 99.9% of the time, except when emotionally and physically overwrought to the point that the harsh thoughts take over (*ahem* looking at you, Tuesday comp class). I am not lazy, but I am a huge creature of comfort. I like my habits and my routines. I like sitting underneath a fluffy blanket as I sip black tea with lactose-free milk and turbinado sugar while my cats purr in my lap. I enjoy immersing myself in a good Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode, and then another one, and then another one.
If the famous song from Rent measures a year “in daylights, in sunsets/ in midnights, in cups of coffee” I would measure my year in naptimes, in blankets/ in takeout, in cups of bubble tea.
For people who say that they don’t even remember life before the pandemic, for me 2020 would have been a different year anyways. It was the start of the beginning of a new chapter in my career away from being an associate with biglaw billable hours. The pandemic in many ways magnified parts of myself that I had neglected — basic ingredients for sanity like ability to take more than 0.1 hour breaks from work and finding a community centered around martial arts. I spent the greater part of the past five years trying to heal while at the same time trying to fight off my mind’s desire to cling to the familiar, no matter how harmful it was to my long-term wellbeing.
This is why I can write so easily about creature comforts. I have spent a long time cultivating them, but perhaps now, to the detriment of other contexts that require a more austere approach. That is not to say that suffering is necessary or good for everyone, but for me, I recognize that some discomfort is important for my growth. In fact, discomfort has been only constant source of my growth as I look back on my successes, both objective and subjective in nature.
Those failures and successes and the neutral bits in between, like it or not they inform the person I am right now, right here. When I won this past weekend my coach told me that it was only because of those losses that I had endured that allowed me to arrive at this point. It resonated with something my sports psychologist told me as well, which is that the conversations we are having now were only possible because of the months of discussions we had put in during the past year.
However, you can’t spell experience without “price.” For the first time in a long time, I really understood the cost of what it meant to work hard at something.
I paid the price not because I was being forced to. Not because it was vital to my sense of self-worth or image in front of my peers. But because I wanted to. The emotional and intellectual labor made me feel as if I was truly an artist, no matter how tortured at times.
Postscript
Standing in darkness with empty hands
I still know how to use 'em, but the miles made other plans
Running out of highway, shorter on time
Feel the dead weight deepen and the devil coming down the line
The dashboard shaking, I steady the wheel
And I make every turn by memory, by feel
Towards a black horizon, an unbroken dawn
Will this endless stretch of desert road get me back where I belong?Will you turn the bright lights on?
Baby, turn the bright lights on
'Cause I haven't forgotten where it is I'm from
Look out your window for me, here I come
Will you turn the bright lights on?
Baby, turn the bright lights on
Put me back on the corner to sing my song
I'm a shoo-in tonight, turn the bright lights on
PS If you’ve read my past work, you know that there is always a song that describes my major emotional developments in jiu jitsu. We have got show tunes, vocal and actual fireworks, and a sure-fire karoake pick.