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bjj scares me

tue, 14 jul 2026, 08:44pm utc

brazilian jiu jitsu is a combat sport focused on grappling, i.e. wrangling your opponent for points during competitions or into submission or unconsciousness by applying a variety of joint locks, chokeholds or other such things. it is also known as "the gentle art" for its lack of striking to induce brain or organ damage despite it being trivial to seriously injure yourself or the other involved party in immediately crippling ways, willingly or unwillingly, the latter primarily when you are one of the uninitiated - the caste of practitioners i most definitely belong to. if you aren't squeamish, check out the horrifying kani basami on youtube! anyway, i have a couple of jiu-jitsu lessons under my belt. searching my brain, i struggle to come up with an answer to the question "how did i ever have the confidence to show up to these places?" because the idea of attending a bjj lesson deeply frightens me

this is not a post about brazilian jiu jitsu

around this time last year, i signed up for a culture academy membership. the culture academy is a non-profit org that provides a safe and open space to do all sorts of things in a communal way including but not limited to yoga, cooking, knitting, IT workshops, mma and, of course, brazilian jiu-jitsu. before this, i had already "tried out" at two other gyms. my first attempt at entering the sport was disappointing since the trainer seemed disorganized, and the class consisted practically of only first timers. this didn't exactly inspire confidence. while i was looking at bjj as a recreational hobby, i did intend to also become good at it for ego-feeding purposes, and this didn't seem like the place where those dreams would become reality

after that, i visited a more competitive class hosted by another gym which was more aligned with what i wanted but was unfortunately gi-only. a gi is the traditional garb of the sport, practically the same thing judoka wear. as a fan of mma, i preferred the no-gi approach where you just show up in shorts and a compression shirt known as a rash guard. this takes away clothing as an attack surface and invites more judo- and wrestling-adjacent techniques which are more interesting to me than lightly choking someone with their suit collar. it's also just more natural. who wants to even do warm-ups in a god damn suit. get me out of these constricting clothes. regardless, even if i was pro gi, there were other issues. the class i attended was practically a demoralizing beatdown. it's humbling to be folded into all sorts of shapes during drills by more experienced people while you were taught practically no fundamentals to defend yourself with, so, as a new guy, you are technically there to be ragdolled. the drill is something that mostly happens to you, not something you take part in. it takes a special kind of masochist to enjoy this. i also didn't love the environment. the people seemed professional and nice enough but i just couldn't imagine being around them regularly. have you ever been some place among some people and thought "yeah, this is where i'm supposed to be right now"? this was the complete opposite of that. i tried to stow away these counterproductive, idealistic thoughts and took home a membership application but left it sitting in my paperwork pile completely filled out until i forgot about it. that was my last session for a while. i concluded that maybe this shit just wasn't for me after all

when my invitation to the academy was extended to me by an acquaintance, i was kind of stoked. combat sports have presumably always attracted a more, let's say, "conservative crowd", but the neo-nazi problem is especially prevalent in my eastern german residence these days, so stumbling upon a gay communist gym (they offer flinta classes) to train in with competent people who regard you as their equal gives you a certain kind of peace of mind if you hold similarly humanistic views. i also regard the gym as a place in which you can socialize with nice people, so that's a cultural fit for me. still, mixed in with the elation was a special kind of anxiety

when you ask the people i grew up with if they could ever imagine me in a sports class of any kind, their first reaction would likely be unbridled laughter. i was known to be possibly the least athletic kid on the block. i skipped PE classes for years, building a reputation as an uncool, lazy dickhead in the process, and almost got permanently expelled from my school in return. not because i necessarily wanted the negative attention, but rather because i didn't want to embarass myself with my lack of athleticism (wow, foreshadowing) and enthusiasm for team sports. the last time i remember showing up, i gave it my all and proceeded to throw up all over the floor in front of the class. my teacher at the time who didn't much like me quipped that he'd now understand if i didn't show up anymore which i creatively interpreted as permission to skip class even harder from then on before ultimately dropping out. my attitude towards physical activity has changed significantly since then, and i've been doing strength training on and off for a long time now, but one thing that hasn't changed much is that i'm socially strange in a catastrophic way

