 Hello there, my beautiful, lovely, talented, fierce internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today on Footless Show. I am Jo. I'm missing a foot, hence the channel name. So today we're going to talk a little bit about why homeschooled Christian girl got into full contact MMA cage fighting, what my experience was like as one of only two or three women ever in a gym of like 50 or 60 guys. At a time where being a woman in the sport was not super duper accepted and my overall experience with MMA fighting. So as we dive in, if you want to give this video a thumbs up, it really helps it get out to more people. If you do want to subscribe, if you felt like doing that, I am almost to 150,000 subscribers here on YouTube, which is mind-blowing and I'm so grateful. And if you want to help me get to that next milestone, go ahead and hit subscribe. I think it's here, might be over here. I think it's here. So without further ado, let's dive in. I do need to set the story up a little bit because I never would have thought that in my life I'd walk into an MMA gym, much less join one. As I said, I was a sweet little homeschooled Christian girl. Not that any of those things would exclude you at all from this sport, but you don't find many people with that background in MMA. At least you didn't at the time that I was training. This was back in 2012, 2013, early 2014. And some really important context for this story is that the time of my life when I walked into altitude MMA, I was at the darkest place in my life. I mean, I can say this from the bottom of my heart. I would not be sitting in front of you here today if it was not for that gym. In all honesty, I'm really certain that I would have lost my fight with depression and I wouldn't be here. Back in 2011, I was in a very bad situation where I experienced a lot of mental and emotional and sexual trauma. It left me a broken mess. I had no idea who I was or what I was doing. I didn't feel like I had a voice. I was terrified of everything and everyone. I didn't know how to make it to the next day. I didn't want to make it to the next day. And that is when my friend Chris, who is an acquaintance, came over to my house to pick up a backpack that he had left. Seems like a mundane enough day. And he told me, Joe, I've really gotten into graffiti art lately. And there's this gym I've been told about that is really good graffiti art. You should come check it out with me sometime. And I was like, okay, cool. I'd love to go look at some art. That was the premise for walking into this place. And the place happened to be a mixed martial arts fighting gym, which sounded really intimidating to me. But I was like, all right, Chris, we'll do this. And he got me to sign up to like, check it out and do like a quick little class with them, like their intro thing so we could get in the building. And we went with another friend of ours. And this gym was situated in a not great part of town. Sincerely, my entire time there, I was never comfortable doing more than walking from the parking lot into the building. And that was it because it was surrounded by areas where a lot of bad things, unfortunately, were happening. So I pull up to this gym, a little concerned to get out of my car. And I see my friends and we go in and we go through their little like introduction to boxing class and check out the art. And I can sincerely say that from the moment I walked in those wide swinging glass doors and I was met with the smell of 50 sweaty men and mats that needed to be cleaned probably more often, I was, I was home. Like I sincerely felt home, which was bizarre considering that nothing about that situation related to anything in my life up until that point. But I knew it was the place for me. At that point in my life, I was going to school, I was working three jobs to attempt to eat. I didn't turn my heat on for part of the winter because I was so broke. Hey, I had a fireplace. I didn't freeze the death. Everything worked out okay. But somehow I found a way to get the gym membership fee, which was like a hundred bucks a month, an awful lot of money, especially at that point in my life, because I knew I needed to be there. And I honestly think that that was some of my survival instincts kicking in because I needed something. And the moment I walked in there and started playing around with some boxing gloves, I was like, there's something here that stirs life in me when everything feels dead. So I joined and I started going every day to Carlos's boxing class at 6pm. And I've mentioned this in other videos, especially on my other channel, TraumaTalk, but having a reason to make it to the end of every day, having a reason to get up and want to die and feel just empty and numb and awful and in so much pain every day. But to think I told people I would be at this six o'clock class, I know if I can make it to that class, it is so mentally and emotionally and physically draining and exhausting that all I have to do is make it to six because then I have class and then I'll be so exhausted that I'll just pass out and I'll wake up and we'll do this again. And that was a pattern that I followed for a while was just making myself muscling through to six o'clock to like a go to the gym. And what I learned pretty quickly is that martial arts for me, fighting for me made the rest of everything else disappear. It makes sense when you think about it, but when you are fighting someone, like when you are full contact fighting someone, you're not thinking about being depressed. You're not thinking about all of the difficult things you've experienced and not knowing how to get through them and just anxiety and all of that. You're just thinking about making out of that fight. You're thinking about what the next move is and are you executing this properly and all of that. And it was life changing and life saving to me to have a breath of air, to have an hour every day where I could just be. I could just exist. Eventually I got enough courage to try out the jujitsu class and that was when my passion really came alive. I love, I love, love, love jujitsu. It is one thing that I still have been able to do after my amputation. We'll talk about MMA and my amputation here in just a moment. But like I said, I was one of three women total who I knew at that gym during the entirety of my course of being there. On an average day, it was usually just me or just the other