hits and misses

inside the octagon & on the silver screen. simultaneously, consecutively, cyclically.

they say that a lot of growing up is reconnecting with things in your childhood you used to love, but grew ashamed of, eventually shunned, or “outgrew”. one of the big things my father and I used to do together was watch UFC fights. of course, we only had old fights that played on cable or the up-and-coming, “nobody knows who they are” fighters, but it was always entertaining.

i remember i loved watching it. it was a good bonding experience with my hard-headed, cold-hearted father who really only ever enjoyed watching people get into fights or being in fights himself.

then, i hit 18 and maybe it was the fact that it was literal state-sanctioned violence played on a screen for thousands, if not millions, of people to be entertained by, or maybe it was a rejection of everything my parents were and wanted from me, but i, in a sense, grew out of it. once i moved out for college, i never watched it on my own.

recently, through two of the people closest in my life now, i’ve gotten back into watching it and what can i say other than, i am obsessed. it’s strange, really—how something you once dropped like a bad habit can circle back to you with an entirely different temperature. it’s like touching an old scar and finding it warm again, alive again. i watch these fights now with a different set of eyes, a different version of myself, yet there’s a faint echo of the girl who used to sit cross-legged in the hammock next to her father, pretending not to flinch when someone caught a clean hit.

it’s not just that i’m watching UFC again. it’s that i’m watching myself again. or maybe letting myself be seen and recognized by others, and most importantly myself, for the first time in a long while. it’s like i watch myself watch the fight and i can tell i just look so happy.

for the past four years, i think i lived inside this idea of who i was supposed to be. yale has a way of doing that to you—handing you a version of yourself that feels polished, curated, palatable. someone who reads all the right books, says all the right things, never admits to the parts of herself that like mess, chaos, sweat, impact. someone who trades sharp edges for smooth surfaces.

and because i wanted to belong, i wore that version of myself like a uniform. i convinced myself that loving philosophy and loving a good fight couldn’t coexist. that the girl who writes about borders and cinema shouldn’t also be the girl who gets excited when someone lands a clean takedown.

so i tucked that part of me away. told myself it was childish, unsophisticated, not aligned with the person i was trying to be.

but now, falling back into the world of fights—almost accidentally, through the people who feel closest to me—it feels like i’m meeting someone i’d lost track of. someone i’d left behind because i thought everyone else knew who i ought to be better than i did.

and there’s something strangely intimate about that. like discovering you’re allowed to be more than one thing at once. that contradiction isn’t immaturity—sometimes it’s honesty.

maybe getting older isn’t about becoming a new person but peeling away the personas you thought you needed to survive certain rooms. maybe it’s about saying: i can love literature and love watching people beat the shit out of each other. i can be thoughtful and chaotic, soft and sharp, academic and animal.

and maybe theres another reason i’ve slipped back into loving it: the discipline. the sheer, almost monastic self-control these fighters have to cultivate just to step into the cage. people think it’s all chaos and brute force, but it’s the opposite—hours of repetition, restraint, ritual.

and i think i admire that because, in a strange way, it’s how my dad was. not soft, not expressive, not gentle—but disciplined. rigid, even. a man who lived by routine and toughness and a kind of internal code he never explained but always embodied. watching these fighters now, i recognize that same sharp-edged commitment in them.

so maybe it makes sense that i’m drawn to it. it feels like a language i learned a long time ago, even if i tried to forget it. it feels like recognizing something in others that i once saw every day in my own home—something unforgiving, something focused, something that demands everything but gives a strange kind of stability in return.

maybe i like UFC because it reminds me of that discipline. because it lets me touch a part of him—and a part of myself—i thought I’d outgrown.