“The key to being able to handle the pain and uncertainty?” Cleather quipped, “Accepting the pain. Not fighting it.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things

I won’t apologize for the versions of myself that existed in order to survive.

I also won’t pretend like thinking about some of those past and dead versions of myself doesn’t give the current iteration of me the ick.

I decided to go completely sober in December 2025.

I had put alcohol away earlier in the year when I began fighting more consistently, but had effectively switched one vice for another and started enjoying the cannabis seltzers you can find pretty much anywhere now.

I felt so badass being a “California sober” person.

Not because I identified as an addict or felt like I had made this incredibly virtuous decision, but because I had stopped doing something that was very obviously slowing down my ability to see and make the physical and performance progress as an athlete I knew I was capable of.

Look at me. So disciplined. So evolved.

Anyway.

After raw dogging life for nine months now, free of both, I can say from the other side that I was still lying to myself.

Hard sparring day? Fun seltzer to relax.

Saturday night watching fights? Fun seltzer to vibe.

Good day? Cap it off with a seltzer.

Bad day? Well, obviously.

There was always a perfectly reasonable explanation for why turning the volume down a couple notches would make whatever I was experiencing a little more enjoyable.

And that’s really what I was doing.

Turning the volume down.

Not enough to stop feeling. Not enough to blow my life up. Not enough for anyone to look at me and think I had a problem.

Just enough.

I was effectively anesthetizing myself from feeling the full expression of my emotions while telling myself I was just relaxing.

I remember when I stopped drinking alcohol thinking, Holy shit, I can FEEL MORE.

Nine months with nothing but a prayer and entirely too much caffeine, and I’m realizing there are still depths to my emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual experience that I had semi-unintentionally been turning the volume down on for most of my life.

The THC drinks were just the latest iteration.

To be clear, I’m not writing this from some high horse.

If you’ve been reading my blogs for any amount of time, I’m sure you can discern that I had a pretty dark and unhealthy upbringing.

I started finding ways to numb myself very, very young.

Self-harm at eight. Drinking at ten. Workaholism started at thirteen. I’m not exaggerating—I got a worker’s permit and worked at a local coffee shop until I turned fifteen, at which point I moved to Starbucks and worked as much as I was legally allowed to.

Turns out you can turn the volume down on yourself in a lot of ways.

Some of them are obviously destructive.

Some of them will get you praised for your work ethic.

And some of them come in a cute little can and make Saturday night fights more fun.

As I got older, the ways I coped became increasingly socially acceptable. When one no longer fit the person I was trying to become, I found another.

When I became more serious about being an athlete at 26, drinking stopped making sense.

So the vice changed.

The common denominator was always me trying to find a way to make being inside my own head and body a little quieter.

And honestly, I understand why she did.

I feel so deeply, all the time.

For a long time, I didn’t know what the fuck to do with all of that feeling. I didn’t have the tools, relationships, faith, or community I have now. I had whatever coping mechanisms were available to me at the time, and some of them were objectively not great.

Some of the versions of myself I think back on now make me cringe.

There are decisions I would never make again. Ways I behaved that I don’t identify with anymore. Things I tolerated. Things I did to myself. Things I did because I genuinely did not know another way to exist.

I can look back at that girl and think, Jesus Christ, babe.

And I can love her anyway.

Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

About four months into being completely sober, I started to notice something else.

I could hear myself more clearly.

And I could hear God more clearly, too.

The inner knowings, nudges, signs—all of it got louder.

I don’t think God suddenly started speaking more. I think I finally stopped constantly finding ways to make everything quieter.

There was nothing left between me and whatever I was feeling.

Which, admittedly, fucking sucks sometimes.

But it also meant there was nothing between me and joy. Or conviction. Or gratitude. Or the quiet feeling that I needed to pay attention to something. Or the ability to sit with myself long enough to figure out what was actually going on instead of immediately reaching for something to change the channel.

Muay Thai helps.

My relationship with God keeps my feet firmly on the ground.

My husband helps. My community helps.

I’ve slowly built a life where I don’t need to escape myself nearly as often as I once did.

And maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about refusing to be ashamed of the woman who did.

I don’t need to rewrite her into someone more palatable.

I don’t need to pretend every choice she made was secretly empowering or necessary or part of some beautiful divine plan.

Some of it was ugly.

Some of it was unhealthy.

