Breaks Bones, Heals Hearts

I want to dedicate this piece to Vikki who keeps roasting me for being a lower grade than her at Jiu-jitsu. I owe her one. Also dedicated to Antonis, one of the nicest instructors I've had.

Were I to write this story with ink and a quill, most probably the ink would have been self-hatred. We are going through a time that people cash out on their content by promoting cheap, middle-class self-love. The marketing is good but it's just a gimmick that does not but scratch the surface. The abyss is still full of angler fish and terrors unspoken of.

The only constant of happiness in my life is martial arts. From a very early age, I loved to fight. Not because I wanted to hurt others but because I realized there was emotional content there. There was a thrill. It was the nicest game ever. I cannot live without it. Unfortunately, I found out much, much later.

As I said, I had always wanted to take up martial arts. I was born in Victoria Square in Athens downtown, Greece. The area used to be upscale and artistic, and in the nineties, it started transforming into a horrible heroin ghetto.

Very close to my house, was the stadium of the greatest athletic association related to Olympic Sports. Their Judo team was among the best in the Balkans and the Greek Olympic runners come from that association almost exclusively.

Apart from that, my friend's mum owned a gym, and they used to do Taekwondo there, which I watched a couple of times and I was super-excited and jealous to try. That was the distant 1997. I was seven. My mind was this wonderful mosaic of Jackie Chan movies, Zoro's fencing delirium, and Street Fighter II.

My mum is a teacher. She is close to retirement now. I am 31. She used to read the Iliad and a lot of Greek mythology to me. My favorite hero was of course Achilleas because he was undefeated until the day he died. Not only was he undefeated but he was nearly immortal. This was my hero. Achilleas knew how to fight. Knowing how to fight made you a hero in my adolescent mind.

My parents hated martial arts. I begged to take classes. Any system. I didn't mind. I wanted to know how to punch and kick and take down people. I was in love with the motion and the sounds, the intensity of it all. I was jealous of all the classmates that did it. It was love. Unrequited love beyond logic and certainly beyond proportion. I cracked the oven door by kicking it.

When I asked them to join my classmates from school at the Taekwondo class. They got me to a place to learn playing a type of 8-string mandolin that is very typical of the Ionian islands. I had musical talent and I loved it. I didn't love it with the unfathomable intensity that I loved-and still love- the martial arts.

We moved to the countryside and I am still asking to do martial arts. My parents, especially my dad are terrifying people pleasers. A friend of my dad was part of the managing council for a local basketball team. I ask to take Karate classes and instead, they take me to basketball training. Having said that, I am 6'3 which is short for professional basketball but still tall enough for a town in the countryside. The worst part there was the teammates. I fucking hated and still hate these cunts.

I was fourteen and in love with the daughter of that friend of my dad. So, I wrote her a poem. She told the guys on the basketball team. People that didn't even know me, were mocking me at training. Long story, short we are playing the Southern Greece semi-finals against the strongest competitor of the periphery and we lose. I was a substitute the entire match. The people that had been mocking me, were crying. I went to the bathroom and choked one of the most despicable, vindictive amazing waves of laughter of my entire fucking life. I even laugh now as I remember how much I was laughing back then.

I still wanted to do martial arts. Bachelor's degrees in Greece are mostly four years long. I get to try Gong Fu for the first time in my life at a very weird academy. Basement with a dark brown carpet. The system was Eagle Claw Gong Fu, it is a system that incorporates grabbing and destroying limbs to its striking arsenal. Beautiful moves choreographed that improved my flexibility but to be fair, very little focus on the application of this amazing art. I stayed there for three years.

The first two years I studied in Athens, I was renting a basement flat. About ten minutes from the academy. My parents decided to refurbish the flat that I was born in after it had been damaged beyond repair by the last people renting it. They left without a trace and there was no one to sue.

The flat still needed lots and lots of refurbishments and the area is not safe, it's not clean. It's very depressive. Many times, before I would even drop the trash bag in the bin, a homeless person would take it from my hand to see what's in it. I felt that all of this tragedy as the crisis peaked was my fault.

I was spiraling cause I was now too far from the Gong Fu academy, had a quite toxic relationship with an older woman, and most of the time was taken up by work. When I got home, I would waste my life on video games and -since I don't smoke or drink- fast food. I got really fat. I am a fairly tall guy so I guessed that at some point, I reached 140 kg. Depression was there. I would cry myself to sleep, realizing that my whole career would revolve around working afternoons and evenings.

Now, this is late 2009. I was studying at the University of Athens, Faculty of English Studies and literature. The choice of career was not mine. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Like every teacher of English as a second language in Greece, I started giving private lessons to kids around Athens. More often than not, I was not paid in time, and in some cases, people didn't pay me for the whole amount of hours.

I stopped attending Gong Fu eventually. My body couldn't take it. I needed a lot of time to commute and there were very few classes I could take. The martial arts that I loved more were the ones associated with joint manipulation. It was at that time that I discovered the most amazing thing on earth. The thing that fills my heart with emotion and makes me levitate.

