One Brown Belt's Perspective, Six Years Later

An annual celebratory tradition of reflecting on the anniversary of my first day of jiu-jitsu

I didn’t know it at the time, but March 22 would became an unexpected anniversary in my life.

Six years ago this month, I, humbled by certain personal circumstances that had reduced me to a shell of myself—broken heart, burnout job, general fear and self-loathing—decided to humble myself further by walking down the stairs and through the doors of a MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym.

My life would be forever changed from having walked through those doors. For the most part, I try not to look back—except around this time of year.

I’ve made an annual reflection out of my “jiu-jitsu anniversary”, choosing to publish blog reflections year after year—one year, two years, three years, four years, and five years—of the role jiu-jitsu plays in my life and what I have learned from the sport and about myself.

When I read through all of these old posts, I cringe a little bit, but in a good way. It’s the kind of cringe that reminds you that you’ve grown up, grown older and “wiser,”  typically evoked by pictures of your younger self with a bad haircut, too much eyeliner, or an insistence on a certain kind of fashion style that looked cool at the time but would prove ridiculous one or two decades later.

For me, the person I was six years ago and the person I am now couldn’t be more different from one another, even if a lot of my life looks somewhat similar on the surface.

When I started jiu-jitsu, I worked in a technology job. I lived in a nice apartment. I had reached a local maximum of what my education and upbringing had expected me to achieve, and despite being “good on paper”, I was patently miserable. The dimensions of my life were the line items on my resume. My life’s ambitions were fairly typical and outcome-oriented, true to a girl born and raised in the pressure-cooker climate of suburban Jewish families in the New York Metro Area. Reach the Director level at my company. Buy a house. Meet, marry, and start a family with a nice Jewish doctor or lawyer.

Six years later, I’m close to obtaining many of the things I had hoped for when I had started jiu-jitsu, plus or minus a few of the details. For example, my fiancé is not Jewish and is neither a doctor nor a lawyer (🤣). But my life is a lot better now than it was then, and what’s interesting to me is how I got here—specifically, how I didn’t get here.

I had long thought that the way to get to the life I wanted was to grind down a certain path—a path mostly filled with things that other people wanted me to do or that people like me were expected to do. “I will do this because it is what I am supposed to do,” “because this is what people in my alumni networks do,” “because this is what my father wanted of my life.”

I did not know that the path to get to the life I wanted would involve starting a combat sport, giving up my home and life as I knew it in the name of said sport, and quitting my job for a year to train and travel across the country in a somewhat foolhardy attempt to become world class at it.

Six years ago, if you asked me to describe the shape of my life, most of who I was and how I spent my time was out of complacency, circumstance, and optics. I lived in Boston because it was the first place I landed after college. I worked in tech because that’s what graduates from MIT typically did. I stayed in my career path because it was prestigious. And so on. I didn’t have the courage or the creativity to envision and generate a different course for my life. I knew that I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t have anything interesting to write about, short of a fictionalized corporate drama.

Six years later, I live in Georgia. I’m back in a tech job, in part due to missing it and in part to afford the rest of my life and finish my book. I’m about to close on a house. I’m engaged and due to get married in the fall.

All those decisions were deliberate choices.

The biggest thing for which I thank jiu-jitsu now is it how it helped me cultivate a sense of confidence, agency, and ownership over my life. Jiu-jitsu gave me belief that I could, in fact, fight for the life I wanted, and even if I didn’t win, I could meet loss with grace and resilience. And when I did win, I would really win and be able savor it.

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The changes between six years ago and today are night and day, but so are the changes between last year and this year.

A year ago, I was living in San Diego, getting my ass beat by full-time competitors, mostly ranging from age fifteen to thirty, at Atos Jiu-Jitsu’s headquarters in San Diego, California. I was nearing what would be the end of my sabbatical spent training jiu-jitsu full-time.

I had given up my life for a year to practice the sport, but I was nothing like the people who had given up their entire lives for their entire lives for the sport. That was a different level of sacrifice than the one that I had made. I was in awe of it, inspired by it, and, if I was being brutally honest with myself, I could not match it.

