The Arena

🥊 The Arena

I got the title of this post from one of my favorite quotes by Theodore Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,
because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

If you’ve never read that before — read it twice.
Because it’s not the critic who counts.
It’s not the passive onlooker, the spineless lurker, the cheap-seat heckler.
It’s the one in the arena — sweating, stumbling, daring greatly.

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💛 Brené Brown puts it like this:

“If you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.”

She talks about the 3 C’s of wholehearted living: Courage, Compassion, Connection.
Courage comes from the Latin cor, which means heart.
Compassion and connection come from that same place: vulnerability — from vulnus, meaning to wound.
To be vulnerable means to risk being hurt — and to do it anyway.

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🕊️ On the other side of wholehearted living is shame.

Shame says: “You’re not enough. Stay small. Stay hidden.”
Shame thrives in secrecy — in what goes unsaid, in the stories we twist to protect the comfort of people who’ve never stood in the ring with us.

⚡️ Here’s what I know now:

If you can’t show up in the arena when it’s messy — you don’t get to talk about how I swing my punches.
If you can’t stand with me when I’m bleeding — you don’t get a seat when I’m rising.
If you haven’t lost sleep, cried real tears, spoken the hard truth out loud — you don’t get to tell me how to do any of this.

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🔥 Trip. Heal. Rise.

I’ll keep showing up.
I’ll keep loving hard.
I’ll keep standing in the fire when others flinch.
I’m here to live wholehearted — with people who know how to hold the line.

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💙 If you’re ready to stand in your own arena…

I’ll always share how I got here.
My ketamine healing journey ripped my shame wide open and showed me what was mine to carry — and what never was.
If you’re curious, check out Better U — the clinic that helped me keep fighting for my life.
When you’re ready, use my code NANDO84 at betterucare.com — because the arena is no place to stand alone.

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🗝️ The critics don’t count. 

It’s you — the one with dust, sweat, and blood on your face — who counts.
If you’re in the arena with me, you have my heart.
If you’re not, you’re just noise.

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Trip. Heal. Rise.
See you in the ring.