Jiu-jitsu is for.....someone.

 On showing up.

    Trees Hall is an old building that sits on the very apex of the aptly named "Cardiac Hill" at the University of Pittsburgh. It's called that because, should an unfortunate soul have a previously unknown heart condition and try to scale it, they'll more than likely drop dead before they reach the Burger King in the Pete three-quarters of the way up. It's to the top of this mountain I would trudge on Sundays, past the strewn clothes and occasional bodies of drunk college kids, to a musty basement in an old building. 

    In that basement was a magical place called the Multi-Purpose Room.

    Now, the uses of that room truly were legion. Some nights it would be filled with wrestlers, kickboxers, dancers. Other nights it would be a place to study, swing kettlebells, and practice esoteric martial arts that were obviously invented in that very place the day before by a group of guys with access to fake weapons and a disappointing lack of physics homework to keep them occupied.

    To say this place reeked of sweat would be to do a great disservice to the sheer magnitude of sequestered perspiration hidden beneath the aging foam. A great amalgam of DNA; I believe the whole of the human genome may have actually been sequenced from what was sponged up below the mats one weeknight. Penicillin was first discovered when someone pulled an old pair of boxing mitts from the back cupboard and punched a friend in the mouth with them; miraculously, his syphilis cleared overnight. 

    In this room, a few times a week, the Pitt MMA club would meet. The group as a whole wasn't much for striking. Occasionally, we would strap up and send a few errant kicks into a training partner's groin, but mostly it was all grappling. The main instructor was a neuroscience major who had the unenviable job of dealing with an influx of meatheads every fall and somehow sorting the chaff into a few outcasts that preferred the camaraderie of other sweaty men trying to hurt them to the usual bonding exercises of college life, mainly getting one's stomach pumped at Presbyterian with a bro. 

    A tall dude with long legs performed my initiation. It was a triangle that darted up from a land of nightmares known as full guard. It was strange, the logical part of my brain trying to register the idea that this lanky kid was actively murdering me with his thighs. The animal part panicking, telling me to use all the muscles and epinephrine in my body to pile-drive this bony aggressor into the Earth's core. I settled on lifting the guy halfway off the ground and gurgling the word "stop" just before I set off on a lovely adventure into a kaleidoscopic world of color and a ringing symphony of tinnitus. I remember my new friend kneeling over me, asking if I was okay with concern in his eyes, almost as if he hadn't just sent me to the Upside Down two minutes after meeting me. 

    After the second time he got me with the ol' sankaku, I figured out how to tap. It was after probably the seventh that I became determined to solve this new puzzle I'd found. 

    To this day, I'm not sure how I ended up down in that basement for my first practice. Up to then, social interaction with other humans just wasn't my thing. Overweight, anxious, with a personality I felt best to keep hidden from the world, just showing up that first evening was likely one of the most profound steps I've ever taken to becoming a more complete version of myself. The people I met there were welcoming and didn't care about my weight, where I was from, how much money my family had, my grades, my major. They didn't care about what frat I was in or who my friends were. 

    They only cared that I showed up. 

    Throughout the years, many I've trained with have expressed frustration at their perceived lack of progress on the mats. They tell themselves that they're not where they're supposed to be, that their body just isn't made for it. They're too old or too broken. 

    Within the toil, these individuals are making incremental progress, invisible to all but the keenest observer. Achievements of spirit and body are happening every day, but the painting can only be completed one brushstroke at a time.    

    Find good people. They might be hiding in a dank basement on top of a crushingly tall hillside. They might pass your guard and take your soul and drag it from one end of the mat to the other. Through the struggle, trust the progress that is inevitably there. Believe in those that help you see it. Give yourself permission to suck at something and feel like hell and like you'll never belong. It will get better.   

    'Cause most days, all that matters is that you still showed up.  

-M