among strangers, i am hyperconscious of myself. i seem to have made it my lifelong task to never offend anyone by acting in a way that could be considered cringe, weird or antagonistic which results in suppression of the self and a kind of offensive reservedness that people will, ironically, classify as weird. here's a strangle example: when leaving the café, i will not say goodbye to my acquaintances if they're in the presence of people i don't know or if doing so requires speaking in a loud voice that will catch the attention of strangers that are in the way, all out of fear of somehow embarassing myself. let's say, my voice cracks or they overhear me, "leaving me hanging" if you will. or my nightmare scenario if they're with friends: they give me the gen z stare and don't say it back which would signal that i've misjudged how much you like me and now i must banish this place and you from my life for betraying me. in any of these cases, however likely they are to occur, my conditioning will tell me that i have just embarassed myself, ruining my mood for the rest of the day since my brain will not switch off and instead continue to recall the moment until i am on the cusp of going insane from stress. alternatively, i will think that i could be annoying you with my "attention-grabbing". so i just walk out of the door and go home. this creates tension both in myself and probably in people i interact with regularly. some will be fine with the idea of me just being weird like that and others more plugged into the psychosphere will resent me for giving them a strange mix of signals, both "hello, i am your friend" and "i will not acknowledge your existence, leaving you to guess why". i am 100% of the time living in fear of embarassing myself. whether by being socially awkward, the avoidance of which as has been demonstrated leads to me being perceived as socially awkward, or, crucially for bjj, not knowing or understanding something intuitively, especially if i feel that i should know or understand it

when i first made my way up the stairs to the culture academy's premises in july of last year, i felt like i was going to pass out from the anxiety. i had arrived just after the striking class wrapped up, so a stream of strangers flowed out of the matted-out room down the narrow corridor and into my direction. immediately, sweaty men and women alike started greeting me and giving me fist bumps on their way past. it was nice but also awful. eventually, i found my contact who then showed me around before we settled into the room where i was to presumably meet my maker. the following hour is now pretty much a haze, but it involved a lot of awkward attempts at throwing people around and trying out over- and underhooks into back takes. just thinking about it makes me wince. eventually, the worst-case scenario came to pass: the shark tank was called

a shark tank is a staple of presumably many combat sports where you and a randomly selected opponent duke it out in front of all the others, trying to reach a certain goal. in bjj, this could be a single-leg takedown. the first to achieve the takedown leaves the ring and rejoins the queue. the "loser" remains and takes on the next opponent already waiting in the queue with the same goal in mind, rinse and repeat. i chose the single-leg example because that was exactly the task of my first shark tank. never in my life had i ever considered trying a single-leg on anyone. i didn't even know how to facilitate one since no one taught me how, and i certainly didn't want every single one of the 10+ participants to know that i'm a moron by asking the trainer to explain and then fumbling my way through one against much more seasoned fighters over and over and over again. if there's a more embarassing situation for introducing someone like me to a technique than the tank, then i'm not aware of its existence

it's really difficult for me to transport via words the emotions that came over me as i watched the group get in line, and no attempt at doing so will do justice. it was a fight-or-flight panic. even thinking back on it now while typing, a year later, this panic comes flooding back with the same exact intensity. the heat wave traveling through your body, your heart beat rising to 180bpm while standing completely still, the nausea, oh god, the horrible nausea. it's the closest you can probably come to having a full-blown panic attack without actually having it, and i feel it now sitting in this beanbag chair in my "office", miles away from the gym

if you're wondering: i picked flight. my shoulder had been lightly aching for some months, so in my panic, i stumbled toward the person in charge and told them that i was gonna go home due to pain. he looked at me for a second in a peculiar manner and finally replied with "...okay?". i dislike the ellipsis as a rhetorical device but it's necessary for emphasis here. the pause before answering, his mind analyzing my excuse and the inflection at the end of his one word sentence transformed panic into rage, flight into fight, but instead of doing single-legs, i was about to insult this trainer and burn all bridges connecting me to this institution. my immediate thought was something along the lines of "are you doubting me? who even are you? i gave you a reasonable excuse, and you're going to accept it"

at that point in my life, i was still under the effects of some very important psychotherapy sessions. i now know that god won't save me and that i'll have to take prophylactic action to make my own life more pleasant before it all ends. that or end it myself, but there is no waiting for better times, just action. recognizing that is one step, evaluating your behavioral patterns that are detrimental to this action taking place is another. you find yourself in a type of situation in which you have previously done the thing that ultimately got you into a psych ward, so with your newfound self-awareness, your neurons fire, giving you a very brief moment to take the final step by trying something different this time and evaluating the result after. interpreting your emotions and reasoning through them is a bit like bible exegesis in that there's a whole lot of creative assuming and educated guessing going on despite there being very little chance of arriving at some ultimate and undisputed core truth. my guess is that i was in a situation that has previously in my life been very stressful (PE class), and since i used to wage war against my teachers and principals for forcing me to do something i really didn't want to do for reasons they couldn't possibly relate or even want to relate to, i felt the need to wage war against the bjj coach since he too seemed to question the validity of my struggle with the thing instead of being understanding, though i didn't really give him a chance to understand anything. another less creative guess is that i had chosen the deceit play to avoid being authentic and felt that the coach called me out on it. in any case, i had failed the final step of doing something differently and that sucked

