Today we’d like to introduce you to Erica Zendell.
Hi Erica, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
A recent transplant to the Atlanta Metro Area, I’m a proud but conflicted Jersey Girl and “Masshole” at heart.
I was born and raised in New Jersey and lived in the Garden State until I graduated from college. For most of my childhood, all I wanted to do was run away from the place [cue a Bruce Springsteen song like “Born to Run” or “Thunder Road”]. I couldn’t seem to get out” until I turned 21, and “Shipp[ed] Up to Boston,” where I landed until I was almost 31. I started getting “itchy” to leave Boston after my first few years there, but lacked the courage, conviction, or what I thought was a good enough reason (read: a job or degree program) to pack up and venture somewhere outside of the Northeast.
What started as a feeling of “home” in Boston transformed into a feeling of complacency after a few years. I felt myself slipping into a state of inertia, feeling my world getting smaller instead of bigger. Every bone in my body said, “You need to leave and see what else is out there,” but every job opportunity, romantic relationship, and the inner beckoning desire for settledness and comfort told me, “Eh, just one more year. What’s the harm in staying?”
Compounding this inertia—but also somewhat in contrast to it—was a crippling desire to be “successful.” For most of my life, I’d call myself a “straight-A follower of the straight-and-narrow.” I attended and excelled at excellent schools. Once I concluded my time in academia, I chased the utmost success I possibly could in the business world. I had a deep-seeded emptiness in my soul but tried assiduously to ignore it and bury it with better degrees, better job titles, higher pay, and more “success.”
As was true for many people, 2020 was an enormous turning point. For me, it was the year I could no longer ignore these inner friction points: in addition to the world locking down, forcing a reckoning with my relationship with work, home, and self, two big things happened in my personal life. My dad died a few weeks after the lockdowns began and I turned thirty a few months later.
It wasn’t until my thirtieth birthday that I realized that the “success” I was chasing wasn’t a kind I’d consciously defined on my own terms. My ideas of success had been absorbed from the places where I’d worked and studied, but also effectively inherited from my dad, who was a self-employed, hard-grinding attorney. His ideas around work ethic, balance, and financial power were the product of being a first-generation in American. His parents had come over from Ellis Island in the early twentieth century and in addition to the pressure of running his law firm, I think he also carried the pressure of being his parents’ keystone in their American dream: work hard, make money, and generally “make it” in America. Anyone who knew my dad would tell you he was a curmudgeonly, unhappy man. Brilliant, bombastic, hotheaded, and a little bit broken: the measure of his life, if you asked him, was how much money he was able to earn and what he was able to afford with it.
By the time I hit my 30th birthday, I thought I’d be on some “Forbes 30 Under 30” list or otherwise achieved some sort of renown for *something*, *anything.* I at least hoped I’d be happy with my life, how things had ended up, or where they were going. I wasn’t. And the next few months after that birthday, behind the screens of my work laptop and behind the scenes in my own mind, I thought, “What would it take to live a life that I was proud of? That made me happy? That if the pandemic killed me off tomorrow or I reached my death bed like my dad, would there be something I wish I’d done that I hadn’t done?”
It came down to chasing the two things that made me happy—or, if not happy, at least made me feel challenged and fulfilled: writing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ).
I started blogging on the internet in 2011, in my junior year of college and stuck with the practice of writing personal essays and reflections to whoever would read them. My blog was—and still is—the “open letter” to anyone wanting to stay in touch and know what is going on in my life, filled with the kind of introspective searching and questioning that is intended to feel like a deep coffee chat with a friend or a second round of drinks in with a stranger. The kind of personal essay writing I go for is the kind that gets you bearing your soul and breaks past the veneer of small talk. I pay down “the currency of my own vulnerability” (or, less enterprisingly, “my heart on the line”) in hopes someone else can feel it’s safe to open up, too. Few things are as gratifying as hearing that something I wrote resonated with someone—whether a close friend, long-lost acquaintance or random follower on Instagram.
My practice of BJJ is inextricably linked to my first year in the tech world, which was a sea-change year for me: I had reached my academic pinnacle (unless I wanted to go back for a PhD) with a MBA from MIT, but my post-grad job in tech was a trial by fire that failed to live up to my lofty, overly-optimistic expectations. Compounding the disillusionment with my new career in the business world was a life-changing breakup. My relationship with a serious boyfriend at the time abruptly ended a few months after we moved into together, making the five-hundred square feet of our formerly-shared, shoebox apartment feel like a chasmic black hole. The shimmering high rise in the middle of Boston’s Chinatown, for me, had become the fire pit of all the hopes and dreams for my personal and professional life after graduation.
