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