[Original Newsletter Published on November 28, 2021]

Issue #005: Zen in the Art of Fighting

Welcome to the fifth edition of this newsletter from the front lines of my ambitions as a martial artist and author.

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.

If you'd like to catch up on the previous issues, you can check out the new newsletter archive here.

Before we begin

Happy Thanksgiving, even if belated. It bears restating that if you're reading this, I’m thankful for you this holiday season. Your continued support, interest, and investment in this journey means more than the gelt on the Chanukah table.

After leaning into “Sad Girl Autumn” in the previous newsletter, I’m looking for the brighter side of things, true to the "Festival of Lights" beginning tonight.

Chanukah, Masters Worlds, and the Season of Miracles

The Chanukah story is a timeless one, and a particularly timely one for my time training jiu-jitsu in San Diego so far:

Figuratively speaking, I feel like one of the ragtag Maccabees taking on an arsenal of skilled, well-armed Greek soldiers. (The Atos logo even has swords and a shield). I don’t have age, attributes, or experience on my side in a training room where the wall is stacked with world champions, past and future. I just keep fighting against the odds. Mostly losing, but still showing up to fight.
Much like the oil in the Holy Temple, I thought I’d only last for one unit of time but endured to eight. In the Chanukah story, the single day's worth of oil in the menorah burned for eight days. I barely survived my first week of training in San Diego but next week will mark eight weeks. I'm not unscathed, but I'm still standing.
Chanukah, at its heart, is a story of miracles. The last month, from a jiu-jitsu perspective, had its fair share of miracles.

The Maccababies can reclaim the Holy Temple, but can they do Jew-jitsu? (Credits: Rugrats Chanukah Special, Nickelodeon)

I'd spent my first month in San Diego getting my ass handed to me. As someone who has succeeded well enough by outworking the room, Atos was the first place where I physically could not outwork the room. In October, trying to match the training volume (3x/day) and intensity (going 110%) of my peers fast-tracked me to feeling mentally, physically, and emotionally broken.

While I gave myself credit for throwing myself into the fire at all, testing myself in one of the best rooms in the country, I was constantly questioning whether I deserved my purple belt and whether I deserved to be in that training room. And when the time came to drive out to Las Vegas for a tournament, I wasn't sure whether I knew jiu-jitsu at all.

If my facial expression doesn't make it obvious, contrary to the Instagram caption, I can assure you that this roll was not fun for me. Laura is a monster.

It's one thing to go in lacking confidence for a competition, but if I had to pick one competition where I needed to be both physically and mentally bulletproof, it was this one: IBJJF World Masters, the marquee tournament of the year for BJJ practitioners over the age of 30. It was the tournament I'd won at blue belt last year, and it was a triumphant way to end the mess of 2020.

I wasn't expecting any triumphs this year. I wanted to perform well, of course, though I was tempering my expectations: I'd be competing at purple belt rather than blue belt, meaning that I'd be going against more skilled and experienced opponents. I'd yet to compete in any tournament at purple belt and feared I'd be instantly outmatched and outclassed the way I am every day in San Diego.

Moreover, I hadn't won more than a handful of rounds in the training room since moving to San Diego. I'd spent the last four weeks getting choked out by teenagers and styled on by adult medalists from many a major tournament. Short of a couple of drills, I had hardly gotten any meaningful practice of anything but defense. Constant defense. Feeble defense. If I found myself in a position to attack, would I even remember what to do? If I remembered what to do, would I be able to do it? Or would I hesitate--or worse, freeze, and lose in some embarassing fashion?

I came into the tournament held together by compression sleeves, athletic tape, and shreds of positive self-talk. I came out with a 2-1 finish for a bronze medal, no additional injuries and some faith that I did, in fact, remember how to do some jiu-jitsu. Even though I'm among the worst at Atos and can't outwork the room I'm in, the work I've put in in the room still pays off outside of it. It turns out that benchmarking myself against the average female competitor at Atos (who is anything but average) isn't the fairest comparison to the average 30- to 35-year-old purple belt woman. Shocking, I know. 🤷‍♀️

While I was happy with the outcome, I was happier about a few other, critical things that had nothing to do with the outcome:

My very “boring,” traditional style held up.