girl, occasionally both of us in the gym at any given time with a bunch of guys. Women were not super accepted in MMA at this point. If you were a woman, it was really hard to try to find an MMA gym. I eventually found out, but this place was really accepting of me. But even with that being said, one of my boxing coaches told me, Joe, as a woman, you're going to have to work twice as hard for half the respect. That's just the way it is. And I was like, okay, turns out that that was pretty legit for a long time. If I ever got partnered up with a guy, they would sincerely smirk. I remember one guy in particular who got paired up with me and just started kind of giggling. I was like, all right, I guess let's do this. Because I don't think women were taken particularly seriously. The men there were delightful. They were good people for the most part. But I definitely didn't fit the stereotype of who was going to be training. And it took a while to, I guess, convince people that I was serious about what I was doing, that I loved the sport that I belonged there. And I just kept going with it until people stopped giggling at me. I remember dreaming about the day that women would be in the UFC, but Dana White, who was the owner of the UFC at the time, had been on the record saying women will never be in MMA. And during my time training, I actually saw that change. I actually saw the first female fight in the UFC, which was so inspiring to me because that's what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to fight for a living. Now, that didn't work out, which we'll go into, but it was an honor and it was really cool to be a part of this sport as it was becoming more welcoming to different types of people. I really appreciated that. I really appreciated being a part of that. Now, traditionally speaking, going to an MMA gym is not the place to meet the love of your life, but I did. The owner of the gym invited me to go visit a Jiu Jitsu tournament with the team one day. It was pretty early. It was like the first few months that I was there. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. I want to, like, bond with these people a little bit more. And so I rode up with them. And when we got up there, there was a second car. And I noticed that there was this guy I didn't know. I hadn't seen them before. This just super, super cute, confident guy hanging out with our team kind of across the way. And I remember eyeing him over the Jiu Jitsu mats and being like, I wonder, I wonder who he is. I wonder what his story is. It ended up that we started connecting and talking and he made me laugh. And we started making fun of different things at the Jiu Jitsu tournament. Long story short, he sent me a Facebook friend request. We started chatting. And then a few weeks later, we were dating. And then a few years later, we got married. And now we are coming up on our fifth wedding anniversary. The majority of my relationship with Brian, my husband, how we like established it, how we got to know each other was from training and training and training and training together. I'm so grateful for that really unique experience. He was a great teacher. He was a great coach. He knew a lot more about Jiu Jitsu than I did. He'd been doing it for many years. And we ended up getting really tight with the owner of the gym. And he gave us a key to the gym so we could go in before anyone else was there. So I'd get up at like 6 30 a.m. And I'd meet Brian at like 7 15. And we do like a little CrossFit circuit. And then we'd train with Jiu Jitsu. And it was amazing. I don't think a lot of people meet their spouses by fighting with them on a mat. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that. But for us, it really worked out wonderfully. So going back to 2012, when I started really training and realizing that I loved this, that this was like a piece of who I was. This was a piece of my heart. For a long time, I felt like I didn't fit the stereotype of someone who would be into fighting or whatever. Like I'm not a violent person. I've never been in a fight in real life. But when you start training, you come to pretty quickly realize that those things are not parallel. Having a space where you can put you're all like literally all of yourself into something for a few moments is so beneficial, is so healing. I couldn't recommend it highly enough to anyone who is interested in any kind of martial art, especially like a contact martial art where you are you are fighting other people, you are working with other people. It is so healing. Mixed martial arts fighting was one of the ways I started reconnecting with my body after the trauma that I had gone through. I definitely had moments of just losing it in the gym being triggered, having really a really hard time fighting dudes, right? There are definitely some parallels to what I went through where it got frightening in moments. But for the most part, it was so healing to regain confidence in what my body could do to stop hating it because of the things that had happened to it and start using it to learn something. And let's just make it clear. I still know nothing. I still know absolutely nothing compared to really skilled fighters in the world. But to be able to walk around with the confidence of knowing that I I've choked people out on the mat who are literally twice my size because I knew what I was doing and they didn't have any training really helped the way that I carried myself started giving me a little bit of confidence in myself. I think more than anything it just changed the way that I walked. I felt like I could sort of look people in the eye a little bit more. I was less ashamed of everything I was. And here's the other thing. It was a family to me. When I went through the trauma that I experienced a lot of it was tied to the church. Previous to that, my entire life was my church community and it became so fractured and so painful and so difficult because of what had happened that I really didn't have that community anymore. And that definitely contributed to my feelings of isolation and loneliness and to have this gym of random people from every walk of life. I can't stress that enough. There were people there who were professional businessmen who like walked in wearing a suit and went and changed their gym shorts in our dirty bathroom. And then there were people who lived, you know, right down the street and came from really