True story: in my 20s I thought teaching martial arts was going to be my career. I was always someone who needed to work hard to cover for lack of natural athletic talent, but by then I had been training for a few years and running most classes for my teacher. I had a small team that I was running out of a basement in Tel Aviv that I was subleasing from another teacher; it was barely breaking even and I was mostly funding it from my three other positions as a youth instructor and then from my work as a data analyst.

Then reality, and startups, and life interfered. Making ends meet was complicated enough without a black hole in my budget, and my move to San Jose sealed that part of my journey. I tried getting back to it occasionally and nothing ever clicked, I got injured once or twice, and having lived half of the last 9 years on planes didn’t help either. So, between all of the above I spent more than a decade away from the mats, wondering whether I was ever going to come back.

This year I found this school, and things clicked. And here I am, in my 40s, my whole body aching for oxygen that my lungs can’t provide while I struggle to hold my own against bigger, better opponents who are five, ten, and twenty years my junior. I still need to work twice as hard to compensate for my lack of talent. I may never get very far, but I don’t worry about that. I have time, and (a tiny bit) less ego, and mostly I have perspective: it turns out that I feel at my best when I’m fighting for my life, figuratively or literally. It’s also why, despite nursing my fourth mild injury in six months, I will be back to the mats as soon as humanly possible. As it turns out, we’re all going to die, but some things matter. This matters to me.