Rise

by Paige VanZant

  It’s December and I’m set to fight Michelle “The Karate Hottie” Waterson as Fox’s main event. We’re not part of the lineup—we are the lineup. Being on the main card is both thrilling and mortifying. It feels good to be featured, but a loss will be that much more magnified. I don’t know much about Michelle other than the fact that she has a serious background in traditional martial arts.

  During fight camp, my foot and ankle are injured, which makes training at full speed impossible. I can’t afford to put off a fight this important, so I just work through the pain. As the weeks progress and the fight grows closer, my ankle refuses to heal. It’s easy to get down when you’re injured. It gives you an excuse to slow down, to quit. It opens up my mind to all the doubts and negative voices. I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve to be the main event. I don’t belong in the UFC. It’s so frustrating to accomplish so much and, yet, negative thoughts still find a way to creep in. I push through the rest of fight camp, focusing on my purpose. I want to win. I want to provide for my family and my future.

  The fight is in Sacramento, my new hometown, my fight camp base, so I can’t fail. I have to show Team Alpha Male that they have trained me well. The stakes are crazy: winning tonight can catapult my career—and losing gives her my current position. The pressure is heavy, the feeling that all eyes are fixed on whatever is going to happen next. Like me, Michelle has been modeling from an early age and she’s also made her own rounds on reality TV. At the official weigh-in, the two of us break out into a playful freestyle dance-off for fun.

  But she takes my ranking and I lose the fight. Right from the start, Michelle clinches me against the cage, closing the distance, and with that she’s able to throw me onto the mat. From then on, it’s a tussle, but I can feel that my ground game isn’t at its max, and she does everything she can to finally sink me into a rear-naked choke. She adjusts her grip, and I can feel my airway closing in, that familiar feeling, it’s how I went down with Rose. Here I am again—hanging in the hairline sliver between life and death, pushing myself to endure, sipping air through the stress of it, and plowing forward on the fuel of pure resilience. It feels like the pressure is going to snap my throat, so I tap out and suck in what feels like a gallon of air. I have lost the fight by submission in the first round, which is both a swift kick in the ass and a wake-up call to the fact that I have my work cut out for me.

  After a loss like this, I skip the gym for a while but, once again, it’s Mom who snaps me back into reality. “If you’re serious about actually doing this, you better stay at it,” she warns, her tone intent. She sounds the alarm I need to get me up off my ass, working hard again, with my eye on the big picture.

  A less experienced me might take a defeat such as this one to heart. Michelle took my position, after all. And while it’s true that I hate losing, for some reason I face this loss with a new blend of dignity. I accept it as a reality of my evolution as a fighter. I start to see that there will always be wins and losses and that the real point is to give it my all. It’s one thing for me to beat some of the less-seasoned fighters whom I have won against before, but if I want to be a champion, I need a new bar: I need to start finishing the higher-echelon women, the Tecia Torreses, Rose Namajunases, and Michelle Watersons of the world. And for that, I will need more technique, more discipline, and more precision. I’m not mad at that. Bring it all, is my attitude.

  I hold a BEAST, an ANGEL,

  and a madman INSIDE ME.

  —Dylan Thomas

  GRIT & GRACE

  I know it sounds insane, but I decide to move back to Oregon. I return to the source of some of my best and worst hours for the simple reason that I want to define my home state on my own terms. I want to fall in love with it again. But when I try to trace the history of hate that pulsed through major moments of my life here, I always come up short. Sure, I can understand that it happened—I just can’t understand why. And in the fogginess of this limbo I make a choice: to choose love. I can’t control other people, their way of thinking, or their behavior. What I can do is maximize the agency I have over my own life. And I want to be a lover and a fighter.

