柔の道
Journal
This tag is the diary part of the journal: posts pinned to actual events rather than ideas. The first class. The first stripe. The first time someone asked if I would compete and I produced a fence to sit on.
I keep these separate from the concept and fundamentals piles because they age differently. A post about base will be as true in five years as it is now. A post about my first stripe is true the way a photograph is true: accurate about one moment, taken by someone who could not see what was coming next. That is also what makes them worth writing. In a year I will not be able to remember what week three actually felt like, and every upper belt I have asked confirms the forgetting is total.
If you are starting now, read these in order. They are the closest thing this site has to a before picture.
- Your first jiu-jitsu class: what actually happens A play-by-play of a first BJJ class from someone who just had one. What to expect, what nobody tells you, and the one thing to remember.
- What a first stripe actually means A first stripe in BJJ usually arrives somewhere between two and six months, and it does not mean you are good. What the tape on the belt actually measures.
- What progress feels like when you cannot see it Progress in BJJ hides for months. You do not win more, you drown less. The invisible markers I learned to read instead of waiting for a highlight reel.
- Should a white belt compete? Notes from the fence Whether a white belt should compete has two honest answers, and mine changed while writing this. Notes from someone still deciding, with both cases intact.
- My first submission: an americana I hit before I understood it My first jiu-jitsu submission was an americana I could not name until I looked it up afterward. What I actually did, and the part of it that worried me.
- The month almost everyone wants to quit Wanting to quit jiu-jitsu around month two is so common it has a schedule. What the urge actually is, what it is not, and what to do when it visits.
- Rolling with higher belts, and why you cannot do anything yet Getting handled by upper belts is not evidence you are failing. It is the curriculum working. What those rounds are for, and how to stop dreading them.
- Why the gi gasses you out, and it is mostly the grip You gas out faster in the gi than you ever did wrestling, and it is mostly your hands: a hard grip chokes off its own blood, and the forearms quit first.
- My first stripe, one month in Getting my first white belt stripe about a month in: what the moment was actually like, and what a wrestling background carries into jiu-jitsu.