Not everything I survived made me stronger. But it made me real.
I’ve slept in cars. Curled up in janitor’s closets. Trained through hunger just to hold on to a thread of who I was. This isn’t a story about how pain makes you stronger. It’s about how it makes you real—when everything else has been stripped away.
Not everything I went through was fair. A lot of it wasn't. Some of it was downright brutal.
But all of it taught me something.
And truthfully? Some parts of it — I wouldn't trade. Because they made me.
Sleeping in cars. Crashing on borrowed floors. Finding corners of the world where I could go unseen.
Going days without real meals, stretching scraps and small mercies further than they were meant to go.
These weren't just hard times or obstacles.
They felt like rites of passage.
Stages I had to pass through to become who I was supposed to be.
It wasn't romantic.
It wasn't cinematic.
It was survival.
The Empty Hand Teaches Most
But in the middle of it all, something deeper started happening:
I began to learn what I could actually endure.
What I was actually made of.
See, if I hadn't lived through certain things earlier — being constantly uprooted, abandoned, bullied, forgotten — I don't know if I could've handled those adult years of instability.
But I had already trained for it, in a way.
Life had put me through the early reps.
At seven years old, while living in Japan, I'd watch judo classes from a hiding spot — learning to avoid the ijimekko, local bullies who loved to single me out for being ha-fu, half-breed. I wasn't looking to fight back. Something else drew me in: the explosive movements, the graceful throws, the discipline that seemed to anchor people amid chaos.
Martial arts gave me a way to hold it all.
Not to fix it. Not to escape it.
But to move through it — without losing myself.
These were life lessons from martial arts I couldn’t have learned any other way.
The Forge of Many Fires
My sensei once told me something I didn't understand until years later:
"The dojo floor reveals who you already are."
He wasn't talking about natural talent. He meant that how you handle being thrown, struck, exhausted, or humbled mirrors how you face life's harder moments.
Sometimes I think of those years as a kind of forge.
They shaped me.
Stripped away the ego.
Burned off what I didn't need.
Forced me to find what was real. What was mine.
I remember nights during my college days here in California, nineteen years old, sleeping on a thin blanket on the floor of an apartment I could barely afford. Living off instant noodles and whatever I could scrape together — sometimes even sneaking a hamburger patty from the freezer from a roommate just to get something in my system.
Somehow, I kept training at two different dojos despite having nothing — not just because I was disciplined (though I was), but because those training halls were the only places where the world made sense.
Where life had parameters. Where effort equaled growth.
I'm not grateful for the pain.
But I'm grateful for what I built in response to it.
Kuzushi: The Art of Unbalancing
In Japanese martial arts, there's a principle called kuzushi — the art of unbalancing your opponent before executing a technique. Without breaking their balance first, your throw lacks power. Your strike meets resistance.
Life, I've found, performs kuzushi on us constantly.
Just when we think we're standing solid, it shifts the ground.
Here's something I learned the hard way:
Rock bottom isn't a single place.
It's a staircase.
Just when you think you've hit the lowest level, life shows you another floor beneath it.
And another.
So I stopped assuming the world was ending every time it got dark.
Because things can always get worse. Sometimes, much, much worse.
But they can also get clearer.
There's something steadying about realizing that.
It makes you move differently. Breathe differently.
You stop waiting for things to be easy.
And you start asking:
How do I want to carry myself through this?
The Silent Teacher of Empty Hands
I didn’t choose martial arts to learn how to hurt people. That’s the misconception people who’ve never done judo or karate often have. The irony is that what draws many of us to these disciplines — especially those who’ve known real violence — is their capacity to teach self-control, patience, and what the Japanese call zanshin: continued awareness, even after action.
The kind of awareness that keeps you present when everything is falling apart.
At thirteen, practicing karate forms alone in a borrowed space, I wasn’t preparing for a fight. I was building a home inside myself that couldn’t be taken away.
When facing moments of deep injustice and pain in my youth, I didn’t fight back. I didn’t seek revenge.
Not because I was weak.
But because martial arts was teaching me something more valuable than retaliation:
How to remain myself in unbearable moments.
How to absorb impact without becoming it.
If you're going through something right now —
Something that feels senseless, unfair, unending —
Just know this:
It might not be a punishment.
It might be your rite of passage.
Not everything you survive makes you stronger.
But some of it?
Some of it makes you real.
And real is what the world needs more of.
Real is what stays when everything else falls away.
The Path With No Shortcuts
People often ask me what martial arts has to teach someone who isn’t fighting for their survival — someone with a comfortable life, a stable home, a refrigerator that’s never empty.
Everything, I tell them.
Because comfort is temporary. Security is an illusion. And the principles that carried me through homelessness and hunger are the same ones that help navigate everyday struggles.
In the dojo, there's a saying:
"The path has no shortcuts."
You cannot skip the difficult parts and still reach mastery. You cannot avoid discomfort and still grow stronger.
This isn't just true on the training floor.
The mother struggling with postpartum depression. The executive facing burnout. The student overwhelmed by anxiety — each stands at their own crossroads between avoidance and presence.
Between turning away and turning toward.
Between seeing difficulty as punishment or as passage.
What martial arts taught me wasn’t how to avoid life’s harder edges, but how to meet them with steady breath, a rooted stance, and the willingness to be transformed by what I couldn’t control.
I look at my hands sometimes — the same hands that once stretched change to buy cheap noodles, that once snuck scraps from shared kitchens just to get through the day, that now guide others through the forms that saved me — and I’m struck by how ordinary they look.
How they bear no visible trace of all they’ve carried.
But they remember.
And so do I.