The Secret Society of Passion

From Bourdain’s kitchens to the jiu-jitsu mats: The beauty of being "weird" together.

Illustration by Mihajlo Stojanovic

This is Dispatch #20 in a series of personal reflections on passion, meaning, and what it really takes to feel alive. You can read the whole series here.

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Hi friends,

I finally read the late Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential this week. I don’t know what took me so long. It is a masterpiece of voice and honesty — a book that reminds you that the specific is always universal. Books like this make me fall in love with books (and the human beings who write them) all over again.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, Bourdain wrote about the gritty, adrenaline-fueled and deeply loyal underbelly of high-end kitchens. But one of the lines in the forward caught me off guard. He was asked about the best thing about cooking for a living:

“It’s this,” he wrote. “To be part of a subculture… a secret society with its own language and customs.”

That’s exactly how I feel when I go to jiu-jitsu competitions. The past few days, I’ve been in Vegas for No Gi Worlds, one of the biggest competitions of the year. Spoiler alert: I lost. But I learned a lot, had fun, and left feeling more excited than ever to learn and improve. What could be better than that?

And the thing that echoed the most over the weekend wasn’t the loss… it was Bourdain’s words.

If you’ve never been to a jiu-jitsu competition, it is a sensory overload. There is a distinctive smell of rubber mats, sweat, and Icy Hot. The stadium lights make you squint, and the air is filled with the thuds of bodies hitting the mat and coaches yelling instructions in Portuguese.

Thousands of people — from four-year-olds to sixty-five-year-olds — walk around in flip flops, half of whom seem to be eating an acaí bowl. It is a place where strangers walk by wearing t-shirts that say things like “Jiu-jitsu: tap, snap, or nap” and instead of being alarmed, you give them a knowing fist bump.

Warming up with my teammate Maria before her match

Just like Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen, we speak a secret language. It is a language that sounds odd or even violent to outsiders but makes complete sense to us. We talk about various ways to choke our friends, break posture, and the mechanics of (almost) breaking an arm. We obsess about “guards” and “frames” with the same seriousness as academics talk about citations.

To the outside world, it looks like madness. We spend hundreds of dollars on admission and travel and take off work just to potentially get strangled in front of our friends. But inside the room, it makes perfect sense. We are all there because we have agreed to play the same game, to value the same struggle.

You don’t have to fight to understand this. I see it with my parents around their pickleball friends; they talk about third shot drops, dink strategy, and which brand of paddle has the best ‘pop.’ I’ve heard it from the dozens of people I’ve interviewed for On Fire — from dragon boat helms who love their crew, to computer gamers who, twenty years later, still can’t believe they found other people who want to spend the weekend nerding out about the same games as they do.

This is the beautiful about passion. It doesn’t just light yourself up internally; it connects you to a room full of people who are just as weird as you are. It makes you feel less alone.

Some of the Meraki team after some of the kids’ fights

What is the ‘secret society’ you belong to? I’d love to hear what weird language or customs you share with your tribe.

See you out there,

Krista

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