Milam's Musings, milambc@miamioh.edu
Kill your darlings. All of them. I'm paraphrasing William Faulkner's famous quote about what the writer must do when writing.
Darlings could be characters, a sentence, and a description or anything that you hold dear, but doesn't fit into the story. Kill it. Holding to darlings leads to bad writing.
Writerly advice is about as ubiquitous as finding a drunk person on Brick Street on a Saturday night and largely, if a writer gets too beholden to advice, which often translates to rules, they are likely to find themselves stumbling worse than that drunk person.
Even so, Faulkner's quote is one of the better ones applied to writing, and to be sure, life. In life, perhaps you have to kill your darlings, too. Not literally, unless you're Dexter Morgan and can get away with it (excuse the reference, I just started binging on the show).
I try not to take idols or "darlings," in life. It leads to bad outcomes and to putting on the proverbial blinders.
Sure, there are authors, poets, philosophers, journalists and athletes I'm quite fond of, but I try to keep my distance, if I can. But in general, I gravitate toward those that excel at human achievement, whatever that achievement entails.
As a humanist, I like to see humans push boundaries, exceed expectations and perhaps more importantly, empower and inspire others to try to exceed their own self-erected boundaries.
UFC women's bantamweight champion "Rowdy" Ronda Rousey gets pretty close to being my "idol." She's a beautiful bad-ass that dominates in the octagon world of UFC, is comfortable in her skin to pose in a swimsuit for Sports Illustrated and versatile enough to appear in the latest Fast & the Furious movie.
Let me be clear, I couldn't tell you a thing about jiu-jitsu or grappling or striking; honestly, my MMA knowledge struggles to achieve basic understanding. And yet, when there's a Rousey fight, I'm plugged in. I'm watching.
I don't care if her last fight against Cat Zingano at UFC 184, which they headlined, lasted a mere 14 seconds. Or that her fight before that with Alexis Davis lasted a mere 16 seconds. Two fights, 30 seconds total.
Because it's the most exhilarating and cool 30 seconds you'll see in professional sports and athletics, barring Usain Bolt's God-like running in the Olympics.
Apparently, she's a tad bit too violent for Walmart, as they've declined to stock her upcoming autobiographical book, "My Fight/Your Fight," in May, which I've already pre-ordered on Amazon. The New York Post reported that Walmart deemed the content too violent to sell in stores.
The same behemoth that features fiction and nonfiction books with all manner of violence, as well, as you know, guns, won't feature this book. Yeah, yeah, you can get it online through Walmart, but it's bewildering that they would neglect to sell it in-store.
"Walmart is welcome to watch the success of this publication from the sidelines if they choose," Rousey said on Instagram.
She's bold and is going to do her thing regardless of what critics or, I suppose, Walmart decides.
I find Rousey empowering and inspiring because she's come to not only dominate a sport where women were deemed unworthy, but she's also the top draw of the sport's biggest promotion, UFC.
Just four years ago, Dana White, the promoter of UFC, told TMZ that women would never fight in the UFC. Then in February, two women headlined UFC 184.
Over 17,000 people packed into Staples Center in Los Angeles to see UFC 184 for a gate of $2.67 million. Additionally, Dave Meltzer, a journalist that covers professional wrestling and MMA, said the early estimates for PPV buys is between 500,000-600,000, which would make her the biggest active draw in the UFC.
That's 500,000 on the back of Rousey since the rest of the card was filled with no-names.
Even cooler, Rousey doesn't shy away from the feminist label.
"Fighting is not a man's thing, it's a human thing. To say that fighting is anti-woman is an anti-feminist statement. UFC, I mean, I'm the biggest draw in the sport; how is that anti-woman?" she told Good Morning America.
Her backstory only adds fuel to her bad-ass fire because it shows how far she had to come. According to the Washington Post, she didn't speak in sentences until she was six. Her dad committed suicide when she was eight. As she got older, she also struggled with bulimia and body image.
"I come from a very matriarchal lineage of strong woman. I don't know why feminism became like a bad word or something insulting to call someone," she said to the Post.
Make no mistake, I'm not saying Rousey inspires me to want to step into the octagon and try fighting. I'd be scurrying over the cage as fast as I could climb.
But she does inspire me to be mindful of boundaries, mostly those pesky self-imposed ones. The nagging voice that says, "Nah, you can't do that. Hell, why even bother trying? Sit down."
She spearheaded a change in UFC's business and the larger MMA culture stubbornly resistant to women fighters and that they can be thought of as just fighters without the patronizing preface of being "women fighters."
The least I could do, then, is to tell my nagging inner voice to quiet down. When life seems hard, the struggles too insurmountable and all I want to do is continue binging Dexter. Not that there's anything wrong with that sometimes.
When I think about Ronda, I think about her entrance into the octagon. YouTube it. If it doesn't get your adrenaline pumping, you might be a corpse, seek help.
Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation," blares over the speakers and Ronda appears, clad in a hoody with headphones around her neck and the most determined, fierce look you'll ever see.
In that moment, it makes me want to arm bar my inner voice into submission. Now, the task of figuring out the proper way to apply it.