I was terribly down and depressed.
Training today was looking good. A lot of my good buddies showed up to work a gauntlet circuit on me; a gauntlet is the the full fight, in this case three rounds of three minutes, with a fresh person coming in each minute. It was supposed to be my last day of good hard sparring, and it was going well. Against one opponent in the last round I landed strong strikes that left him covering up against the cage. I probed and probed and then unloaded a combo which he responded with by just thrusting into me. Because I had the visual advantage during this whole exchange I got underhooks when we clinched up. I went to combo trips, hip throws, and shots with my underhooks by my opponent was a good grappler/judoka (and thus was able to read and defend well), and at one point in the series of hip directions I was dictating he just held on to an overhook and fell forward in a shoulder throw attempt. It wasn’t very clean, I would of had his back at the end of the fall, but because we we’re wearing boxing gloves my arm was stuck and we fell with both our weights on the top of my shoulder. It was the worst pain.
I didn’t get up for fifteen minutes, just throbbing in pain. Eventually got it wrapped up in ice. My strength and nutrition coach said, with his certainty, that it’s an AC joint separation. I honestly felt sick from the pain and wanted to hurl. As it stands now, I can’t move my arm across my body at all, out forward, or up without acute pains. After researching it, yes it sounds like an AC thing but I doubt I’ll go to a doctor.
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I went to watch the fights with my friends. Some really good fights, but man it hurt to watch. I just have so many feelings going on about failed expectations, and inexplicable amounts of what I perceive to be negative karma almost consistently shooting me down. It’s just a feeling of damning and failing.
After the fights the place turned into a club and people drank. I didn’t feel well in there. I looked at the people and knew that this isn’t what I want to be. I don’t want to be one of these people who come out week after week for this. It seemed like shallow ground. A place where people came to affirm something in themselves because it (this place, these events) tingles in people as something natural or cool—something that people are supposed to do and something that’s supposed to be naturally fun. It isn’t natural, it’s a depression pit. It’s a place lonely people go to meet other lonely people, and in that they get drunk and stumble together; stringing together into a series of nights of these foggy likes, never to be remembered as something worthwhile or never to be known intimately. Nothing worthwhile happens here, ever. It’s emptiness under the pretense of fun and normal.
Taking it all in kind of motivated me though. As hurt and discouraged as I was about my shoulder and this fight, seeing this further threw it in me that I can’t become this. I can’t be one of them, I don’t want to be one of them, and the strongest feeling I recognized is that my girlfriend doesn’t deserve one of them. Not saying that nightclub people are bad or lazy or whatever, but just this perspective of mine was so personal that it kind of crazily transcends the truth of the individual people there and more just ventures into my intangible thoughts about worth and potential.
This setback, in this short time of review, made me question a lot. I’m getting older and things are far from perfect. I begin to doubt it as an issue or putting in work, because I do put in work and lots of it; I begin to think it’s of matters out of my hand — a damning. It hurt. This nightclub, silly enough, motivated me. I can’t become that, I don’t deserve that, and my girl doesn’t deserve that.
This, as of right now, is motivating. I’m on fire. I will be back stronger and better.