  Sometimes it feels like my life is woven together from the innate duality of everything that comprises it. As a dancer and a fighter, I have to work with rhythm and strength, with coordination and stamina, with balance and brawn. I am very much my parents’ daughter—she a dancer, he a wrestler—their legacies of physical robustness entwined in me. I know I’m still young. I wish I could sit that fourteen-year-old me down and say, Look, your rape was without a question the absolute most evil, horrible thing that has ever happened to you—but it will also somehow be your most important teacher. Through the years, I slowly peeled back the layers of the trauma, first by admitting it happened, by talking about it, by processing it, and ultimately by crafting an entire identity and life purpose around the notion of self-empowerment. Maybe that’s the purpose of pain. To strengthen. To cultivate resilience. To condition. To teach.

  I’m in awe of the power within one’s self to climb out of just about anything. The power to redefine the terms of our mission in life at any given time, even in the face of the most harrowing rock bottoms. There was a time not long ago when my life felt haunted by a constant darkness, a gash in my soul that just bled and bled. Every day was a wrangling of demons. Now I see the demons less and acknowledge the angels more. Instead of counting down the hours left to sleep, I milk every waking minute. I live. I experience. I feel the fullness of existence in my body and mind, and there isn’t a moment that I take for granted, because at one point I wanted to die. The goal is consistent: to stop my inner lamentations dead in their tracks, and any time I feel down, to dig deeper and remind myself to transform the melancholy into might. In this way, for me the act of being a committed fighter occurs all the time, in real time, from the inside out. And those dark gray corners of my memories slowly flood with luminescence and the golden promise of possibility.

  Yet I feel the need to keep shedding the calloused pieces of my past. Despite my growth, traces of the agony still linger on me like tiny strips of seaweed that cling to wet flesh after a swim. Unseen to most, sticky nonetheless. I aim to shake them off, but the essence of these emotional pathogens is to persist. So there they always are, these prickly little reminders. Sometimes the tiniest things can trigger a memory, like the long pinky nail of the woman who gave me a manicure the other day, and forever the strummed jangle of a ukulele, whose twinkling sound is thought of as sweet to most, but to me is the soundtrack to death. I know these memories will never fully vanish, because experiences such as these seep into the tiniest folds of one’s existence. I can blur the thoughts. But I know I can’t erase them.

  One day, in an act of metaphorical scab-picking, I drive to the Newberg police precinct. I’m not even sure why. Or maybe I am. I just know in some intuitive way that I am supposed to go there. It’s been a while, but the thread still pulls.

  Pulling into the parking lot, the memories flood back. Just stepping outside the car proves to be tricky for me at first, but I manage and walk up to the entrance. But once I swing open the door of the precinct, everything shifts.

  “Paige VanZant! I watched your fight!” a young officer says, pushing back his chair with a loud screech. He stands, and a giant smile of admiration forms across his face. He looks like he might even salute me.

  “I’m here to pick up a box of personal items. I left it here a few years ago when I gave my statement. About my rape.” The words are crisp as they leave my mouth—delivered with a tone that has nothing to hide. I say the word “rape” not as a victim, but as a survivor. The cop looks at me slack-jawed and dumbfounded, sizing up his understanding of me as a professional UFC fighter in the context of what I just said.

  “Of course,” he says, his cheeks suddenly flushed. “Let’s get you a release.” After some phone calls and a fair amount of administrative shuffling, the officer produces a document for me to sign, which will grant
me access to my own most private possessions. While he’s off doing that I reflect on the fact that I left all traces of these memories here, in the care of the police, during which time I worked on myself, strengthened myself, conditioned myself to be the best that I can. Now strong, I can take back my past.

  I open it. Everything is exactly as I left it. Tons of journals and notes from that time, some of them recounting what happened, others just quickly scribbled blasts of suicidal thinking. A written testament of my darkest hours. I can’t look at it in front of the cop. I snap the box closed and thank the officer for his help. He congratulates me on my accomplishments and walks me out to my car, even asking for a selfie and my autograph.

  I set the box in the driver’s seat. I’m not sure where I’m going, but I feel something. I feel the call of my own soul to do something. I feel it’s time to shed yet another layer.

