When Life Hands You Lemons

I have no idea what I’m doing.  I have no idea where I’m going.  I have no idea what’s going to happen.  Obviously, I know that right now*, I’m drinking coffee at the café down the street from my apartment in NOLA, writing my first blog entry (of which there will hopefully be many).  I know that I’m going to Cambodia to see my father and create some much needed space.  And I know that when I get there, I will give him the biggest hug he’s ever gotten and start to work on a business plan to revamp his socio entrepreneurial business Wetlands Works! (more on that later).  What I mean to say then, is that for the past month into now, for the first time in my memory, I have no meticulous and ambitious life plan.

In the sixth grade my teacher pulled me aside to tell me I was failing my classes.  Apparently blatantly reading Sci-Fi during homeroom wasn’t the way to honor roll.  Simultaneously, a guardian angel came into my life and impressed upon me the importance of hard work and taking responsibility for myself as a practice of self-respect.  I put my nose to the grindstone as a way to escape from and better my circumstances and never looked back.  Seventh and eighth grade were devoted to raising my grades to get into a decent high school.  Starting high school, I maintained an A average, joined clubs and made sports teams.  Applied and was rejected, applied and was rejected, applied and was finally accepted to the prestigious Deerfield Academy on financial aid.  After an awkward junior year of painful adjustment, I excelled at creative writing, earned my first real paycheck working at the school grill, and made high honors.  The summer before I went to Tulane University on scholarship, I worked as a life guard to raise some money and spent that and my savings in life thus far on an intensive summer internship to get my professional SCUBA diver’s license.  My next summer and subsequent semesters were usually spent interning at Banks and Financial Institutions. 

While in New Orleans attending college, I met the pivotal character who became my boxing and kickboxing coach, and together with a friend, we established GOW Martial Arts, a small dojo.  I became the ICMAC Heavyweight World Champion, a Title National Boxing Silver Medalist and won the Louisiana State Golden Gloves.  This past May, I graduated from Tulane Summa Cum Laude with Departmental Honors in Economics and that’s about when everything I was holding together shattered in helpless and long overdue release.

I began to experience shortness of breath, constantly feeling as if I could not get the air I so desperately needed.  Panic attacks, an ordeal I hadn’t experienced routinely since the sixth grade, left the metallic taste of fear in the back of my throat.  All the expectations and external motivations driving me to attain more and achieve greater were suffocating me.  I was (rather painfully) shedding outdated mechanisms I developed in adolescence to keep me safe.  Of course, I ignored this.  I did not stop, continuing to train three hours a day, jogging along the street car tracks on St. Charles, my lungs shriveled plastic bags refusing to fill.  After a week or two of this, I was at my gym sparring and my body stopped.  On a cellular level, I did not want to be where I was, physically in the ring, mentally forced and spiritually repressed.  I watched as a back leg round house cracked across my jaw and down I went.  My heart and mind weren't there to support the blow.  I tearfully confessed to my coach that I didn't know what I was doing anymore but I knew what I was doing wasn't working.

We both decided to see this as an opportunity for growth.  When life hands you lemons, examine the fucking lemons and decide what to do with them.  I canceled my tournaments and decided to focus on personal growth.  And fun.  Lots of fun.

So here I am, having sold my piece of the dojo and hopped on a plane, creating space with no plan to go pro or go to the Olympics, no distraction of academic pursuit and accolades, no high powered job to keep me climbing a ladder of loftier and loftier goals.

I dedicate this next year to me. 

To do whatever I want, to have fun, to travel, to explore, to be instead of always just doing.  This blog is here to record and share my adventures—the places, the people and the random happenstance.  Today, I leave for Southeast Asia.  I return to NOLA in a month for some more photo shoots, to finish up filming in a movie and to take a few stunt classes.  And then, who knows?  I certainly don’t and I’m enjoying the fuck out of it!

Stay tuned for my next entry:  It’s a Holiday in Cambodia!!  Or alternatively titled:  The Place Where You Can Blow Up a Buffalo With a Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher for $500*!

*My computer’s wireless was, for some unknown but irritating reason, not working.  It's fixed (for now) so I’m still in a coffee shop posting this but the coffee shop is in Cambodia two days later.

*Please do not come to Cambodia and blow up Buffalo.  Not cool.