I found myself in my first jiu-jitsu class in March 2017 at the urging of three people: two friends whose advice helped me get back on my feet after the breakup (“You need a hobby. Tinder doesn’t count,” and, “You need to do something badass in your life to help you get your swagger back. ”) and a classmate from business school who had recently become impassioned with combat sports and insisted I join him for a BJJ class. After my first class, I was exhausted from the physical workout but enchanted by the mental quiet I felt after training: when someone’s trying to choke you, you can’t be worried about the length of your to-do list or the email you need to send tomorrow morning. I was also enjoying the opportunity to learn a new and very empowering skill that had nothing to do with my day job. By my third class, I was hooked. I’ve trained consistently ever since.
Flash forward from March 2017 to March 2020, at which point I’ve become increasingly dedicated to and competitive in jiu-jitsu and beginning to wonder how far I could possibly go in the sport before I was too old, too broken, and too late to reach the kind of athletic potential that’s typically optimized before you reach a certain age. I’d never been known for being athletic and never thought of myself as an athlete until I started training—and eventually winning—in jiu-jitsu at a local, then regional, then broader scale. I was supposed to do my first major tournament in March 2020 (The Pan American Championships in Irvine, CA), but the global shutdown foiled those plans. When the tournament was postponed to October 2020, and I won third place in spite of the lockdowns, suboptimal training conditions, and while holding onto my day job, I wondered, “If I went all in for a little while, how far might I be able to go?”
Alongside that curiosity and ambition to go “all in” with jiu-jitsu were a similar curiosity and ambition around writing: I’d wanted to write a book for a while, started thinking about it more seriously in 2018, but ended up pushing the idea to the side in efforts to keep climbing the corporate ladder, hoping some “perfect day” or “perfect time” or “perfect circumstances” might arise that would allow me to write the book of my dreams while still “crushing it” in my day job.
In the wake of 2020, I decided to stop waiting on “the perfect situation” to go “all in” after the two passions to which I most wanted to dedicate my time. I also decided that I would regret simply staying in the same city and among the same people around whom I’d spent the last near-decade of my life—if I was going to live in Boston for the long haul, it had to be a conscious choice, not the result of it being the first place I landed after college, and, while I didn’t love it, I didn’t have the guts to leave.
In 2021, I threw a stick of self-lit dynamite into the safe and settled life I had in search of the kind of life I hoped to create: I left Boston on an indefinite cross-country road trip. I quit my day job and spent a year training competitively in BJJ in some of the top academies in the country in Houston, Austin, Oklahoma City, San Diego, and most recently, Atlanta. I lived a story worth telling for the book of my dreams—I’ve got a full book proposal and manuscript in the works for a debut memoir, and am currently seeking representation for it. It’s a mix of travelogue, underdog sports story, and self-discovery inspired by my last year on the road and learning what in my life—on and off the mats—is most worth fighting for.
That’s the “long story, long.” Long story short: I’m in Atlanta by way of a longer journey—geographical as much as physical, emotional, and mental—to live a fulfilling, purpose-aligned, and highly-creative life.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It has been anything but a smooth ride. Literally and figuratively. The Subaru that carried my life across the country and back has sustained its share of dings!
Car troubles aside, the romantic road I’d envisioned for myself in quitting my day job, leaving Boston for the open road, and writing and training jiu-jitsu full-time was, in reality, filled with potholes—some bigger than others.
The way I think about the challenges of the trip can be broken down roughly into three themes: the people, the training, and the writing. When it comes to people, it was hard to leave behind people I love and to build relationships in unfamiliar places and from scratch. When it comes to training, I learned just how much I sucked at jiu-jitsu relative to the true full-time competitors for whom jiu-jitsu is not only *everything* but also the *only* thing. When it comes to writing, I thought my identity as a writer would make me ok with not “making bank” and impervious to comparing myself to others (it didn’t) and that I’d fully left the business life for a creative life. It turns out that the creative world, too, is not a write-by-candlelight dream: it, too, is a business.