  I arrive at the cemetery where my grandmother is buried. I haven’t been to her grave in ages. The earth is damp and spongy beneath me, and on Grandma’s grave there is an elaborate regal-looking tangle of moss draped on her tombstone like a green velvet shawl. I sit on the ground with the box in my lap. There is a vast stillness, with the exception of the occasional insect wing flutter or rustle of a leaf. I open the box, the sound of the old cardboard suddenly loud in the silence. I slowly take out one piece of writing at a time, reading aloud the wrath and fury of each one, telling the ghost of my grandmother, the trees, the sky, the grass, the insects, and the flowers about the worst thing that has ever happened to me. Telling this story isn’t something I’ve done that many times in my life—but letting it all go there to nature and the unseen feels oddly more appropriate than my confessions to Alan, the police, Alexa, and Dr. Morgan. Now I release the story to God. I release the words “I was raped,” and the heaviness from every etching and every scribble, casting them outside me, watching them fall like dry leaves onto a grave. And like a snake molting old skin, I keep stepping outside the dead parts and slide into the rest of my life.

  Non-MMA people are always shocked to hear that I’m a professional fighter, and when they see images of my face all bloodied their eyes go wide. They can’t imagine a life of such violence. They can’t fathom that one would voluntarily put themselves through that kind of pain. But they don’t realize that I have been through so much worse. That I think about my past almost every single day. That in the fading rearview mirror of my experience, I always try to understand. I unravel the moments from each scene, to tease out the causes and effects that became the complex blueprint of my life. I dig through the memories, I trace my steps backward, I try to do the math. And somehow, it always comes back to one simple word:

  Hate.

  It’s a certain blend of hate that turns a bunch of cheerleaders, who, by definition, are supposed to be bubbly, encouraging, and positive, into a pack of conniving bitches. It is also hate that turns a supposed friend into a vicious sexual abuser. It is an awful brand of hive-mind hate that lays the groundwork for the cruelty that follows me throughout my adult life. It’s hate when someone questions my skill set or my seriousness about being a fighter. It’s pure hate that inspires comments on social media to the tune of “I hope you die.” (I mean, I know I’m involved with a violent sport, but who wishes that on someone else? There isn’t a fight I go into without first having prayed not only for myself but also for my opponent.) And it’s the essence of hate that causes kids in Newberg (long after my time there) to feel so bullied and oppressed that in the span of six months I hear about at least three suicides there; a hate so insanely bad, there are signs up all over that town urging kids to seek help when they feel despair. It breaks my heart to think of my hometown as such a dark hub, but I know exactly how those kids feel. I am those kids.

  I was so desperate for company and friendship that I was willing to compromise my own standards. I clung to the idea of belonging, but the groups to which I sought to belong were not particularly interesting or smart. I got older and continued to chase chaos for the wrong reasons. I dated men who tried to oppress me. I drank alcohol to numb myself out. I even tried to kill myself. But when fighting became a real option, I chose it. I declared it as my own. I identified something positive for my life and dedicated myself to going after it.

  I remember feeling so overcome with despair that I forgot who I was. I sunk into that feeling and drowned inside its power, and in that process the best parts of me became so faded and muted that they finally just switched off. I allowed the sadness to strip me of my own essence. I couldn’t help it. It was bigger than anything I could understand, like an emotional tsunami whose very nature was to persist indefinitely. I wish I could have whispered into my own ear, Please trust me, everything is going to be OK. Your life has meaning. Your path will emerge. Your life is worth it. You are a survivor. You are strong.

  I would tell that younger me, just like I would tell a stranger: Listen, no matter how bleak everything feels, no matter how much you hurt inside every single day, no matter how intensely you feel that you’ll never come out of the hole in which you feel trapped, you have to believe there is hope. And even if you don’t believe it, find something—for me it was fighting—and let that something be what you live for. Imbue it with intention. Nurture it. Protect it from the parts of you that make you want to give up. Cast it far from the place where you harbor your darkness. Make it the light. Because the more power you give to this special something, whatever it is, the more power it has to lift you out of pain and hurl into purpose.

