[Original Newsletter Published on October 3, 2021]

Issue #003: Zen in the Art of Fighting

Good things come in threes. 3️⃣

Welcome to the third edition of this newsletter from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author. I'm glad you're here and am exceptionally grateful for your support, interest, and investment in this journey.

If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, welcome back! However we know each other or however you found this newsletter, I hope sharing some stories and thoughts on a monthly-or-more cadence will inspire you to find and follow some courageous and crazy dreams of your own.

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Shoutout to Kristen for becoming a Patreon patron of the arts in the past month (and for her recent return to BJJ competition 👏)

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Let's Dive In

The past month was a big one bringing out the full spectrum of emotions: from losing at Pan Ams to returning to the East Coast for a few days to finally feeling like OKC will be a place I'll genuinely miss. Every month on this trip feels like a year, and now it's almost time to hit the road again.

Also, at the time of sending this, it's been six months since the trip began. Tempus fugit.

Down the rabbit hole into Update #3 we go. No time to waste. Credit: Disney's 'Alice in Wonderland.'

Travel Updates: Where in the World We Are—and Where We’re Off to Next

We are still in Oklahoma, but ship out to Southern California on Thursday. It feels like just yesterday that it was the beginning of August and we were making the trip from Austin to Oklahoma City. In just a few days, we’ll be starting the drive to the West Coast to close out 2021 in the most idyllic spot of the trip (weather-wise and jiu-jitsu-wise): San Diego.

On our way to San Diego, we’ll be stopping through Waco, Texas, Odessa, Texas, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona, before hitting the Golden State. Indulging my literary reverence of Friday Night Lights and all its associated media, I’m excited that we’ll be in Odessa on a Friday night, just in time for a high school football game. Assuming I can figure out how to procure some tickets as a total, non-local visitor, not just a member of a visiting team, I’ll get to witness firsthand the Permian Panthers “in the wild”, the fervent frenzy of Texas High School Football on a Friday night, and, through both, the inspiration for one of the best sports books of all time (IMHO).

Coach Taylor as portrayed by Kyle Chandler very well might be one of my all-time favorite characters in television. Friday Night Lights is a rare book that has a good TV show and movie as part of the franchise.

Things I will (imminently) miss about OKC

As the last newsletter mentioned, there’s a lot to like about Oklahoma and a lot that fascinates about Oklahoma City. Still, if I had to guess the things on which I’ll look back most fondly (aside from Cafe Kacao and Brewhouse Barbell, which are mentioned in Issue #002), the list will look something like this:

Braum’s Ice Cream. The cheap, delicious, convenience of $1 Braum’s soft serve is not something I expect to find elsewhere, because most of Braum’s 300 stores are in Oklahoma.
Dallas Niles (whom one might describe as "the Jack Black of the BJJ world") and Naomi Earls (not your average massage therapist). If there's a pair of people who went above and beyond in making us laugh, helping us out, and making us feel at home in Oklahoma, it's the two of them. Between Dallas beating us both up on the mat and Naomi beating me up on her massage table, I learned a lot about my own tolerance for pressure and pain. In interviewing them both on how they ended up in their uniquely brutal lines of work (teaching BJJ and doing bodywork) and how they started dating, I was inspired to hear how they spoke about their respective leaps of faith, both the professional ones and the personal, romantic ones that brought them together. I'm excited to share more about this in future pieces of writing.
The shock value of telling people I know from my past life that I live in Oklahoma. The questioning remarks and puzzled looks didn’t get old.

Pictured: Bug assisting Dallas in the filming Dallas' upcoming instructional for BJJ Fanatics. Photo credits to @dallasniles. Caption this.

BJJ Updates: Coming Up Short at Pan Ams and the Pursuit of the "Gold Medal Life"

At the beginning of September, I'd had high hopes of winning Pan Ams, a major tournament at which I'd gotten bronze last year and, this year, was determined to reach the top of the podium. I had every reason to believe I could win: as of July, I'd started dedicating myself full-time to BJJ, was training more than I ever had, and had certainly improved since the last time I'd competed at that tournament.

Sometimes, you match up against the best person in the final, and sometimes you get the best person in the first round. In my case, her name was Heloysa Fernanda Araujo Oliveira (quite the name) and I got her in the second round. She was an opponent who had taken a year off from competing (so I didn't face her at all in 2020), but was no slouch. I'd later learn that she had been training since she was six years old, had competed with success all the way up the kids' ranks, and had won double gold at the Juvenile 2 Blue (the 17-year-old age group) at Pan Ams and Worlds in 2019. She won double gold at Adult at Pan Ams this year (for my weight class and Open Weight), and it would not surprise me if she performs the same feat at Worlds in December.

