I was born in a cult and as far as I can remember I was always told to believe that the world was going to end and I would not go into the rapture if certain things were not done. I was not allowed to wear Jeans, or T-shirts, or shorts. As a kid, I was told not to make friends with people outside the cult and to enforce that I was totally cut out from the world till the age of 14. I had no idea what a television was and when I did, we were still told that it is a devil’s device much like watching movies or listening to pop songs, or reading a magazine. I have seen a grown man die in front of my own eyes and as a kid that fucks you up on another level and to control the narrative we were told that ‘He was not faithful to God’. The cult promoted the ‘blessing of the holy ghost’ and I have seen women rolling around the floor like cylinders or slithering like snakes. I was told repeatedly that I had to follow the rules of the cult and ‘what God said’ in order to be saved or I would burn in the eternal fire of hell.
All of these incidences led me to a life of clinical depression and suicidal tendencies. At the age of 19, I tried self-harm for the first time, in order to feel something and then sometime later I tried to kill myself by jumping in front of a train. Then I discovered substances and it got to a point where drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol became my release. I wanted to die young and thought that if I just kept abusing substances eventually I would. Then in 2016, I had my closest experience with death. I was at a party in Indonesia and blacked out for a couple of days before waking up in a hospital. I spent almost 5 days in a wheelchair and had to be taken by medical air transport back to my home nation. I spent another 2 weeks in the hospital back home where they ran a lot of tests on me, only for the doctor to say that if I didn’t change my way of living, I would end up dead pretty soon. I was 22. The waiting time in the hospital made me reflect a lot about myself. At that time, my brother was already doing Jiu-Jitsu and he told me to try it as it had helped him find a way in his life. Once I started BJJ, I became hooked. It gave me a way in life, a sense of belonging and I was learning something new every day. It also made me confident about myself as a person who suffered spiritual abuse. I was doing good in life and then suddenly the hole opened and swallowed me whole.
I was doing BJJ as a band-aid to hide and run from the real problems that had been going on inside me. It was a quick-fix thing that I used and in a way replaced substance abuse with the mats. This time it was hard in a way that I had never imagined. It became hard for me to even get out of bed, I put on a lot of weight and always thought of ‘offing myself’. In all of this chaos, the thing that changed my outlook on life and helped to pull me out of that hole was therapy and philosophy. Jiu-Jitsu had initially helped a lost me to find a way in life but it was actually philosophy, and now as someone who is studying psychoanalysis, that helped me to understand myself and find a meaning in life. This year I competed in the Europeans and after losing by an advantage I had a bad mental breakdown. Thankfully, I had a support system in the form of my coaches Ana Yagues and Tony Hesse who supported me and uplifted me. Still, the psychoanalyst in me wanted to find out why the mental breakdown happened in the first place. The answer I zeroed down upon was that I cannot use BJJ competitions as a way to run away from all my problems and as someone who has an ongoing battle with depression and suicide, I cannot make winning my complete identity. There has to be more and I have inherent value as a human being. It does not matter if I win or lose, I am a valuable person. I had to learn all of this the hard way. And thus Rolling For A Reason was born, to spread awareness of mental health issues inside the BJJ community. I will forever be grateful to BJJ for giving me a way of life when I was lost. Without it, I wouldn’t be the man I am today.
