jiu-jitsu wasn’t meant to be a long-term commitment. The plan at the time was to get a blue belt and then return to my other plethora of pursuits.

You see, at that time in my life, I picked up projects like lint. In fact, trying to check as many of the “right” boxes as possible was kind of my thing. In high school, I was on the Academic Decathlon team, the baseball team, in a couple of service clubs, and graduated as valedictorian. Following that, I got a B.S. in physics from UCLA.  For a hot second, I believed my future would be a Ph.D. in particle physics, and a research job at the Large Hadron Collider. 

But the trappings of success can mask some unpleasant things. If you hadn’t already guessed, achievement for me was a compulsion, not an intention. Some of the things I chased the hardest didn’t make me genuinely happy. And some of the things that truly lit my fire would never be allowed the label of a “real” pursuit in my mind. I was without a solid sense of self, a purpose, or a what I believed to be a “respectable” place in life. I was the quintessential “fragile perfect,” and it would catch up to me.

Two months into my graduate studies, I dropped out, became a boomerang kid, and desperately searched for work for 8 months before landing a "safe job" that I would grow to despise over the next four years. It was amid this backdrop that I first walked into the Gracie Academy in January of 2007. But unlike so many of the other pursuits I’d collected over the years, it morphed from a line-item for the sake of validation into something different.

As it turned out, the process of trying to avoid my simulated death, day after day, had an implicit lesson that slowly began to creep into my subconscious: I was worth defending. All my life I had it backward. Before learning, before achievement, before the struggle—I was worth it. And once that began to genuinely sink in, it was as if the stars began to align.

Jiu-jitsu became a microcosm of life’s struggles, and I started to feel other truths open up to me. Open-ended questions would always be. Certainty is rarely possible, but choice and intention are always within reach. Objectivity and course-correction are key, but judgement is rarely useful. The struggle and the path aren’t separate—they have always been one and the same.

2025 marks my 18th year in jiu-jitsu, and the 9th year since receiving my black belt. In all this time, I’ve never been in a physical altercation; but I use jiu-jitsu EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Not merely against the dangers of the world, but against the invisible enemies of life: poor mental health, “analysis-paralysis—” the list is endless.