In the words of my Boston-based coach, analyzing and processing a loss means answering an uncomfortable question: "Did you f--- up or was your opponent better than you?" As I watched back the tape, I'd certainly f---ed up, but there was no question, especially as I watched her other matches to gold in the division and in the Open Weight class. Heloysa was better, and not just better than I was. She was better than everyone she faced that day.

My most offensive and proudest moment in the match against Heloysa: setting up and landing an omoplata sweep to score two points and change the score from 5-0 to 5-2. I make a loss-accelerating mistake shortly therafter, but this moment was a personal, technical 'win' for the day.

This is the kind of thing that sucks about tournaments. I've trained intensely for four years, and my jiu-jitsu is generally competitive within size, rank, and experience level, but what can I realistically do against a serious, highly-experienced practitioner like Heloysa who's been training for twelve years? Sure, any opponent is beatable, but that's three times as much mat time as I've had, and mat time that started accumulating at a more opportune age (six-years-old and invulnerable) than I gained mine (twenty-six-years-old and aging).

I should note that things only get harder at you move up the ranks, with the highest likelihood of being confronted with an experience gap existing at Black Belt. Take the example of what might be the case of Jessa Khan in about ten years: in a black belt bracket, twenty-nine-year olds who have spent ten years training (since age nineteen) could realistically face twenty-nine-year-olds who got their black belts at age nineteen and have spent ten years competing in the black belt division.

This is where, for me, BJJ becomes a metaphor and means to explore some broader questions about life and success. What do you do when the odds aren't in your favor? Where do you find your sliver of edge to make the most of your 0.001% chance of victory? How do you go into a situation as an underdog and not beat yourself first? What's the difference between identifying a legitimate reason versus making an excuse for why you might not have succeeded? How do you account for the losses and use them to improve? And, should you face the same challenger (or a similar challenge) again, how will you disregard the ghosts and scars of the past to perform your best in the present?

These are some of the questions I've thought about a lot since beginning to compete, even more so since the trip began, and especially since being promoted to purple belt a few weeks ago. I'll have more to say about these questions in future writing, but the first small reflection I'll offer on this subject is in a recent Instagram post @zenintheartoffighting on the K-drama movie about a middle school female weightlifting team, "Lifting King Kong." To quote the movie's closing remarks, voiced over by the team's coach:

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 the gold doesn't mean you your life will be a gold medal life. If you try your best and don't give up, your life itself will be the gold medal.

Well said, Coach Lee Ji-Bong.

Writing Updates: "The Editor's Dilemma"

When I went back to Boston to train in Mid-September, I had a few solid conversations with my coach, one of which may or may not be on a podcast in the coming weeks. Of the off-air observations worth sharing, these two are most relevant to the theme of writing in the last month:

Coach: Do you edit your text messages?

Me: Yes. How did you know?

Coach: I can tell.

Me (to myself): Damn. It's that obvious.

If anyone on this newsletter is wondering why I might respond to a text instantaneously versus days later, it's a reflection of how much I'm probably overthinking and editing my message to you, wanting to get you something good and "done right" rather than send over a quick emoji and call it a day. The desire to only write "good" things is killing me softly.

A few hours before my coach observed this text message phenomenon, he'd made a similar observation about my sparring. There are certain moments where I'll pause or hesitate on a technique, usually trying to evaluate all my options for the best choice or, meeting some resistance, changing course.

Coach: "It's like you're trying to edit your jiu-jitsu. You don't have time for that."

The good news is that if my jiu-jitsu and my writing suffer from the same problem, it means if I solve it in one area of my life, it's likely that I'll solve it in the other area as well. I subscribe to the belief that how you do one thing is how you do everything and if there's one thing that keeps in me in jiu-jitsu, it's the conviction that any problem I have off the mat can be solved on it. While I'm far from "cured" from any of these defects, I'd say my worst-offending personality traits (including, but not limited to perfectionism, fear of failure, addiction to control, avoiding discomfort, compulsive desire for certainty) have all lost some of their former edge since I began training.

The bad news is that the problem of constant self-editing has been a hard problem to solve. My goals in both writing and jiu-jitsu are to be excellent, and the desire for excellence is getting in the way of being good, often to the point of getting anything done at all. So the last month of writing has been a lot of me avoiding writing: claiming travel as an excuse, interviews as an excuse, training as an excuse, and, in the absence of other excuses, hating myself as an excuse.