I spent much of the last year feeling insecure about my style, movement, and all the things my game wasn’t: elegant, modern, explosive. The self-consciousness started when I traveled to Mexico City last fall and worsened while traveling full-time this year. In this tournament, I owned my style, played the shamelessly simple game that was true to me, and I didn't try be something I wasn't. As a plus, I won with it.

I managed my energy and focus really well in spite of the schedule and environmental circumstances:

Usually, brackets, once started, will wrap up in one or two hours, depending on the number of matches. Because of a special event happening concurrently with my bracket, my matches were spread out over the course of four hours (my first match happened at 11:45, my last one near 3:30). In spite of this, I successfully warmed up, cooled down, and got my mind right multiple times.
I didn’t let the circus-level noise and antics of the venue distract me or drain me, a feat that’s difficult at any tournament, but especially this one. The tournament lasted for three days, three tournaments were happening simultaneously in the convention center, and surrounding the tournament were thousands of people scouring the live seminars, food stands, and the tons of business booths related to motley jiu-jitsu-related businesses (from gis and stem cell therapies to acai and immigration services). Competitions are typically chaotic, but this was the biggest and most chaotic one I’d ever seen.

I collected and analyzed the “right" kind and amount of information about my opponents:

I watched the first few minutes of footage from my opponents' matches in other competitions, looking for trends in their opening sequences, making a few observations about their stance, the grips they seek out, their go-to techniques, etc. You don't always have the luxury of tape on your opponent, and what people do in the past is not a guarantee of what they'll do in the future, but in this case, I had tape and all my opponents did exactly what I'd watched them do on the tape. In my first two matches, that intel and awareness were crucial, enabling me to counter my opponent's opening sequences and get a precious step ahead to dictate the pace and course of the match.
I blocked out the rest of the stuff I knew about my opponents as meaningless, nonessential data. I easily could have (and almost did) let the findings in my Instagram stalking lead me down a rotten path. In the past, that kind of social media study has led to me beating myself instead of really making my opponents work to beat me. I'd already opened the "Pandora's Box" by seeing their training and previous competitive successes on social media. To counter the spiral of despairing thinking, I told myself things like:
- “They may have won X tournament or beaten Y competitor before, but they’ve never faced me.”
- “They may be good, but anyone can have a good day, and today is going to be my day.”
- “They may be good, but they’re going to have to go through me if they want to advance, and I am not going down without a fight.”
- “They’ve been beaten from this position that I like to play. If I can get there, I can beat them there, too.”

Down by two in my third match, which I ultimately lose, but not without a fight and one good cold, dead stare into the camera.

I was fully present.

I am not sure how I managed to get to that place of total presence. I can’t remember if I was breathing deeply in the bullpen, meditatively accepting of all the BS and able to roll with it (pun intended), but I felt like I was living the only lesson I remember from a brief stint in the Headspace app: treating any unhelpful thoughts as simply thoughts, letting them go by like watching cars drive along a highway.

When I made a mistake in my semifinals match, it was, in part due to not being fully present. I had reason to believe I had the skill and the tenacity to win the whole bracket. On another day, I could have been the one at #1.

Most of all, "there can be miracles when you believe":

Technically, 'The Prince of Egypt' is more of a Passover movie than a Chanukah movie, but the message still stands, and few things inspire the soul like the soundtrack's duet of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. I highly recommend "When You Believe" to break up your X-mas music loops of Mariah Carey's, 'All I Want for Christmas is You."

Closing out

I hope you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter and thank you for reading. I realize that this edition was predominantly focused on jiu-jitsu, but hopefully some of the nuggets and learnings about presence, self-belief, and mastering oneself through oceans of distraction and self-doubt are something you can ponder in your own life this month, especially as this year concludes and you reflect on any aspirations or intentions for the one to come.

The next newsletter will focus more on writing process-related updates, so if you're more compelled by the creative adventures than the BJJ bullying pieces of the trip, I should have a good story or two to tell for you then--and maybe a little bit of good news.

Until then, with warm regards and a Happy Chanukah from me and this Kosher hotdog,

EZ

Snickers has an inherently self-destructive and possibly cannibalistic appetite. Don't worry. We didn't let her eat the hot dog.

PS: About a year ago, I wrote about the power of self-belief and all that glitters not being goldbased on my experience at Masters Worlds in 2020. I still stand by those statements. It's interesting, amusing, and fulfilling to see how much and how little hasn't changed since I wrote those pieces ~1 year later.