I’ll let you in on a little secret - some days are rough. I’ve
always liked the saying “Some days you’re the bug, and some days you’re
the windshield”. And I know that’s
okay. We’re all allowed to have “bad” days every once in a while, you just can’t
let that define you week or your month or even your life. Today I had one of
those not so great days. I think it’s an accumulation of lots of little things
that I’ve just been putting toward the back of my mind – I’m stressed about medschool, I’m stressed about step 1, a friend is moving away, I haven’t talked to
my college best friend in months, I’m tired, I feel like I’m in a BJJ slump,
med school feels isolating, etc. etc. And I may have eaten WAY too much
sugar/drank WAY too much coffee today and had a major crash right around the
time BJJ open mat started. Bad timing.
I could not
physically get myself to walk onto the mat tonight. I just felt like the weight
of the world was on my shoulders and for the first time in a really long time
it was abundantly clear to me that I was the only girl there. I just needed
someone to understand that I was being a little overly-emotional but that it
was OK. And I really do appreciate and respect and genuinely like the guys at
my academy [I do love that I've been fully accepted and don't feel like being a girl sets me back in my BJJ]– but there are times when you just really need a girl because
telling a guy you didn’t want to train because “I want to crawl under a blanket
and eat pounds of chocolate” just isn’t going to fly. And yes, sometimes being
a girl means that even though it’s irrational and you wish you could change it, you’re going to cry or binge eat anyway.
So I didn’t train tonight because I felt like an outsider in my own
academy. [Let me be ABUNDANTLY clear: it was nothing the guys at my academy did, they are incredibly supportive, it was just an irrational feeling]. I was really upset with myself the entire ride home, but luckily I have
a strong supportive mother who told me to “suck it up, go back tomorrow, and
prove to yourself that you do belong”. And that’s not her being harsh – that’s
her awesome way of picking me back up and telling me not to let one bad day
make me give up on BJJ. [Thank you.]
So that was my bad day. I will be back tomorrow at class,
and I will train. You’ve just got to take life one day at a time. Today was
rough – tomorrow will be better.
To all the warriors out there who keep standing up every time
they fall, remember that “Failure is not
the falling down, but the staying down”.
OSS.
Labels: bad day, BJJ, getting up