Vincit Qui Se Vincit

My childhood was a short one.  It was a confusing time in my life, one which I thought I knew who I was.  I relied upon my parents to provide the safety I needed.  My mother did her best.  I grew up with fear: fear of the bullies behind my house, fear of the adults in my life, fear of losing more of what little I owned.  The only thing I was not afraid of was my brothers and sisters.


I spent my time educating myself on what I felt was important: Science, Music, Languages, simply being educated.  To me, these subjects were important; to me, this was who I was.  My decision to join the Navy and continue learning was not random.  I made it with the intention of learning who I was, to serve my country and, I thought, to be a man.  Instead, I bobbled, lost in a sea of confusion.


I furthered my confusion by dating someone whom I thought was right for me.  I put myself in to a situation which replicated my childhood where, like my father and his father before him, I would eventually leave, ashamed of who I was, feeling like less of a man due to my continued inability to confront my own self-image.

My brother called me in to his office one summer day, shortly after the term had let out, and showed me a clip of a friend I new cagefighting.  He was big, close to 300#'s; fighting a man bigger than him.  He went several rounds and won after putting this larger man up on the cage and pummeling him with his fists.  I immediately called him asking him to coach me.


MMA produces a specific type of person: a predator.  It's a mixture of long-range fighting in the form of boxing and close range fighting using jujitsu (modern MMA).  This has become the formula because that's what works.  When I started training with him, I had the cardio to go 10 rounds.  I could go so long every day that he he would collapse from exhaustion and yet I craved more every day.  I studied American Boxing, Muai Thai and JuJitsu with the ravenous desire that I had devoted to everything else I studied..


My first day at the gym was incredible.  The owner had been having a dispute with one of the students about thefts from the gym for a few weeks.  The student told the owner off and wouldn't give the keys back.  Eventually he decided that he wanted to come back so the owner told him that if he would get in the ring (which the student said he would win in with this former pro-UFC fighter), he could come back.  Enter me.  This kid, maybe 18 but big, went 2 minutes and just took a pounding.  This, too me, made sense in a weird way.  It was the way things worked.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RKEvbkODF8


It must have been a week later that my coach told me that he wanted me to "sparr" with one of the other guys, a man named Wallner.  Everyone talked shit about him and his weird loopy punches so I thought I had a very good chance of beating him, what with my 2 months of private lessons.  I got in that ring confident that I was the leader, the winner, the alpha-dog.


I left the ring after 7 rounds with 2 fractured ribs, a partially fractured big toe on my left foot, my neck jacked up and injured pride, but I learned something about myself in that 21 minutes of an ass beating.  I learned who I was.  When he broke my ribs, it was the most excruciating pain I had ever been in; every breath hurt, every motion from my left side felt like a knife cutting in to my lungs, my abs burned from the continued exertion of fighting, but I went the rest of the way... another 5 rounds.  He ended the fight because I wouldn't quit, because I chased him even when I knew he was better, I cornered him even when I knew he was dangerous, I did what I had to because it's what I needed.  He ended the fight by choking me out.  For teaching me who I was, I owe him.


I recently had the opportunity to go out with a friend from work.  He was a young kid, 23 and drifting in life, lost with no guidance.  Among my peers at work, I am the one people look to.  He heard me speak of things that would mystify most, but to him, they made sense.  Science, religion, women, war, whatever the subject was, we all talked about it openly while we shuffled through the day.  While working he told me he wanted to fight me and I had told him that it could be arranged.  Well, New Years Day was when it was to be.


I won't bore you with the details (more of, anyway) and not everyone agrees with what happened, but after we had had a couple of drinks and met some women, we went at it.  I had told him I would, but the fear he felt when fighting for real made him panic.  He didn't know me and he thought he could beat me.  He didn't.


Sometimes learning who you are isn't as simple as looking in a mirror, or running the Marathon.  It isn't always something you can learn on your own, but more often a lesson you need to seek out from someone else.  Often we don't even know that we don't know ourselves, stumbling through life in a fearful haze of what could happen to us.  How can we succeed if we can't look in the mirror and say, "That is me."