Written: 09-Nov-2022 | Wed 23:18

There are few things I’ve experienced in this life that make me feel like more of a bitch than being choked out by my best friend.

Oh, and uh, yeah, that’s a bit awkward. For the record, it was from wrestling. Yeah, I got choked out… more than once.

I’ve had all 3 of my roommates put me in a position where I feel like an absolute bitch. No matter how hard I wrestle, strain, struggle, or force, somehow I end up feeling like none other than a total bitch.

Choked out, strangled, suffocated – All actions you never want to have inflicted on you by another human. Fortunately for me, all my roommates have all managed to put me in one of these positions.

You owe it to yourself to be choked out every once in a while 😉

A Quick Visual

Picture a small child being cradled by its mother – oblivious, unable to care for itself, kept alive only by the gracious nature of its caring mother.

Yea now switches out that 35-year-old responsible woman with a testosterone-filled, sweaty-balled, hairy-ass grown man. Not your ideal Friday night… In this poor attempt of an analogy, I’m the child, and my roommate is refraining from knocking me unconscious.

So Whatchya Talking About?

There are times when you wrestle, technically Brazillian Jiu Jitsu in this case, where you are totally overpowered and physically can’t move. You are outclassed. You lost. Simple as that. No matter what you do, your opponent has total complete control of you. Your life is in their hands.

You want to do everything you can to survive. You fight, you explode, and you struggle. Nothing changes. They have total control. If your opponent wants to break your arm or knock you unconscious, they have the full ability. You have an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

The Realization

If you always won, and always had an easy time grappling, though, you have no drive to improve. It’s this feeling of desperation that makes you want to improve. It SUCKS getting choked out… let alone by your best friend. It feels personal. You need to improve.

Without the desperation, there’s little desire to improve. No reason to get better. This is true for many aspects in life. It’s often the desire to be better than the other person (more so ourselves) that keeps us going. If we walk around and are never put in our place… If we’re never humbled, well, there’s a good chance we’ll be humbled at a point when we don’t want to.

Training yourself to be put in shitty positions makes you more adept at handling them in the future. It’s not about that singular moment of being strangled. It’s so that in the future you’ll be strangled that much less. That’s the whole point of training.

After a few months of training Jiu Jitsu, I’ve come to realize that’s one of the whole points of the sport: There’s always someone better than you and you have to figure out how to keep the emotions in check. You have to train yourself to calm down and figure out how to not be strangled.

If we humble ourselves on the daily and check our ego on the regular, we’ll have all the tools we need if shit really does hit the fan.

When we’re humbled we’re reminded of how far we have to improve. Without that, we’ll never be truly tested. We think we’re better than we are. We disconnect from reality, but really we just have a disillusioned view of ourselves. We’re living a lie.

Getting our ass kicked is when the learning happens. It inspires the desire to get better. I just watched the Khabib Nurmagomedov vs Abel Trujillo UFC Fight where (spoiler alert) Trujillo got mauled. One of the things [[Joe Rogan]] pointed out was how outclassed Trujillo was. All Trujillo could really do was get back in the gym and fix all the parts of his fighting game that went wrong. He thought we would be chilling during the fight but instead got smoked.

Getting our ass kicked happens when we’ve been coasting on easy street for too long. It’s life’s way of telling us to get the hell up and back on track.

A fight is a quite literal example of this but humbling can be seen in all facets of our life. Our jobs and our relationships are great examples. Everything is going smoothly until it isn’t. We take the good for granted, so when things go wrong, it feels like a total punch to the gut… so dizzying you can’t even see straight.

But every time we feel like a total bitch in our lives, it’s just another chance to train for the next time we’ll feel like a total bitch… so that next time maybe we won’t have to.

I guess that I’m trying to say we all deserved to be choked out… I mean humbled. Either works. Use that embarrassment as motivation to do better instead of lamenting at how poorly things are going.

If you train yourself to be choked out sometimes, you’ll know how to not be choked out. If you train yourself with stress, you’ll know how not to be. If you train yourself to be embarrassed, you won’t be.

Humble yourself and be inspired, don’t pity yourself. I try to treat every setback in life as just another training ground.

It’s not inevitable that you will be wrestling a 20-something-year-old, whose jacked and smells like shit, but it is to say that it is a good training ground.

My Whole Point?

So go. Go feel like a bitch. Seek that feeling so that you improve. Use it as motivation. Don’t complain you’re not good enough. Internalize the failure and use the embarrassment and be better. Use that discomfort as motivation.

Every situation in life trains us for our next situation. The learning never stops. It doesn’t get easier either, we just improve.

It’s good to feel like a bitch sometimes. If you always feel good you probably won’t get better.

Choose your suffering.