The Burden of Being Understood
- Shawn A. Stack
- Jun 26
- 5 min read
Notes on Being #04
I train jiu jitsu.
It is you against your opponent.
No equipment.
No teammates.
No timeouts.
The objective is to get your opponent into a position where they must voluntarily submit or risk limb dislocation or unconsciousness through strangulation.
You never intentionally dislocate someone’s limb, but occasionally people do end up unconscious.
It sounds brutal.
And it is.
But it’s fun.
If you try it you will likely find, as most people do, that the brutality factor is far outshined by the fun factor.
Jiu jitsu is less about athleticism and more about understanding your opponent’s available next move.
Less about strength and more about strategy.
More The Art of War than the act of war.
It’s human chess with your body.
More importantly, jiu jitsu teaches the relationship of combat.
If I am out of arm’s reach of my opponent, I am safe and can avoid the conflict altogether by leaving.
If I am within arm’s reach, I am vulnerable to being punched or kicked.
But if I close the distance and grab my opponent, not only can I no longer be struck effectively, I can bring the fight to the ground and apply a joint lock to force submission—or choke them unconscious if they refuse and still want to fight.
When you train jiu jitsu you practice fighting every time.
It’s called rolling.
And you can train every day because rolling does not involve striking.
You do not beat your opponent into submission.
You lock them into a situation in which movement itself becomes catastrophic.
Or you choke them unconscious.
Pick your poison—but do it gently.
Me?
I prefer chokes.
They say the choke is the gentleman’s punch.
And I fancy myself a gentleman.
They call jiu jitsu The Gentle Art, and it really is.
When you train jiu jitsu, in order for the rolling to progress one person has to become the aggressor and one person has to become the defender.
The defender is said to be “playing guard” against the aggressor.
But do not mistake this to mean the guard player is passive.
The guard player attacks constantly.
They simply respond to the initiated movement of the aggressor rather than initiating first themselves.
In jiu jitsu, “the guard” refers primarily to your legs.
If you are attacking, you are typically standing or using your legs for movement and pressure.
When playing guard, you are sitting or on your back using your legs defensively rather than for mobility.
The guard player will, however, seek to “sweep” their opponent—reversing the roles entirely.
The aggressor becomes the defender.
The defender becomes the aggressor.
Rolling is a dynamic exchange.
And knowing which role to inhabit at which moment is key to submitting your opponent.
Ironically, it is often the case that the most dangerous opponent is the one who prefers to play guard.
The one who responds rather than initiates.
Because the guard player lulls you into the false confidence that often accompanies aggression.
And then they exploit your momentum and trap you within it.
In many ways, jiu jitsu is a dance.
And the subtlety of the dance is invisible to all but those who are dancing.
From the outside it may appear that one person is leading and the other is following, but this is because you cannot feel the slight pressure of the hand on the back, or the shifting weight that effortlessly moves the partner across the floor.
The exchange is relational.
Responsive.
Fluid.
This is the way in life:
One leads.
One follows.
One aggresses.
One compromises.
Only those with two left feet who have never danced claim to always lead and never follow.
Real dancers understand there is an ebb and flow to movement:
Sometimes you take the lead.
Sometimes you let the lead be taken.
The same applies to fighting.
Sometimes you aggress.
Sometimes you acquiesce to the aggressor.
Sun Tzu counselled:
“If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles;
If you do not know others but know yourself, you will win one and lose one;
If you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperilled in every single battle.”
What this means is that knowing yourself is the fundamental self-defence to master, because it is you who enters yourself into conflict.
If you are aggressed at, you can compromise or you can aggress back.
The choice is yours to make.
When you understand that compromise does not diminish you in a conflict that cannot be won, this recognition becomes strength.
And when you recognize that an aggressor will not accept compromise, you act decisively and strike first.
But even then, aggression itself need not become identity.
You can still offer compromise afterward.
And sometimes it is only after your opponent experiences your mettle that compromise becomes possible at all.
Over time we become so practiced in these positions that we stop recognizing them as responses at all.
The aggressor experiences himself as naturally forceful.
The accommodator experiences herself as naturally yielding.
The guard player begins believing they are merely defensive by nature.
But often these are not identities.
They are adaptations.
Rehearsed responses carried forward from previous conflicts into present relationships.
And this is why knowing yourself matters.
Because before another person can understand your intentions, you must first understand the role you keep instinctively stepping into when conflict begins.
And while the responsibility of being understood rests with you,
it cannot truly be carried until you begin understanding yourself.
And this is difficult because most of us experience ourselves as continuous people.
Most of us experience ourselves through continuity.
Through memory.
Through what we have done.
Through the roles we have repeatedly occupied in past relationships and conflicts.
We tend to define ourselves by what we have done in the past—
whether good or bad.
And then the actions of that past self become the scaffolding for the actions of the present self.
We repeat patterns.
We replay positions.
We roll the same exchanges over and over again.
Yes, we have done what we have done.
But we are not what we have done.
We are what we are doing.
And what we are doing is becoming.
And this is not something we only understand in thought.
It reveals itself under pressure—
in real time, before reflection can intervene.
Because under pressure, we do not become someone new.
We become someone familiar.
The strange thing about this is that training jiu jitsu makes it visible.
You stop learning merely how to defeat another person.
You begin learning the positions you instinctively return to under pressure.
Where you panic.
Where you compromise.
Where you aggress.
Where you endure.
You begin learning your habits of selfhood.
And because relationships operate no differently than rolling, life eventually confronts you with the same question—
not in abstraction, but in lived experience:
Are you responding to the present moment—
or merely reenacting the positions you have become comfortable occupying?
Jordan Peterson once asked the question:
“At your father’s funeral would you rather be the one crying on a shoulder, or the shoulder being cried on?”
The question stayed with me.
Not because it demands an answer, but because it reveals how fluid those roles actually are when the moment is real rather than imagined.
I suppose my answer is:
Whose shoulder is available?
Grief too is a dance.
With time and study you eventually begin to recognize the position you most naturally gravitate toward under pressure.
Not in thought—but in reaction.
Are you the aggressor animated by passion?
Or are you the guard player whose instinct is to become the shoulder another cries on?
The burden to be understood is yours alone to bear.
But it cannot be borne in isolation.
It is shaped in contact.
Refined through resistance.
Made visible through others who force you to move.
Because before another person can understand you,
you must first become honest about who it is that keeps entering the fight.
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