Digging more deeply into the people: in leaving Boston, I lost a really strong, anchoring sense of myself. For the nine years, I lived in the city, I had been able to fall back on the comfort of friends and familiar places to keep me going. One of the most important figures in my life was (and remains) my first jiu-jitsu coach, JC. To go from seeing a coach you love and respect five or six days out of the week to only chatting with your coach asynchronously by DM is a huge shift. It isn’t overstatement when I say that leaving JC was the hardest part of leaving Boston because even once I’d grown tired of living in the city, training at his gym and under him had long been my reason to stay. The last year of travel has reaffirmed his irreplaceable status as a mentor and friend, and when this book comes out, JC will be among the first people I thank, because—in so many ways—it would not have been possible without him.
Trying to go to a new training room with and build an equally- or approximately-meaningful bond with a new coach is hard. It’s been a tall order to approximate the trust and relationship with someone new after having been coached by someone who has known me for years and seen me through hundreds of ups and downs on and off the mats. But it’s also forced me to stay open-minded and continuously learning. There have been moments on the trip where something from my old coach finally clicked because a new coach said or explained something a different way.
Moreover, traveling across the country and building rapport—both with training partners and coaches—with people who don’t know you, and some of whom don’t *care* to know you, is a challenge. It’s hard making new friends in general. It’s harder making new friends when moving from city to city and you’re also trusting those new friends to be respectful but tough on your body in a martial arts training context. You have to beat each other up to make one another better—iron sharpens iron—but you need to make sure you don’t *break* each other. It’s a tricky balance.
A huge lesson and struggle from my time traveling and training competitively was coming to terms with how much I sucked in the grand scheme of jiu-jitsu. I felt like a big fish in my home gym, but I’d really been a big fish in a small pond. When I went out into the ocean, so to speak, I was no big fish. I was chum for sharks. That was made irrevocably clear in San Diego, spending six months training at one of the top academies in the world that is known for pumping out jiu-jitsu World Champions. Despite my ambitions to excel at jiu-jitsu, I quickly learned my limits and had to trade in my ideas of being “the best” to being “my own best.” As a thirty-one-year-old nearing five years of experience, I was getting mauled by teenagers and by people who had been training since the age of three, else were exceptionally athletically-gifted, young, resilient, and significantly more experienced. I’d left a room where I felt like I was awesome and ended up in rooms where I was being constantly broken down to the point of uncertainty and lack of confidence in my own ability. I wondered if I had any ability at all and whether it was pointless to dream of a world title or any other degree of accomplishment in this sport around which I’d decided to make my life increasingly revolve. The book I’m writing goes into that line of introspection and questioning at greater length: what happens when you chase a passion, stake a significant portion of your life on it, and realize—broken-heartedly—that maybe you’re just not cut out for it?
Digging more deeply into the writing: In addition to the discomfort of continuously starting over in unfamiliar places among unfamiliar people, and spending a lot of time having my BJJ aspirations forcibly checked and re-set, the journey of the last year was challenging because I’d lost a huge way by which I identified myself: my professional career. It wasn’t until I left the workforce that I realized how much I relied on my resume bullets and my bank account to give me a sense of self.
In leaving behind my job in favor of a year of writing and jiu-jitsu, I also lost a sense of anchoring that comes with a well-paying and prestigious series of jobs and with a biweekly paycheck. If I wasn’t working for someone, and if I wasn’t earning money from jiu-jitsu or earning money (yet) from writing, what good was I to the world? To myself? Who was I anyway? If I didn’t have a BJJ World Title or a book deal to show for my efforts, had I simply quit my job and left behind everyone who loved and cared about me only to bankrupt myself financially and emotionally? Especially as my business school and my ten-year college reunions rolled around during my time on sabbatical, I felt immensely self-conscious about not earning an income and not having anything obvious or tangible to show for my efforts in fighting or writing. I began to dread how much I was “falling behind” relative to my peers, even as I’d chosen a fulfilling off-the-beaten path that I knew was right for me and was the thing I believed to my soul that I *had* to do.
Writing is hard, but writing a book is a whole different universe of hard. I’d always seen my writing as this beautiful creative outlet, but to look at your creative product as something you want to monetize, sell, and turn into a real thing on a shelf is a unique form of descent into The Inferno. A big part of writing a book is learning the business of writing a book. I’m still grinding through those challenges as we speak. Also, to be able to have taken time off to focus purely on training and writing was a gift, but it was a gift with a deadline:
I recently had to return to the workforce in order to provide myself with the financial stability needed to continue investing in my writing dreams while taking care of my physical and mental health. At first, needing to “go back to corporate work” felt like a failure. I’d thought that I would be able to have my book done before I had to rebuild my financial lifeline.