Some of it gives the current iteration of myself the ick.

But she was working with the tools she had.

And if I’m going to talk publicly about bravery, courage, discipline, becoming, or any of the other things I apparently won’t shut the fuck up about, I think there has to be some integrity in pointing backward, too.

Because you wouldn’t have looked at that girl and predicted this woman.

There is not a single thing I can point to from my past—who I was, how I showed up, what my habits looked like at my lowest—that would have made it obvious that one day I’d be a full-time athlete traveling around the world doing what I love and owning and operating a gym with the love of my life.

None of this felt inevitable.

I don’t know what your dreams are.

I don’t know what holes you’ve had to climb out of, what versions of yourself you’ve had to bury, or what you’ve had to heal from.

But I know how dangerous it is to look at who you’ve been and assume it’s evidence of who you’re capable of becoming.

I thank God for all of it.

And I thank myself for not giving up during all of the moments I wanted to. During all of the moments where, frankly, it would’ve been pretty reasonable to.

Not to, like, trauma dump on you, but like.

I don’t think you need to love every version of yourself.

I certainly don’t.

I don’t even think you need to look backward and somehow turn every shitty decision into a beautiful lesson you’re grateful happened.

Some things just fucking sucked.

But I won’t apologize for the versions of myself that existed in order to survive them.

I won’t spit on their graves either.

They got me here.

And eventually, somewhere along the way, I stopped needing to turn the volume down.

Ora Et Labora.

“Maslow wrote, “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
― Steve Magness, Do Hard Things

I grew up with one parental figure who would rather pretend everything was normal after conflict than acknowledge that anything had happened at all, and another who believed there was one right way to exist: their way. Any deviation from that could result in physical or verbal punishment.

So, as children tend to do, my small brain made sense of the environment it was given. I learned that in order to be loved, I needed to become the version of myself that was most appetizing to the people around me. Be good. Be agreeable. Don’t upset anyone. Read the room before you enter it. Anticipate what people need from you before they have to ask. Shape-shift accordingly.

A very chill and normal way for a child to exist; because upsetting someone didn’t just feel uncomfortable. It felt unsafe. When love and safety become intertwined with your ability to keep other people happy, you become very, very good at abandoning yourself. This is a dangerous way for any young woman to move through the world. Add CPTSD, ADHD, and OCD as the cherry on top, and I would say I survived my childhood and crawled out of my teenage years on bloody hands and knees, trying to regulate myself with drugs and medications because I didn’t yet know another way.

That’s heavy.

I am blunt about my past to be incredibly clear about where I started, because when I tell you Muay Thai didn’t just change my life—it helped save it—I want you to understand the weight behind that statement. Muay Thai taught my nervous system a different definition of conflict.

Getting consistently hit in the face as a beginner was, strangely enough, one of the first things that began to reintroduce me to what conflict actually was. An unconventional form of therapy, I’ll give you that. (I was still and am still doing mindset and re-patterning work- getting hit helped with my somatic experience.)

I learned over the years that conflict did not always mean danger. Someone could hit me and still care about me. Someone could correct me and not reject me. My coach could yell at me in front of an entire room because I was doing something wrong, and I could feel embarrassed and uncomfortable and imperfect—and then discover that I was still safe. Nothing terrible happened. Nobody stopped loving me. I just…needed to fix my fucking technique.

Which is a remarkably freeing realization for someone whose nervous system had spent years treating disapproval like a five-alarm fire. Muay Thai gave me a place to repeatedly experience discomfort without abandonment. And then, because apparently getting punched wasn’t enough character development, it gave me failure.

Losing taught me that disappointment wasn’t death, either. I have lost fights. I have made mistakes in front of people. I have trained my ass off for something and watched the outcome go a different way than I desperately wanted it to. Every single time, I was still there afterward. Still valuable. Still loved. Still me. If you only looked at my wins and training videos, you could very easily miss the parts of my story that actually built me.

You’d miss ACL surgery. You’d miss having to come back physically, mentally, and emotionally from an injury that temporarily took away the thing I had built so much of my life around.

You’d miss the fights that didn’t go my way. You’d miss the moments where I had to sit with the uncomfortable possibility that other people might form an opinion about me based on one performance, one decision, one moment in time.

