Fight back

By Cat H.

You can’t stay down forever. When you’re all bruised and the scars on your face prove how long you’ve been pummeling over and over, there has to be a way for you to get back up again. And that’s what Angel Espinoza did.

Espinoza has experienced bullying throughout his life yet he still stood his ground.  No matter how difficult it got. 

“Well growing up, I was actually getting bullied because kids just didn’t like me. And so I felt like I needed some sort of way to protect myself…” he said. 

Espinoza knew that this constant loop of intimidation and power that is being poured onto him needed to come to an end.  Luckily, his admirable brother decided to lend him a helping hand.

“...My brother at the time, he was an MMA fighter. And he would teach me and stuff.” 

Espinoza and his brothers have such a sentimental bond that hearing their relationship will make your heart completely melt.

It’s full of love but also pieced with rough times. Yet throughout all of that hardship and arguments, their endearment is still closer than ever.

“We argue, we fight, but we also get along more than we fight. We rarely fight now that we’re older… There was this one time me and my second older brother fought and he made me bleed and we were just going at it but we solved this because of my oldest brother. He talked to us.”

One of the hardships that Espinoza had to face was that his brother eventually stopped teaching him because his daughter was born. So that left Espinoza on his own. He had to learn boxing himself from watching action movies and Youtube videos, and luckily it’s become a part of his life now. 

“It makes me feel good  because I have a lot of anger and boxing releases all of that… 

“This one time I defended my cousin from his bully in Oregon. I was 12 and he was 14. I felt great but scared because the dude chased us after with a knife. And we ran back to my aunt's house and when we got there we were just relieved and happy and just kept laughing and talking about how I won the fight.”

Espinoza’s determination to stand up for himself made him grow into a stronger person. Even though he had nobody to teach him, it indicates that in life, you're going to have to be on your own but that doesn’t mean that you should allow yourself to fall. Fight back.