The best "antidote" to the situation (short of physically removing the backspace key from my laptop or exclusively writing while trashed--not a continuously viable option with a big competition in six weeks) is to write more on paper. It's not the most efficient, since everything written on paper has to be transcribed onto a laptop at a later time, but it's kept me from overthinking a little. Tricking myself by writing about the trip in journals (rather than sitting down in Scrivener to write polished anecdotes) is getting me more word count and more honest, unfettered writing out of me than I had been generating before. For whatever reason, I'll let myself get trigger happy on a backspace key but am loath to waste ink by crossing out every other word.

I couldn't tell you yet how any success at the experiment of "editing less" in writing will influence my problem of "editing" in jiu-jitsu, but hope to have more to say on this in the coming months.

Personal Update: My First "Homecoming"

I took a 5-day trip back east in September to do a little book-related business, surprise a few people Boston, and attend a wedding in in New Jersey. It was the first time I'd been back to either "home" since I'd left the East Coast about six months before, and I was anxious about the trip to the point of having a nervous breakdown the night before I left Oklahoma. I wasn't as far along writing-wise as I'd wanted to be before my first trip back, and I didn't have any meaningful tokens of competitive success to show for my full-time commitment to BJJ. I fully expected the trip to be a disaster because I'd be at a loss for words when people asked me about jiu-jitsu or writing.

The trip exceeded expectations and then some in a positive way. In Boston, seeing everyone from my gym and anyone else I happened to catch while there for thirty-six hours was absolutely joyous. Going back to New Jersey was especially profound for two reasons:

As part of book-related business, I had the opportunity to interview one of the people I most look up to in the jiu-jitsu world, Emily Kwok. Writer, competitor, gym owner, and peak performance consultant, she was every bit as cool in real life as she seemed to be on the internet. Also, it was really something to be back in Princeton with the "Professor" I'm there to see not being an elite academic but a master of a very different course of life and study. Mark my words that if the trip ended with an opportunity to work with Emily Kwok and Josh Waitzkin, I think I could be very happy.
At the wedding in New Jersey, the attendees were predominantly what I'd call the "Country Club Jewish" kind: lots of medical professionals, lawyers, investors, and flaunting of status and money. My past experiences with this category of people have been categorically negative, filled with inquiries about my education, my employment, or my marital status (or lack thereof). These conversations always had some sort of tacit one-upsmanship built into them: every interaction was an interview to determine whether I was as smart, successful, attractive, or accomplished as someone's son or daughter. This time, I did not feel so self-conscious amid the "Country Club Jews": the conversations were no longer loaded with tacit one-upsmanship because who I am and what I do don't fit an easy mold anymore and no one from that world knows how to box me in.

After those five days of barely sleeping, running on caffeine and adrenaline, and cramming my schedule down to the hour, I thought I'd be exhausted. To my surprise, I finished that trip energized and inspired to keep moving forward on this writing, traveling, and training adventure. I'm looking forward to the next "checkpoint" visit back, likely in early 2022.

My mom and I at the wedding in New Jersey. I can't help but notice that the hug looks like the beginning of a rear-naked choke.

Pop Musical answers to the FAQ of "How's the trip going?"

Bon Jovi: "Tomorrow's getting harder, make no mistake. Luck ain't even lucky, got to make your own breaks."
Kelly Clarkson: "I don't know. I could crash and burn, but maybe at the end of this road I might catch a glimpse of me."
Florence and the Machine: "Just keep following the heartlines on your hand."

Wake me up when [Snick]tember ends...

This week marks one year since we adopted Snickers. To celebrate, we took her out for an anniversary dinner at Picasso Cafe in the Paseo Arts District of OKC (which feels very Southwestern US). I ended up getting very sick from my meal. Snick, fortunately, did not, and enjoyed as much of the chicken risotto and vanilla ice cream with peanut butter as her 12-pound body could consume.

One year later, her best picture we have is the one from the first week we got her.

Closing out

Thank you for reading and hope you enjoyed my third update from the road!

If you want to continue supporting the journey: chip some $ in the creative tip jar for exclusive content and perks on Patreon, follow @zenintheartoffighting on Instagram for weekly-ish posts, and forward this newsletter along to one friend you think might be entertained.

Soon to be leaving "The Sooner State" for San Diego,

Erica

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, why not reply back to this email with a quick hello? I'd love to heard what you liked in this issue of the newsletter and what you'd want to hear about in the next one.