Then I realized that this was a bit silly because even if I’d finished my manuscript, getting an agent and getting published is a much longer endeavor, the timeline of which is not within my locus of control. Even if I had managed to stretch my savings long enough to complete the manuscript, I would not have been able to stretch them enough to wait out the often-years-long process that takes a first-draft manuscript into a final, published state on the shelf of a bookstore.
The other struggle—a benevolent one—along the way, involves my partner in crime on the road trip: my boyfriend. He lived in Boston his whole life and took a huge leap of faith in being willing to leave behind the only world he really knew, to take this trip with me, and live through many of the challenges I’ve talked about above. On top of that, until I re-entered the workforce, he had been supporting the two of us, rent- and utilities-wise for the last year. As someone who had been fully accustomed to supporting herself or paying her full share of expenses for the duration of our relationship, this kind of dependence on my significant others was a hard adjustment. Relying on someone else when you’re so used to being self-reliant can be extremely uncomfortable, especially in matters involving health and finances. He has served as a breadwinner, head chef, stand-in therapist, lead investor in my journey for the last year on the road, in addition to being a loving partner and friend for our four years together. I’ve been really lucky to have him in the car with me and along for the ride. I don’t take that for granted one bit.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My work is largely in creative nonfiction, personal essay kind of work. My wheelhouse is in memoir and literary magazine-style profiles of individuals. If I had to offer up my writing north stars and inspirations, they’d be are E.B. White, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, and Wright Thompson. I’d add in Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, but I can only aspire to their unflinching edginess.
If I could have my book be thrust into the commercial-literary stratosphere of the Glennon Doyle, Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed, I wouldn’t be mad. They’re the standard-bearers when it comes to renowned stories of women on transformational, traveling journeys. That’s the moonshot: to somehow find myself in the canon and onstage among these writers.
What I think sets my work apart is the spirit of candor and the strength of voice. I’m not afraid to write about when and how things are hard in my life, to pull off the mask and show what’s *really* going on beyond the resume, behind the scenes, and beneath the filters. I’m generally unafraid to show the scars, bumps, and bruises in any journey I’m going through. This has been true about my writing for over a decade. No matter whether I was writing about my depression during my time at Princeton or MIT’s MBA program, the pain of learning jiu-jitsu or losing in a certain competition, the sense of doubt I felt when about to leave a job or a relationship, the goal I’ve always had in my writing is to get out of my own head and put the bleeding, beating heart on the page. At best, it makes my readers do the same, figuratively speaking, and helps them live more openly and vulnerably. At worst, it simply reminds them that they’ve got a heart, too
As for what I’m most proud of, a few published pieces that made it to the Economist and the Princeton Alumni Weekly, a few years ago. Aside from actually setting up a newsletter and full-on Instagram for my writing, I’m proud of a few interviews that I did on podcasts in the last year, while I was in the thick of the road trip. Those came out really nicely. But most of all, I’m proud that I actually lived a cool experience in the last year that has given me a ton to write about. Had I stayed in Boston and never left, continued onward in my life and career, the book I’d have been able to bring to the world would’ve been a lot more boring.
Aside from doing my own writing, I love helping others with writing and storytelling, whether it’s for a personal or a professional context. During my time in graduate school, I serves as a coordinator of a “The Moth”-style story slam and coached tens of speakers in sharing an eight-minute story of a moment that most defined their lives. Since then, I’ve helped people with personal statements for admissions to college and graduate school, as well as assisted with refinements on resumes, cover letters, and professional presentations. No matter the context, I love helping people get to the heart of their story, helping them tell the story, and to the best of my ability, helping that story gets heard and understood.
Even when I’m not writing in a literary fashion, I use these same skills as a writer and storyteller in my day job as a product manager, as well: Usually, that work entails writing user stories, socializing the vision for what my teammates are designing and building, explaining to cross-functional partners what and why we’re focusing on a certain opportunity, and so on. I never see myself as “done” or having learned it all when it comes to my creative work. I’m constantly practicing, “cross-training”, stumbling, and improving my craft, too.
What I’m known for would depend on where you first encountered my writing and in which context. I write on a few different platforms these days, with varying levels of detail and specificity depending on the platform or audience. Most things I write on Linkedin or Medium tend to have a more tactical, actionable spin related to my professional life and sometimes BJJ. A few noteworthy examples are my pieces on “Rookie seasons,” “A more candid look at my MBA experience,” and “The art of the retrospective.”