After every failure or set back I had to decide whether I was going to let ‘them’ decide what that meant for me as a person, or my life or my life as a whole. Coming back from those experiences proved something to me: Regardless of what anyone else believes to be true about me, I know what I am capable of becoming. Because I’ve watched myself become her before.

Again. And again. And again.

There are entire versions of me I have allowed to die so that I could become someone new. I’ve gotten very good at funerals.

There was the little girl who believed keeping everyone happy would keep her safe. The teenager who desperately tried to regulate emotions she didn’t understand. The young woman who needed other people to approve of her choices before she could feel confident making them. The athlete who thought winning would finally prove something permanent about her.

Versions of me have been dying and being rebuilt since I was 8 years old. Now I’m 31.

After enough death-and-rebirth cycles, something interesting happens: you stop being quite so afraid of losing yourself because you know you can build her again.

That may be the reason why I have developed the unfortunate habit of giggling when I hear that someone has been talking shit about me. Not because I’m some enlightened superhuman floating three feet above everyone else’s opinions. I have, unfortunately, not reached that level of spiritual maturity.

I still get frustrated when I’m misunderstood. I still get annoyed. There are absolutely people who can find the exact nerve and tap dance directly on it. With that said- I’ve clawed my way out of enough holes and met enough versions of myself that I know exactly who I am. The good. The bad. The ugly. The deeply loving parts. The ambitious parts. The stubborn parts. The parts with a gnarly potty mouth. The parts I’m still working on.

I THANK GOD I’m no longer spending all of my energy trying to hide the less-palatable pieces of myself. It turns out survival mode is incredibly fucking time-consuming. Without it, I have a lot more energy to love on my family. To genuinely cheer for other people. To pour into my community. To chase enormous goals without needing everyone around me to understand them. To build a life I wake up grateful for instead of one I’m constantly trying to survive.

There is profound freedom in knowing all of yourself and deciding you like her anyway. Maybe this is also why I’ve always loved fantasy novels.

Give me a complicated heroine. I don’t want the woman who always says the right thing, never gets angry, never fucks up, has perfectly regulated emotions at all times, and somehow remains universally palatable while saving the kingdom. Boring.

Give me the main character with a potty mouth and the biggest heart. Give me the woman who occasionally makes the wrong decision for the right reason. Give me someone stubborn and difficult and fiercely loyal who will burn the fucking village down if that’s what it takes to stand up for what she believes is right.

Those are the characters we love because those are the characters who feel real, who make us feel alive. What would a story even be without conflict? Without highs and lows? Without loss? Without the moments where the main character has absolutely no fucking clue how she’s getting out of this one? We understand this when we’re reading stories. Somehow, we forget it when we’re living our own.

We interpret conflict as evidence we’re doing something wrong. We interpret someone disliking us as evidence that maybe we need to change. We interpret failure as evidence that we aren’t who we thought we were. But what if it’s just part of the plot?

You are allowed to be the main character in your own life. I don’t mean that in the chronically-online, everyone-else-is-an-NPC kind of way. Please remain aware that other people exist.

I mean you are allowed to become so invested in the person you are becoming that you stop treating everyone else’s opinion like an editorial note. Someone else’s success doesn’t take anything away from your story. Someone else’s disapproval of how you choose to exist doesn’t have to shake your core. And when someone does press one of your buttons? EXCITE! There’s data there. Maybe they hit an insecurity you haven’t fully addressed yet. Maybe they exposed a place where you’re still outsourcing your worth. Maybe you owe someone an apology. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they’re just an asshole on the internet.

All valuable possibilities to consider. That’s the beauty of knowing yourself. You don’t have to immediately defend yourself against every piece of information that comes your way. You can examine it. Keep what’s useful. Discard what isn’t.

Whether it’s family, a best friend of a decade you eventually have to break up with, a coach correcting you in front of everyone, someone questioning a decision you made, or some loser typing furiously from an anonymous Instagram account— it all becomes data. Data doesn’t get to decide who you are.

You do.

Hands down, that is one of the greatest gifts Muay Thai has given me. It taught me that I can get hit without being destroyed. I can be corrected without being rejected. I can lose without becoming a loser. I can disappoint someone without abandoning myself. I can be misunderstood without needing to frantically prove who I am. I can change without betraying who I’ve been.

I can let old versions of myself die without being afraid of what comes next. After enough self created funerals by now, I’ve met myself enough times to know: I really fucking like the woman who keeps coming back.

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.”

- James Clear

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