From the ESPN article
Her voice is so soft you have to lean in to hear her. Sad is all she can feel since her knockout loss to Holly Holm at UFC 193 on Nov. 14. She speaks slowly, letting each word hurt. Like her hands in that ill-fated fight, her guard is down.
"It might be three to six months before I can eat an apple, let alone take an impact,"
"I'm just really ****ing sad."
"I need to come back. I need to beat this chick. Who knows if I'm going to pop my teeth out or break my jaw or rip my lip open. I have to ****ing do it."
"I've turned off my phone," she says. "I haven't looked at it. I've just been having long conversations with Mochi [her 7-year-old Argentinian Mastiff]."
She did shower today and eat a bit of onion bagel with cream cheese. She got dressed -- yes, sweats count -- and opened her door, first to her sister Maria Burns Ortiz, who brought her coffee, and then again for this interview.
The loss to Holm is still too scary to fully feel or see. The retelling is told in fragments.
"I got hit in that first round. ... I cut my lip open and knocked a couple of my teeth loose. I was out on my feet from the very beginning."
"I wasn't thinking clearly. I had that huge cut in my mouth and I just spit [the blood] out at my feet. Then they brought the bucket over and I'm like, 'Why didn't I spit it in the bucket?' I never spit on the ground."
"It was like a dumbed-down dreamy version of yourself making decisions. ... I was just trying to shake myself out of it. I kept saying to myself, 'You're OK, keep fighting. You're OK, keep fighting.'"
"I just feel so embarrassed. How I fought after that is such an embarrassing representation of myself. I wasn't even ****ing there."
Rousey sinks into her couch to ponder the question. "I feel like I'm grieving the death of the person who could've done that," she says.
Then she lost to Holm and there was no plan. They just got into the truck and drove. Texas was freezing. The wind howled every night. She watched Browne hunt once. He didn't get anything. Another group of hunters gave them a deer they'd killed.
It was miserable.
"I kind of just slept a lot and ate fast food," she says, sitting up a bit on the couch to see what Mochi is doing. "First I was so sick I couldn't eat anything.
Then I just slept and pooped in the woods. I used a whole roll of toilet paper in one day.
"Physically, my body was refusing its own failures. It was, like, sick of itself. Expelling itself. Like all the skin came off my face. My whole body flushed it out."
She left her phone at home. Travis answered texts from her family, trainer and agent. She shut out the outside world. She's been selling the fight game for so long, she knew what was being said about her.
"That I'm a ****ing failure and I deserve everything that I got," she says sharply.
("It was just like a reaction," Rousey says about her decision not to touch gloves with Holm before the fight. "I was like, 'The last time I saw you [at the weigh-in], you were putting your fist on my chin and trying to get a cheap hit on me, then you turn around and you want to touch gloves? You have to be one way or the other. So if you want to be that way with me, that's the way it is.'")
"I guess it's all going to be determined by what happens in the rematch," she says. "Everything is going to be determined by that. Either I'll win and keep going or I won't and I'll be done with everything."
He's seen her lose before. He knows what it looks like afterward. How much she hates it. How much it hurts her. After she lost in the 2005 World Championships in Egypt, he found 40 candy wrappers on the floor. There's always a binge and a purge. There's grief. Then there's anger.
"My mom keeps telling her to 'Woman up!'" Burns Ortiz says. Move on. Deal with it. Open the blinds.
"It wasn't long before she was stopping by and telling me that I can't hide my whole life," Rousey says. "I have to do something with myself. Turn on my cellphone and stop ignoring everyone."
Rousey isn't budging.
"Of course I'm staying [with Tarverdyan]," Rousey says. "That's my mom's opinion, not mine."
"I always think I can lose all of them," she says. "I'm the only one that's scared when I walk in there. I'm always ****ing scared."
So will she fight again?
"Of course. What else am I going to ****ing do?"