11-16-24 🤍💙💜 Last day as a blue belt! 😭🥹 Thanks to the Meraki fam and all the gyms who let me train and travel! Grateful for such a welcoming community anywhere I go 🙏🏻 It’s been a long journey since I walked into a jiu jitsu gym for the first time in 2018. The first two years I hardly even took a single photo training because I didn’t want to ruin it by oversharing or posting online. It was something I was doing for myself and I was afraid of quitting and have it be another 🪦 hobby.. (now I can’t stop sharing hahaha) I started out of fear. Fear of my own safety after having an encounter that I later reflected having no idea what I’d have done if things escalated. Having always heard Maynard from Tool talk about the benefits and his love of jiu jitsu I decided the next day to find a gym and give it a shot. Those first 6 months were brutal. Not just the training but being so physically weak, everyday I wasn’t sure how I’d even survive another. But as with my online career, I just decided to not quit and figure it out as I go. My love of video games I think is the true through line — gaming used to take up a massive amount of my free time until I found jiu jitsu. It has the same appeal as gaming for me but with way more real life [More]