when i left the gym alone, i was completely deflated. it was a nice summer day with all sorts of delightful smells like coffee and cheap falafel in the air. there was not an ounce of anything but complete and total misery in me. i sent some voice notes to a friend of mine at the time and told them about the ordeal, prompting them to tell me how much courage it must have taken to even go and to look at it as a success despite it all, but those words didn't trigger any emotion. i had been to classes before; that milestone was worthless to me. i knew the truth, and that truth was that i had critically failed to do either of the healthy things that would've maybe enabled self-actualization: admit to not knowing something and try it anyway, overcoming the shame OR take a stand and communicate honestly that you're not comfortable doing the tank, overcoming the need for an excuse to refuse something. i did some damage control by messaging my contact about why i had left so abruptly, and he proceeded to assure me that we'd find a more suitable class structure to accommodate my needs

some time later, i went to class again but brought a friend which in itself was already failure to me. i leaned on them being new as well to comfort me when what i really wanted to do was brave it on my lonesome. we proceeded to do the shark tank again, and i excused myself once more, along with my friend who suffers from similar lack of confidence to speak up

during my psych ward stint, i initially often found myself in a situation where the group of patients had planned activity x, but since i didn't feel comfortable around them, i tagged along while abstaining from active participation, which to me felt reasonable but made some of them actively dislike me without them seeking resolution by talking to me. they just passive-aggressively sulked in their repulsion until it became so personally annoying to me and damaging to group cohesion that i confronted them myself out of sheer anger. when discussing this with my therapist, she advised me to "just be the spoilsport", a sentiment i return to a lot even after all this time. i'm no longer in school. it's okay to say no to things i don't want to do, and how people deal with me saying no is their own problem. if they force a situation where their problems become yours, you confront. it's the holy trinity of therapyspeak: self-determination, drawing of boundaries, boundary enforcement. but does any of that even mean anything if you can't act on it? if you're stuck in a perpetual state of realization followed by impotence?

it is now 7:23pm. i am writing this from my sack filled with balls in my untidy "office". i decided to attend the 6pm bjj basics class at the academy today. my stomach hurt thinking about it many hours before, and i almost wanted to have a good cry about it, but then i took a preparatory shower and pondered out loud what the shame in being a bumbling buffoon would be? i might fuck around and do everything wrong on purpose, just to own it, i declared to myself silently. then i proceeded to chant "i can't do it" while putting on my clothes and leaving the house. i had a red bull and a banana as a pre-workout on the way and at last arrived at the gates of hell. why does red bull taste dry while being a liquid? with eight minutes to spare before class began and the door still locked, i lit a cigarette and tried to gather some courage. while standing in front of the entrance to the yard a good distance away from the door, i noticed some people walking past me who looked familiar, like i had seen them at one of the other classes a year prior, and they weren't even close to being beginners. what were they doing at a basics class? i don't exactly know what happened in my head, but in an instant my confidence disappeared entirely. building images of random people who you're gonna playfight with in your head is one thing, but actually seeing the real ones is another. with every drag of the cigarette, the figurative door to my salvation closed a bit more, and by the time i extinguished it, i arrived at the conclusion that i couldn't do it. it looked like four people had entered in pairs of two, so my mind spun me some tale along the lines of "well, you need a partner, so if the number of attendants including you is odd, you're not gonna have one and force some stupid rotation thing" and "all these people know each other and probably have known each other for years. you're gonna be the weird new guy and not get picked as a partner, just like in school", and that was enough to push me over the edge. i waited out 6pm while staring at my reflection in the window across from me, cursed myself and started on the long walk back home. my mood deteriorated further along the way, and by the time i entered the supermarket in my neighborhood, i was entirely detached from everything, walking past produce and fellow shoppers in a trance. nothing mattered anymore. i just wanted to lie down in the aisles and die

that was an hour ago. i still want to lie down in the aisles and die. i had placed all my hopes of personal improvement in this one appointment and couldn't even make it through the door this time. it's legitimately just regression. i first drafted this post before class, so it saddens me that i now can't write the originally intended ending to this story, i.e. me going to class and it being the most fun i'd ever had. alas, brazilian jiu jitsu continues to scare me. maybe we'll get 'em next tuesday