Most of what I write on Instagram or Patreon or my newsletter tends to be a little more personal and reflective. Instagram I think of as an “Insta-blog”: a good, recent picture with a micro-blog of 2,200 characters about something I’ve been thinking about deeply, else promoting a recent piece of writing that exceeds the character limit.
The more recent body of writing for which I’m known is my newsletter: “Zen in the Art of Fighting” (inspired by Ray Bradbury’s collection: “Zen in the Art of Writing”). I started it a few months after beginning my cross-country, jiu-jitsu-inspired road trip as a way to inform and inspire anyone I knew who was curious about my fighting and writing sabbatical. Since I’ve settled down in the Atlanta area for the foreseeable future, the newsletter is likely to shift format and focus. I’m thinking it will lean toward the concept of finding “zen” while fighting for the thing you want, whether it’s happiness, balance, mastery, inner peace, whatever it may be. I post additional long-form content on Patreon for those who are interested in chipping in a few bucks to back my creative journey, getting special perks, and sneak peeks into parts of the manuscript of my in-progress memoir.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Alas, most people know that I have an adopted miniature dachshund named Snickers (and if they don’t, they’ll inevitably see a “Snick pic” in my writing or in this post), so I’ll go with a smorgasbord of other options.
Long before I became very dedicated to writing and jiu-jitsu, a few other creatively-oriented passions that filled my life: singing, foreign languages, baking, and podcasting, which I pursued for varying lengths of time, as little as a year and many as ten.
On singing: I can’t sight-read and don’t have a ton of formal, classical training under my belt, but after clocking in my time in the elementary and middle school choir, I sang in a cappella groups for the entirety of high school and college. My eight years in all-female a cappella (The Treblemakers in high school and The Wildcats in college) were, in some ways, very much like what you’d see in the Pitch Perfect franchise, though with less-choreographed routines and fewer hi-jinks.
On languages: for a good half of my college career, I wanted to work as an interpreter of some kind and studied as many foreign languages as I could possibly fit into my schedule. There was a solid year or two during my undergraduate career when I could have legitimately said I was proficient in seven languages. That time has long passed, but I can still hold a decent, even if rusty, conversation in a few of those languages: specifically Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. With a few drinks, I can offer up a few crumbs of Hebrew and Arabic, too.
On baking: I learned how to cook in a co-op in college, but after graduation, I got diagnosed with celiac disease, forcing me to take all those well-honed skills in cooking for and feeding myself and adapt them to a new diet and lifestyle. I’ll be the first to say it: it sucks to move to Boston and be in the hometown of Sam Adams Brewery and not be able to have a beer. The thing I most missed, though, were sweets, and so I started taking old recipes and jiggering them to make them gluten-free. About a year after the diagnosis, I operated a small allergy-free baking business, selling cookies, brownies, and truffles wholesale to local cafes and directly to consumers at farmers’ markets around the Boston area. I closed down the business because it was too much work to continue managing it alongside my MBA, but I learned a lot about what it takes to develop and market products, as well as to fund and operate a business. As sweet as baking can be, startup life sounds far more glamorous than it actually is: there’s a big difference between loving to bake and making a business out of it—a lesson I’m now learning again when it comes to my writing.
On podcasting: one of my grad school classmates and I put on two seasons of a podcast called “The Business of Being Awesome” (which we called “Bizoba” for short). It was focused on interviewing professionals and classmates on their winding career paths toward doing what they loved and loving what they did in their work and their life. It’s one thing I wish I’d continued, creatively speaking, since we started the podcast back in 2015, before the big surge in podcasting. We could have kept a great, unique show running and an awesome lineup of interviewees before anyone and everyone was hosting a podcast. The “what ifs?” I have related to the podcast, have been a great reminder to me to not quit too soon. If you just insist on persisting with something creative, you never know where it might lead, but the longer you do it, the more likely you are to stumble on something good.
Pricing:
- $1-$5-$10-$20 for Patreon support
- Free first consultation on 1:1 writing/storytelling/editorial services and support
Contact Info:
- Website: www.erica-zendell.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/zenintheartoffighting, www.instagram.com/zendelle
- Other: zendelle.medium.com, https://erica-zendell.ck.page/92bf8b841f
https://www.patreon.com/zendelle
Image Credits
Credit to the super-professional-looking images in the personal photo and the first of the additional images: @histandards.photo
