A New Beginning

A New Beginning. I have an album in my phone gallery, labeled just this. It consists of photos of a very dear friend of mine and myself, and the entire process of getting ready for our first fight. Yep, fight. MMA fight. First one for both of us, same card, two different weight classes and two different opponents. This was August of 2016.

I cut weight, too much and I did it poorly. Fortunately, she did not have as much to go. We lived together at the time, so at least one of us in the household could be emotionally stable. The hanger was real.

It was a very memorable period of growth for me. The first of many very influential ones, I would say. The start of me cultivating who I wanted to be as a person. After all, you do create yourself.

You see, I was cutting weight, working 2 jobs, going to school, on my period, and just got dumped. The week before my first fight. Ouch. As a 19-year-old, that’s a pretty rough week right there. Never mind the “severe depression” that I had been diagnosed with--officially anyways--the year prior.

But that all had to be put aside because this was my first fight.

I trained hard. When I started at Next Edge, I didn’t necessarily have the intentions of getting into MMA. I started with my first love—Jiu-Jitsu. I will always and forever hold this discipline the most near and dear to my heart. But then I also fell in love with boxing. And then my former soccer legs decided to remind me that kicking is a lot of fun, and I fell in love with Muay Thai. I fell in love with the art and the practice, and the level of respect that was expected in the gym, and the amount of comradery that was earned and created amongst my partners and I. I spent as much time as I could in my own personal sanctuary. It's funny that the only place that I got punched in the face, became my safest place to be.

And then I got to the fight, we headlined the undercard around 10pm…and I lost. I lost by a split decision to the hometown girl.

What I had to process through after that, is that it did not invalidate my experiences before and after. I still trained hard. Harder than for anything else I ever had up to that point. And losing didn’t make my hard training any less hard. It didn’t make the literal blood, sweat, and tears not worth it. It actually made me a better person. Because it taught me how to stand back up, brush the dust off, and get back to the grind when life quite literally breaks your nose.