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. If rock'n'roll was a social revolution that started in the late fifties. Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is the most revolutionary thing of our times. For those that have no clue. Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is a combat sport and martial art, very similar to Judo but the game ends in the ground either with points awarded for dominant positions or by submitting your opponent through joint locks and chokes.

It's magic. As Helio Gracie, the father of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu said, " It's the triumph of human intellect over brute strength". It's true. The first person I ever sparred with was fifteen years older than me and half my weight. He got me in so many chokes and submissions that I said to myself. I want to know this! I can't go through life without wanting this. I was obese but I tried to put in as much training as I could.

Then... It was my turn to do my compulsory time in the Greek Army. I broke up with my partner, entered the army. Didn't train for a year but I lost a lot of weight there. I tried to walk as much, jog around, lift when officers allowed me to. The problem is that in the army, you don't get paid. As soon as I did my service, I went back to live with my parents. Found a job as a substitute teacher in a town where there was no Jiu-jitsu and the academy I attended in Athens was 2 and a half hours away.

I woke up in the morning, taught until noon. The school bus dropped me at the train station. I went along the whole length of the train line in Athens. Put as much training in, cause I was going there every other day. I rented a room at a friend's flat in Athens. Slept. Woke up at 5.00 A.M went back to Corinth(my hometown) walked to school carrying all of my BJJ gear because the town and the train station were not well connected and I couldn't afford a taxi that frequently. Taught at school, taught private lessons until the evening without any time for lunch. Went home, ate, showered, went to lift weights. My instructor at the time used me as the fat guy to play jokes on, didn't correct me, didn't give me feedback. I was not living in Athens. I was obese, a lost cause. Fuck him too.

All of that would have been alright if the fucking school paid me on time. When I wasn't paid, I couldn't afford the monthly card for the train, the BJJ classes, or the gym. I was living with my parents rent-free, which is common in Greece because wages are so low that it's almost impossible for someone to afford their place and roommates are not a part of the culture. I did it anyway.

The choice of career forced by someone else has fueled my hatred for a very long. I stopped talking to my parents, take up a master's degree with some money I inherited. Go to Athens, I find a job in business development for an orthopedics supplier. They fire me after a month and they pay me a rate of 2,5 euros/per hour. I am an MBA graduate. They had been doing that with everyone, as I figured out later. This is Greece after all. The place that I hate with all of my heart. The root of all of my trauma.

I lived off the inheritance for a bit. I was unemployed for a couple of months, not talking to my parents, had a hard break up, I was festered by panic attacks daily, " I became the person you wanted me to be and now I cannot live with myself". I was paying the price for being a good student, for making it into Uni and graduating. Society was changing and like everyone else, despite my middle class background, my survival was a constant gamble with unstable situations.

The dream of becoming a BJJ instructor still lived in me. I start working crazy hours, doing my master's. I wrote two dissertations in a month and I was being paid for it as a ghostwriter. Graduated. All this time, I couldn't train because I couldn't survive if I were to work fewer hours. I hadn't had a day off in four months. No holidays, nothing.

Found another shitty job in a beach bar. Greek sweatshops. Working crazy hours and getting paid shit under 40-celsius degrees and being shouted at for no reason. Fuck this man, if I ever return there, I will break his fucking spine.

I get on a plane to Scotland. Find a job, get myself sorted out. Start running, I was running 5km every day no matter what. I start doing the Keto diet. I am fit, I am stable financially and psychologically, haven't had a panic attack in months. I go to train at this amazing place called Rick Young's Black Belt Academy. I am losing weight, I am improving. It feels that I am now on the path to become the man I want to be. I meet Mo, my best friend in Scotland and one of the nicest people I have met. Coronavirus stops the world for a year and a half...I am devastated, I felt that my dream must be on hold again.

People shouldn't support my passion. I am in charge of my freedom to become myself. I will support myself and pay the price needed. It is my Bellum contra omnes. Against my tendency to overindulge and abuse me to the point that I destroyed my body, against my panic attacks, against the people that didn't believe in me, the shit employers that scammed their way on every occasion, against my instructor that humiliated me in front of the whole class while I was sacrificing every single cent to be in his class. My passion is to fight. Bjj is fighting but for me, it took the fighting to be merely able to attend a class. One day I will be good at it, no matter what it takes. If the expense is never having a family or money aside so be it. I owe it to myself whom I don't hate as much any more. I do not want the journey to be short, I don't want a painless redemption. I don't want to go through life without becoming it.

Jiu-jitsu finds everything problematic with us and roots it out. It desires honesty, the things we ignore and the things we lack, manifest in front of us and our teammates. It teaches you to let go and to re-negotiate a situation. It teaches people mercy and others that they need a minimum of violence to survive. It puts you in front of the fear of death, people choke you and they choke you out sometimes and recover you. It is abuse, not like my parents hitting me, but abuse that is within controlled situations. One that heals you. One that healed me and I think, made me a better human being. It offered me heroes, people to try to immitate, follow their teachings and regulate my chaotic life. In a fairly loveless life, Jiu-jitsu offered me a family.