It was only in the first few months of 2022 that it really occurred to me that, after making my life revolve around jiu-jitsu, I wanted to rebalance my life with more than jiu-jitsu.

I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but in the same way my life had lost dimension from overworking back in 2017, my life had lost some dimension by going all-in on jiu-jitsu, too. I didn’t want to spend my every waking moment in the gym and around people I met in the gym, lovely as they were. I missed some of the unique mayhem—not to mention the 401K and healthcare—of my corporate past.

Surprisingly, I had begun to miss the “water cooler” at the office: coworkers talking about their pets or the nonsense of the latest corporate initiative. When my “water cooler” had become a water fountain, a locker room, a lounge area of the gym, when I realized that my likelihood of becoming a professional jiu-jitsu athlete was probably a pipe dream, I’d lost some of the appreciation I’d once had for the sport.

It wasn’t until I quit my job in 2021 that I realized how much the BS of my job made me appreciate jiu-jitsu. It was a relief to have a place to go and blow off steam at the end of the workday. It was a pleasure to have someone to be other than a corporate lackey: a training partner, a competitor, a member of a community. It was a privilege to have such a strong boundary that could prevent my job—within reason—from ruling my life. At minimum, I had two Slack message-free hours a day where I could not be near my phone. Disconnected from technology, I was forced to solve the physical problems at hand instead of nebulous problems “in the cloud.”

When jiu-jitsu became the job, and, when I realized that I was a little too old and started too late to be hanging with the objective best in the world, some of the joy was lost.

Unexpectedly, I missed the dimension of my professional life. My career had scratched a certain itch that jiu-jitsu could not scratch—of problem-solving at scale and getting paid for it.

Being good at something, even something as trivial as running a good team meeting, took the edge off of the pain of the training room. Small wins at work offset the suffering of constant loss, failure, and confusion in the training room, where I could not even find the answers I was seeking because I did not have the technical vocabulary to ask the right questions.

Now I get to think, “I’m getting my ass beat in the training room, but at least I’m decent at my job,” or “I’m getting my ass beat in the training room, and I’m getting my ass beat at my job, but at least I am getting paid enough to support myself and afford my life.”

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I don’t like thinking about the version of myself that brought me to the doors of my first-ever jiu-jitsu class. I don’t talk about her much, and anyone who knew me well at the time could tell you that I was not doing well at the time.

I kept driving forward—figuratively and, on the road trip, literally—and, by doing so, I put distance between me and that version of myself.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I try not to look back, but now the exercise of writing a book that deals with looking back demands it. To explain why I embarked on a yearlong, cross-country journey to try to realize my competitive potential in the sport requires understanding why I started the sport to begin with. To explain this to a hoped-for literary agent who may not know about or care about jiu-jitsu—but must care about a good story—requires a certain degree of businesslike dissociation from my own life. Of late, I’ve been forced into a state of objectivity in what of my own journey is compelling both on and off the mats.

I like to think my overall trajectory makes for a pretty compelling story, especially in the last year: I formally relocated to Atlanta after wandering across the country and strongly considering whether I’d rather return to my life in Boston. I won the biggest tournament of my jiu-jitsu career, the World Masters Championship, after rebalancing my life and having it not revolve around jiu-jitsu. I received my brown belt, bittersweetly, under a new coach and team. I began teaching jiu-jitsu to students of my own.

Now that I’ve got my ending, I’m forced to return to the beginning.

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As my first-year jiu-jitsu anniversary post recalls, there’s a sign on the wall of my first gym with a quotation from Hunter S. Thompson: For every moment of triumph, every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

When I think about the path in jiu-jitsu that led me here, both over the last year and over the last six, that’s exactly how I would describe it:

A routine and willing trampling of my soul for those moments of beauty and triumph.

A continuous challenge and shedding of the inessential in favor of greater self-understanding.

A strange and brutal journey that I can hardly explain to myself, but one that I cannot help but continue, grateful for where it has brought me so far and where it yet might lead.

From the World Masters Championship in Las Vegas, September 2022. Eyes on the horizon. Photo credits to Giselle Villasenor