Year One without the dream

Knowing a goal was stupid and doomed doesn’t make it easy to abandon

You have to shape and maintain dreams the way you do a bonsai if you want them to survive. Tweak the geometry here and there when you realize you didn’t grow the way you thought you would. Scrap whole portions when you lose the bits of you that were supposed to fill them.

I decided, teenage and socially stunted and misdiagnosed, that I wanted to fight for a living.

This was a departure from the original game plan. I was supposed to be an engineer; as a child I’d checked out the same two books on historical fighters and bombers over and over from the elementary school library. I had emotional attachments to certain Battlebots that would, in more organic sporting events, have included body paint and novelty hats.

Standard-issue tech-focused autism, in hindsight, but the thing about my personal niche on the spectrum is that hyperfixation hits like a train. It latched onto a Japanese boxing comic and there was no stopping it.

I’d turned the corner after a disastrous start to my high school career produced my second (first voluntary) mental health commitment and earned my way into Vanderbilt. I proved a very good student and a very poor engineer, which was fine; the whole “change the world through the power of technology” deal was Plan B at that point. Through my cunning strategy of being born to people significantly smarter than me, I had enough of a safety net to throw myself into picking up heavy things and putting them back down over and over.

Despite more support than my commitment merited, I didn’t have “it.” The idea that I’d use grit and hustle to make up for a late start fell apart due to severely overestimating my grit and hustle.

I got there eventually, a couple years and one semi-voluntary commitment later. Consistent lifting pushed me from around 150 pounds to 190, with cardio that went from sucking wind after a 10-minute mile to doing three in 22 minutes. Not spectacular numbers, of course, just enough to keep the increasingly small and sickly dream on life support. No world title run, but maybe a decent stint on the regional circuit before taking a late-notice UFC bout and getting smoked on the untelevised prelims for $8,000.

Starting proper fight training proved a greater hurdle than anticipated due to a combination of mounting injuries and a pandemic that made grappling sweaty dudes even more inadvisable than usual. Even when things returned to semi-normalcy, other issues swiftly developed.

Still, I’d maintained my fitness and the dream wasn’t dead, though it’d been boiled down to one (1) professional boxing match, win or lose. Still good.

By the time I felt ready to knuckle down and get back to punching, the scouting report read:

• Astigmatism
• Scoliosis
• Four meniscus repairs
• Surgically repaired elbow after shattering it in a high school accident
• Three torn labrums (both hips and one shoulder)
• Potential inguinal hernia suffered while running (later diagnosed as a musculoskeletal issue)
• Right hand/wrist damage originally sustained in flag football as a child, later worsened by hitting a refrigerator in a moment of anger in 2016.

My one lifeline was that I knew I could punch and I could take a punch. I had geriatric joints, but I was confident I could last four three-minute rounds and my fellows in the throes of mid/quarter-life crises would fall over if I hit them. I had a whole article series planned out, humorously following my journey like if some hack reimagined Rocky as a depressed millennial. Inspired by the Oleksandr Khyzhniak Paradigm (they cannot punch you if you do not stop punching them), I went into our local gym and had an hour-long private lesson to see where I stood.

I knew the mountain was too high, but I really thought I was farther up.

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It was probably never going to happen. There’s no way I’d have stayed injury-free; even without the natural clumsiness and questionable decision-making, the impingement in my hips means that damage there was inevitable. One of the orthopedists I’ve seen suggested I may have congenitally weak connective tissue. My vision is awful and I don’t react well under pressure, physical or mental.

The annoying thing I’ve learned, though, is that something doesn’t have to be rational to have weight.

It was nice to think it. It was motivating, at least, something to push me through the last stretch of a five-mile run. The idea that all of that effort was for something.

It’s not all bad. I’ve got a chronic condition I hadn’t fully treated because the medication decreases athletic performance and is probably on WADA’s banned list. There’s no question that this failure to launch will be a net benefit for my long-term health.

I’m hoping sometime soon I can look at the dream, tucked into a corner of my garage with a tarp draped over it, and smile. I’ll find something to fill the hole I tried to make for it, something I don’t have to sand the edges off of to make fit.

Good a time as any to start looking.