The Roots
The Prim8te mentality strains from years of being verbally abused by adults and bullied during my youth. Many were left unaware to the fact that at the age of 13 I had been slammed into lockers, had books ripped out of my bag, I was jumped and punched in the halls, this was all a very real and ongoing part of my life. I was full of nothing but fear and anger, I was very quiet, conservative and humble. I had nobody willing to stand by my side and no authority figures that did anything to help me. So my father and I made a decision. I wanted to learn to fight, and eventually, we decided that was exactly what I was going to do. Shortly after, I started boxing and I also learned basic jiu-jitsu chokes. Soon I took a stand to my tormentors.
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Don’t get me wrong, fighting was not something I sought after, but at this point, violence had seemed to be the only answer. In time I started standing up for myself, after an incident where a bully threw me head first into a locker, my response was to fight back. There was another occasion where I choked out a bully until they were nearly unconscious. At this point, it became apparent that I was not to be fucked with. The physical bullying at school stopped for the most part, but as I grew older many adults tried to play mind games with me. Throughout competitive sports, I faced verbal abuse on a regular basis leaving me in bewilderment as I faced their manipulation and aggression. No this wasn’t just coaches being hard on me, this was adults trying to break me for their own selfish reasons. As a teenager, I had no one to trust other than my family. Between being bullied and verbally tormented, I figured I was better off to walk my own path rather than do what I was told. Even at 16, I knew that these adults were pathetic, they were cowards…wolf looking to hunt sheep. I had refused to be the hunted, I refused to go back to being bullied again, to living in a state of anxiety and fear, to living a nightmare.
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Which is where I began to develop the savage mentality. This idea that I would no longer take anybody’s shit! I got in trouble with people more frequently and I disobeyed what they told me, leaving many of these adults frustrated with me, but I did not care. I was always taught to never feel sorry for myself, to always find a way out of that hole, that dark place, to fight and crawl your way out of societies bullshit. As I hit the age of 17/18 and pursued Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I became very humbled, self-confident, and mature. I developed myself, I became a stronger individual with a desire to lead others. I wanted to help those who felt as weak as I once did, who felt helpless, who felt like they were stuck in that dark place. I wanted them to realize that feeling sorry for yourself does not fix things. The weakest can become the strongest in our society, they just need a little push, they are the true humble leaders of a community. I had all these thoughts at such an early stage of my life, with all these past experiences to share, but no outlet for any of it.
- JB