It is with great excitement, trepidation, nervousness, liberation and a sheer number of conundrum of paradoxes wrapped up as adjectives, however I am finally writing to you again for you as Steven Rao the man, the human that is being…
For those of you that once read: ‘Origami with Aragami’, and stuck with it, you may recall that I began writing as a journal of my life, an ode to myself (heck, if Cristiano Ronaldo can have a whole museum built so he can worship himself, I can write a blog can’t I!?), which then became a football only journal. While I loved documenting a full season of the sport, it became tedious, repetitive, and ultimately away from the core-essence of what oWa was supposed to be when I finally gave it life in January 2016. I am not just a sports-writer, I was tempted to write pseudo sports-writer, but that would do my passion for my favourite sports, and the work I put into those documentations a total disservice; rather, that is just one of the many facets that help create the sum of the Steven Rao, or Aragami experience. Another cold truth I have to confront is that it was easy, and comfortable to write about football and MMA exclusively, and once I saw that a few people liked, and read the content I was making in those realms; I did the worst thing that any creator can do, and that is go where the “likes” were, rather than stay authentic to what brought me to the dance. If you go back through the first 40 blogs I posted to aragami2236.wordpress.com; you will see there was more of a rich variety of topics that I talked about from: the progress of my life, my journey through the martial arts, my takes on MMA and football at the time, fitness, business, and endeavours I had gotten up too, before I boxed myself into that corner. By the time June 2017 rolled around; in the 89 blogs I wrote, 82 of those were about football, and 7 were about MMA! I was so burnt out mentally and creatively because of the position I placed myself in, that I wrote 11 more blogs, all about football again, until April 2018; it was supposed to be May, with a 2018 Champions League Final blog to come, however things happening in my life, and just a disinterest in writing about the same events again, meant that I resided that 8/10’s finished effort to the trash essentially…
If you’ve gotten this far, first of all, thank you! However, this is by no means a rant on shitting on writing on football; to the contrary, it is more an expression that, this isn’t the totality of my being, and what value I have to offer as a writer. This inaugural episode of Aragami9x is a snapshot of my story between the oWa lifespan leading to where we find ourselves now.
I re-read the inaugural episode of Origami with Aragami, aptly titled: the Inaugural Piece; it’s pretty cringey when I read it now, I’m not gonna lie, perhaps that is because I see that 25 year old in 2016 the shadow of the 28 year old writing this as we speak, perhaps because I read how much better my grammar, punctuation, writing style is now? What I couldn’t dispute however, was the essence, the spirit, and the motivation! At that time, there was no planning, no foresight, it was just a man with a fire under his ass at that time in my life, and a need to illicit action! Those traits place that entry above all the critical aspects of the content, grammar etc, and ultimately, above the vast majority of publications that were more refined thereafter! You can read it here if you so desire: https://aragami2236.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/the-inaugural-piece/
As I touch upon in this short (by my standards) piece, I had gotten my teeth into Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Workweek, and for the first time, I opened my mind to the possibility of being a dreamer in the adventurous sense; I wanted out of the rut as far as my job as a collections agent with the Royal Bank of Scotland was concerned, I wanted to lose weight, I wanted to be a personal trainer, I wanted to be a concept artist, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to travel; I wanted to be free! That blog was meant to be the shit test from me to me, my prompt to action, to defy procrastination!
I remember that Monday night that bled into the early hours of Tuesday morning quite vividly as I write this; the constant re-edits, the discomfort of the workspace, the excitement, the feeling of lightness – given that I was finally doing something that was a good few years overdue! To be honest, this blog is in some way’s a re-hash of that entry, in that this is my mission statement, the starting point, where the battle line is drawn if you will. I think it was around a month later, that I penned into my Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge that when I had my week off from training, which was the first week of April, that I would leave that job at RBS once and for all. While I was probably just pissed off that I was coming home at 9pm, looking and feeling like shit, that I jotted that down; little would I know that after a trip to Bucharest in the first weekend of April 2016, that I would actually be severing ties with that job!
Apologies, if this is a bit of a clusterfuck; I am trying not to make this any longer than is necessary, and 3 years is a lot to pack in to one instalment! Nevertheless, within 8 weeks of starting my blog, I had: opened up Forever Football Shirts, lost a couple of kilos in weight, began tracking my weight and what I was eating every day, gotten back into wrestling and Thai boxing, started saving a bit of money, been to London to watch the UFC live (Anderson Silva vs Michael Bisping), wrote 22 blogs, and had a flight booked to Bucharest! You know when I read it back like that, I think what a time in my life that was! Of course, that is just the Rocky montage version of events; that isn’t going over the topsy-turvy flocculation’s that come in your weight dropping and then rising when you check every morning, or the frustration of a job you hated every second, relationships that were at times more trouble than they were worth, the hours spent writing when I “should have been sleeping”, the beatings in the gym, and everything else that comes with life; but I suppose it is those nuances that make up the fabric of your existence!
Bucharest was a hell of a trip, and I can’t wait to make my return to Eastern Europe! It’s crazy to think that nearly 3 years has passed since that holiday! For around 6 weeks thereafter, I was jobless, I will never forget waking up on the morning of Monday 11th April 2016 and looking at my ceiling at 07:00 am and thinking: “FUCK THIS!”, it was at that moment where I made the choice to leave RBS. Not too long after that, eBay decided to boot me off as a seller, so my hand was forced into making the FFS website with whatever meagre physical resources I had at the time; what I did have in my favour were 2 invaluable resources however: passion and time. When you are as grass roots however as the parks that the people whom I’m selling the shirts to play on; getting off the ground running is as humbling as it longening (I know that isn’t a word, but it captures the essence!), and bar a sale that I was able to make from a guy who messaged me via eBay, and a fortuitous random purchase; let’s just say that the sales were not coming in thick and fast! While I was able to fashion a small personal trainer gig, let’s just the coffers were quickly depleting! However, by the middle of May 2016, I was back in the rat-race; this time for a company called Nicocigs. From there until the year end; I experienced a wild ride of: providing value for a company, going to Madrid for my 26th birthday, breaking up and getting back with the now ex, coming to terms with the fact that my dog was beginning to decline physically, being made permanent at Nicocigs, going to Milan to watch my first ever live football match, and then winning the new employee of the year award!