  Just as I believe that fighting was always part of God’s plan for my script, I also feel that my script now is about giving back; it’s about using my experience, and the lessons that followed, as a tool to support anyone who feels mired in depression. I share my story to obliterate hopelessness. To inspire faith. To help shatter the thick walls of pain that harden around a person’s will to go on. To help melt that down into an energy that can be channeled into something better.

  I also share my story for the women (and men) who have suffered (or are still suffering) sexual abuse, for all those victims who are swallowed whole by fear and shame, for the ones who feel they have to stifle the truth and the flood of emotions that comes with it, the ones who live plugged up by their own private hell. The sooner we all learn to talk about these things, horrific as they are, the sooner we can process them. And the opposite is also true: the longer they fester, the longer they take to heal. Even though I was a broken person, for a long time I lived in full denial of what happened to me. Reporting it to the cops was the tip of the iceberg. Talking about it with a therapist, with close friends, and now here with these words, with the concreteness of ink on a page, I declare it all.

  By taking this stance, I stand with people like Alyssa, a young fan from New York who read about my bullying and felt a call to rise. One day, I received a private message from her on Instagram, in which she shared details of her private struggle with me. Her honesty moves me, her courage inspires me. I write back right away: I am here for you.

  We become friends. I even visit her in New York. We go out for pizza. We make each other laugh, reminding one another that beyond even the deepest despair is hope. We write to one another and send gifts on our birthdays. Just by sharing and talking about our pasts and present, we lift one another up. And now that I am in the public eye in a real way and have a platform, I can share these personal motivations with so many others: those who feel held down in their lives, those who are shamed in some way, those who are told they can’t do something, those who are senselessly bullied, those who are not taken seriously, and those who want to be the best.

  Experience has taught me that life itself is a fight—to win at it, you have to be all in. But to win you must also know when to lean on your tools, your trusted techniques to pull you through the most challenging encounters. Because life will stare you down. It’ll try to intimidate you. It’ll come at you with its teeth out. It’ll try to choke you out. It will grab you and try to s
lam you down. It will try to hold you in place. It will pin you into submission until you feel like you’re going to lose yourself. It’ll ground-and-pound you, and it won’t care that you’re bloody, broken, and on the edge of death.

  But you can always rise. You can ignite the part of yourself that chooses life, and compel it to take over. You can scramble out of the worst clinch and take the power back. You can strike back harder. You can come back with an even bigger move. You can return with such a vengeance that you surprise even yourself. It all begins with remembering the basics.

  MAKE EVERY MOVE COUNT

  The cage, like life, is a chess game, which means you have to stay several steps ahead of whatever you face, knowing that whatever you do now lays the groundwork for what happens next. As in life, you have to pace yourself, observe, choose wisely, and think through your behavior, even the micromoves. And if you do make a mistake—and you will; it’s called being human—remember that you can always come back. There is always a path back. Just because you get the shit kicked out of you in round 1, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to win.

  BE DECISIVE

  When you’re in a fight, there’s no time to think—you have to move with your instinct. You have to trust yourself implicitly, trust in the power of your brain and body to deliver what you need to prevail. I wish more adults in my life had been more decisive about helping me when I was in the throes of my most painful moments. When I think back on my life, I wonder whether my first cheerleading coach, or anyone else, could have done anything to change things. What if my coach had intervened? What if she had called my mom? What if she had called the principal? What if, when my mom saw what was happening, she had felt supported and empowered enough to call the coach? What if one grown-up—any grown-up—had noticed what was going on and stepped in and said anything at all? When we witness someone else’s pain, it’s our job to stand up, to speak up, and to be advocates for one another. Everyone’s pain is real.