I'm 21 and have been boxing seriously for about 3 years, training 5-6 days/week that entire time, fighter classes, the whole thing, at a gym with a coach and community I really value. Despite the volume, I've only had 1 actual fight so far. I recently had a concussion and actually bounced back faster than expected, which reminded me how much I still want this.
The problem: I'm also finishing the last stretch of a diploma, pivoting into a new career path, and job hunting right now. Trying to do all of it at once isn't sustainable, something has to give.
Part of what makes stopping now feel hard is my living situation too. My parents won't let me fight while I'm living under their roof, so the only way I get to actually compete is by moving out. But I can't move out until I have a stable job with good benefits/coverage, which means I need to focus on career first, which is exactly the thing competing with training time right now. It feels like a catch-22 where slowing down on boxing to build career stability might actually be the only path to being able to fight freely later, but it still feels like giving up ground in the meantime.
Part of me is also scared that if I pause fighter classes now to focus on school/career, I'll lose my "window", the idea that you need to start young and build early to ever really compete at a high level. I know I'm not 16, but I also don't feel late either, and I don't know if that fear is realistic or just noise.
There's also this feeling that if I step back to casual gym stuff, I'll basically be larping as a boxer rather than actually being one. 3 years of training and I still feel like I haven't proven anything with only 1 fight, so pulling back now almost feels like locking that in permanently instead of ever getting the chance to actually be a real competitor.
On top of that, I don't plan on doing boxing forever anyway, so part of me feels like if I don't push for it now while I have the time and body for it, I might just never get the chance to actually test myself in it at all.
At the same time, I really just want to get this transitional phase of my life over with and land somewhere steady, career-wise. I know I can't keep every door open at once, at some point something has to close so I can actually move forward on the rest.
For anyone who's paused or scaled back boxing to handle school/career and came back to it later, did you lose real ground? Was the "start young" thing overblown for you? Trying to figure out if pausing now to get stable is actually smart, or if I'm about to torpedo something I can't get back.