challenging circumstances. But everyone was united on the mat. And something that I think is fantastic is this phrase that the bat makes you honest, right? Because you can't pretend to be someone that you're not. You can't pretend to be extra macho or whatever. When someone's arm barring you on the mat like you can't, it reveals true colors of people. And it shows vulnerabilities and builds a lot of connection when it's done appropriately. And this patchwork quilt of people who I got to know and got to train with and got to grow with became like family to me and I needed that. I needed that so desperately because I felt like there wasn't a place for me because I felt like the community that I had was ruined and broken and like I was ruined and broken. But to be able to put gloves on and train and learn about the lives of the people who I was training beside was incredible. To have a purpose, to have a goal, something I was working towards was life-saving. To have a reason to make it to the beginning or the end of a day, even if that reason was just a silly boxing class or a Muay Thai class or whatever, I will forever be grateful for. I'm not going to go into the full story of why this gym closed but the circumstances under which it closed were not good. There ended up being a lot of drama and a lot of bad things that happened in this community as more people came in and more people came out and more people showed their true colors and eventually it led to the owner deciding he was done with the whole thing and shutting the gym down when it was very successful. The stuff that happened was that serious and maybe one day I'll go into that story but around that time is when I had to stop training anyways. I started having significant issues with my head and of course with my ankle. I was getting really bad migraines almost every day. I didn't know what was going on. We didn't know what was going on. It took a while to figure out pieces of it and figured out how to treat it but getting hit in the head certainly wasn't helping and my ankle was starting to give out more and more and become more painful. Just to clarify, the ankle that was previously attached to this limb was really messed up. It was really messed up when I was training but I think I wanted it so bad. I needed that community. I needed that piece of feeling alive for a second that I just fought through literally and figuratively a lot of the pain but it did take a toll on my body eventually. Thankfully a couple years after Brian and I left altitude we found a jiu-jitsu gym to train with here in town. Amazing people. I just went on a hike this morning with the women's team which was so cool. I've not actually been training jiu-jitsu yet since my amputation but I'm getting back there soon and I can't wait to show that with you guys but you know quarantined social distancing. We'll get back there eventually but I cannot do Muay Thai or MMA or anything like that because of my amputation. Looking back at those years of my life where I got to train with those people. I got to train at that place. I got to learn so much about myself and heal. Even though it was not perfect like I said there was there was drama and other stuff that happened. When I look back all I feel is incredible gratitude. I remember I got to go back the day that the gym closed. The owner invited us to be there and the mats were already out and some of the stuff was moved out. I remember thinking like this is a piece of my soul. This is a piece of my heart and I'm so grateful that I got to be here. I'm so grateful that I got to be there. It gave me purpose. It led me to meeting my husband. It was such a blessing in my life. Sometimes home and community can be found in very different places, very unexpected places. I was a homeschooled girl with an upbringing that had absolutely nothing to do with fighting or MMA or boxing or anything like that and I found an actual home in a real community in MMA. No matter if we've kept in contact or not if you are someone I trained with there who we were friends please know that you made a real impact on my life. You gave me community and hope at a time when I had none and I will forever be grateful. If MMA is something you've ever been interested in I cannot recommend highly enough that you check it out. I loved Jiu Jitsu. I love Muay Thai and way beyond the physical aspects of things. It gave me so much so I'd highly recommend checking it out if you've ever been interested in martial arts. Do it! I'm a big proponent of that. For people who like it or think that they might. So that is the story of the time that I was an MMA fighter for a couple years. I never took an actual fight in front of an audience. Of course I had tons of sparring in the gym. I wanted to but my body prevented me from doing that so I never got to actually live out my dream of being a legit fighter but I was a legit fighter. I just didn't do it in front of an audience. We still spent a lot of Saturday nights watching the UFC with friends. A lot of our friends are from Jiu Jitsu and I'm so grateful for each and every one of them. Thank you for allowing me to share a piece of my life that really excites me that really makes me tick. I talk about all different kinds of stuff on this channel. Mostly amputation related things but there's so much more to my life and fighting and Jiu Jitsu are huge pieces of that for me. I can't wait to bring you guys back to the Jiu Jitsu gym with me when I'm able to start going. God that will be an amazing moment. So thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. Thank you for my patrons for sponsoring this channel, for sponsoring this video. You mean the world to me. I'm so grateful for your support. I don't take it for granted. I'm grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you. If you're interested in joining my Patreon, check out the link on screen or down below. There are a number of perks potentially available for joining depending on what tier level you join at. Like getting a hand signed piece of one of my pieces of artwork, my artwork prints or a video message from me to you. You also get some behind the scenes videos and things of that nature. So check it out linked down below and to you watching this video right now. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to spend it with me and I really really appreciate that. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.