I would start 2017 by starting a test run of recording a few audio versions of oWa, but for whatever reason, I never really persisted with the endeavour; perhaps it had something to do with the shitty hardware I had at my disposal, or maybe it was to do with the fact that already I was seeing what started as a 40 minute recording, double in length by the 3rd and final recording. I’m sure they can still be found on my SoundCloud channel: aragami9x, I warn you, they are not pretty! By the end of the first 3rd of the year, my parents had come and gone to India leaving me as the man of the house during March, upgraded the phone, gotten some new ink; the kanji you see on my neck that are the characters of: God and Heaven respectively, gone to Dusseldorf to watch the almighty Bayern Munich play, and looked to plot my move from Nicocigs, whom had now been fully absorbed into Phillip Morris International’s portfolio; not for the first time in my life, I survived a company culling, and not for the first time, I was only left disenfranchised as a result…
The blog had reached episode 116 at this point, and believe me, I couldn’t wait until June 4th which was going to be when I moved away from the blog scene for 6 weeks, following that years Champions League final. Upon my return from Germany, I was back in the job market, to no avail, and at the same time, my weight had managed to return to a sagging 68 kg’s; however, by the end of June I was very happy with how my training was progressing, how my body looked and felt, and had another birthday trip scheduled for Madeira! Regrettably, at this point Max (my dog)’s health was getting worse, and had all but lost the use the of his back legs, and was losing control of his bladder; it was without a doubt, the most stressful thing that I had ever endured in my life, knowing he was in the state he was in, and being out the house for long periods; with respect to Maxwell, I will produce an ode to him in a later episode, so please bare this in mind if it feels as if I am just glossing over what was most certainly the most watershed moment of my life.
The year would finish off with the last overseas trip I have made to date; that was the short trip to Paris. I will no doubt deliver the whole truth about the adventure that was Paree!, in the interim, you can get a small snippet of that particular trip on my Instagram page, again, I’m also aragami9x on the ‘Gram too. It was after I returned from Madeira in July that I really made the effort to start taking the Forever Football Shirts social media pages a lot more seriously; it was also here where I realised that running a side business is a full-time job, in and amongst itself! Speaking of the shop, I made a whopping 10 sales that year lol, however it was growth from the previous year, especially as far as the website was concerned, and moreover, as easy it was to quit and just pack the whole thing in, I felt the need to continue was paramount, and that the “big break” was around the corner..
Lastly, with respect to blogging, I picked oWa back up again at the end of August, and it was about the new football season unsurprisingly, however this time, I had gone from drawing all of the covers, to now utilising some technology, if you haven’t noticed, I catch on to shit late lol, and the new covers being made were giving me almost as much joy as the writing itself was! Also, upon my return from the French capital, it was set: I would be leaving PMI (Phillip Morris) on March 1st 2018.
2018 was a year like no other in my life, however having gotten up to this point and exhausted 2100 words in this condensed format, I feel it only fair to give 2018 a post of its own at a later date; trust me, you won’t be disappointed!
Some things never change I guess, I still ramble, still procrastinate, still have weird quirks and habits, still just am a weirdo period! As 2019 began, I started to make a huge effort to streamline the content I am producing on my Twitter and Instagram feeds; so rather than random football musings being tweeted, I am instead diverting all of that energy into the Forever Football Shirts pages, so please give them a follow: @ffsfootballshirts on Instagram, and @FFootballShirts on Twitter. My own networks are both: @aragami9x, and I promise to provide unique and valuable content; a lot of which will be elaborated on via this blog, but also regular living content too; after all, I’m not some automaton, I live a life too; I’m not a monk, I’m a human being living, I just make the choice to share my take on things, and findings on a platform that will enable me to connect with other likeminded souls, at the end of the day we are all journeying, and trying to figure this thing called life out. I know this end may read remarkably similar to the my first ‘Inaugural Piece’, but this blog is a shit test to me to keep my ass on job as they say on the streets now, to deliver content that I will be proud of. In many ways, I look at this as a channel that would serve all of the things that I share a passion and love for, so expect to see links to Spanish Trap, RnB, Hip-Hop, French Hip-Hop jams, martial arts and MMA, stories of my own life, thoughts on my life, training, samurai movies and whatever else, quite frankly, the fuck I want! For those of you that did enjoy my 2 cents on football, I am writing weekly at Forever Football Shirts under the ‘FFS Talk’ banner, however I will also look to get a link from this blog to that page directly.
In closing, thank you for embarking on this odyssey with me; believe me, all of the talking points I have briefly covered here will at some point be written extensively about! Lastly, I would like to thank all of the people in my life that are my family, your support to me over the past 12 months especially, I can never repay, such was the degree with which you put yourselves there for me. I would also like to thank the mentors who have been so kind to produce free and accessible content for people like me to digest and act upon, the men like: Andy Frisella, Joe Rogan, Ed Mylett, Shawn Stevenson, Gary Vee, David Goggins, Robert Greene, Andrew Tate, Michael Tsarion, Michael Black and so many more, and lastly, most importantly, I would like to thank God, for without God, nothing is possible, yet it is through him, that all things are possible.
Good night, and God bless you all;
Steven,
#OSU!
The 9x Blog 