What your father owes you, what the universe owes you — you’re going to have to extract it with your own two hands.”

From that afternoon on, I lived on the tatami mats of his dojo.

He indoctrinated me into Kyokushin karate, and he was merciless. If my hip rotation was off by an inch, I repeated the strike a hundred times. If my guard dropped, a thousand.

I trained until the skin sheared off my knuckles, scabbed over, and split again. By sixteen the calluses on my fists felt like coarse sandpaper, and every jab I threw displaced the air with an audible crack.

I earned my black belt in high school. I moved to full-contact kickboxing in college. Mr. Stanley taught me that karate was the poetry of control and kickboxing was the brutal prose of breaking a human being inside the parameters of a ring.

By senior year, the captain of the university men’s team — a heavyweight — spent two full minutes staring at the ceiling lights, gasping, after I hip-tossed him.