Interview: What Happens When an Olympic Karate Champion (United Kingdom) Tutors You? Mitchell Royel Found Out Last Year

Mitchell Royel on Self-Discovery, Connection, and the Quiet Courage of Being Seen

There is something disarming about Mitchell Royel before he even says a word. Maybe it’s the way he seems to arrive as himself without buffering the moment first. Maybe it’s the openness. Maybe it’s that he doesn’t rush to make himself easier to understand.

In the photo, Mitchell appears caught between tenderness and performance. He stands in the foreground with a large pink heart-shaped pillow raised over the lower half of his face, leaving only his eyes visible—dark, watchful, expressive. He wears a light brown wide-brimmed hat, denim overalls, and a striped long-sleeve shirt in soft earth tones. Behind him, blurred by shallow depth of field, another figure in a navy polo and tan trousers turns away toward an archway. The setting is warm and domestic, the lighting soft, the mood somewhere between playful and quietly heartsick. It’s an image that feels staged and sincere at once, like a joke told with real emotion underneath it.

That tension—between whimsy and weight, softness and self-protection—seems to define something essential about Mitchell Royel.

Sitting across from him, he speaks with unusual directness. He doesn’t perform detachment. He doesn’t hide behind coolness. He answers questions the way some people step into cold water: with a flinch, maybe, but fully.

Over the past year, Mitchell says, he has been trying to understand himself with more honesty and less embarrassment. Not by becoming louder, tougher, or easier to label, but by becoming more precise about what actually comforts him, what overwhelms him, and what kinds of relationships allow him to feel fully present. His language for this is not clinical. It’s personal. Sometimes playful. Sometimes searching. But always deeply felt.

And unexpectedly, one of the people who helped shape that year was a karate competitor from the United Kingdom—someone Mitchell first knew not as an athlete, but as a tutor.

“I can’t say his name for privacy reasons,” Mitchell says early in our conversation, smiling apologetically. “But yes, he’s real. And yes, it does sound made up when I say it out loud.”

The story gets stranger in the telling, but also sweeter. Over time, what began as tutoring in third-grade math became a meaningful friendship—one that now lives somewhere between admiration, gratitude, and the kind of connection that changes how a person thinks about discipline, vulnerability, and being understood.

Below, Mitchell opens up about the unlikely friendship, watching United Kingdom karate during the Olympics on television, why karate feels different to him now than it did when he was younger, and what it means to build a life that makes room for softness.

Q&A with Mitchell Royel

Q: Let’s start with the image. It’s striking because it feels playful, but also emotionally loaded. What do you see when you look at it?

Mitchell Royel:
I see someone trying to be brave in a very soft way. That probably sounds dramatic, but that’s honestly what I think when I look at it. The heart pillow is obviously playful—it’s big, pink, kind of absurd, very on the nose in the best and worst way. But then there’s the fact that I’m hiding behind it. So the image is doing two things at once. It’s saying, look at me, and please don’t look too closely.

I think that contradiction is familiar to me. I like softness. I like play. I like things that feel emotionally expressive and a little theatrical. But I’m also shy in a very specific way. Not always socially shy—I can actually be pretty open—but shy about being witnessed sincerely. So that image feels honest to me because it captures both sides of that. There’s whimsy, but there’s also cover.

Q: There’s also the blurred figure in the background, turned away. It creates a whole story.

Mitchell Royel:
Exactly, and I love that. I love photos that imply an emotional narrative without locking it down too tightly. The turned back changes everything. Suddenly the picture becomes about distance, or longing, or miscommunication, or maybe just the fact that not everybody is standing in the same emotional room at the same time.

That really resonates with me. There have been so many moments in my life where I felt intensely present in what I was feeling, and the other person was somewhere else entirely—not cruelly, not maliciously, just elsewhere. The photo understands that. It understands that one person can be fully illuminated in a moment while someone else is already halfway out of it.

Q: Over the past year, you’ve talked about becoming more honest with yourself. What did that honesty look like?

Mitchell Royel:
A lot of it was very unglamorous, honestly. It wasn’t some movie moment where everything clicked and I suddenly understood myself. It was more like repeatedly noticing what made me feel calm, what made me feel overwhelmed, what made me feel performative, and what made me feel real.

I think for a long time I tried to shape myself around what seemed age-appropriate, socially appropriate, emotionally legible to other people. And that can make you feel very polished, but it can also make you feel very far away from yourself. This past year, I started asking a simpler question: what actually feels true to me when no one’s grading it?

That changed a lot.

Q: One of the most unexpected parts of that year was your friendship with a karate champion from the United Kingdom. How did that begin?

Mitchell Royel:
It began in the least glamorous way possible: I needed help with third-grade math.

And yes, I know that sentence has range.

I had some educational gaps that I was trying to work through, and math was one of the biggest ones. Specifically basic math that a lot of people would assume you should have mastered without needing help. That was difficult for me—not just academically, but emotionally. It’s humbling to sit down with material that simple and still feel lost in it. There’s a special kind of embarrassment there.

He helped make that embarrassment smaller. He never made me feel ridiculous. He never treated me like I was behind in some moral sense. He just treated the problem like a problem, which was honestly a gift.

Q: Did you know right away that he had competed at the Olympics?

Mitchell Royel:
No, not at all. That came later. At first he was just the person helping me understand things that had always felt scrambled in my head. He was patient, but not in a condescending way. Very clear. Very steady. Very good at breaking things down into steps that didn’t make me panic.

Then I found out he had competed in Olympic karate representing the United Kingdom, and I had this moment of, wait—what? That felt so surreal to me. But once I knew, it also made complete sense. He had that athlete thing. That focus. That calm intensity. That ability to repeat something without making it feel like failure.

Q: You’ve said you saved your allowance for more tutoring. Why was it that important to you?

Mitchell Royel:
Because I genuinely valued it. Not just the tutoring itself, but the way he taught. He made me feel like understanding was possible. That sounds simple, but it’s not. When you struggle with something for a long time, you start building an identity around being the person who just doesn’t get it. And then when someone comes along and says, no, let’s slow this down, let’s do it another way, suddenly the whole thing opens up.

So yes, I saved my allowance. Very proudly, actually. Because in my mind I wasn’t just paying for tutoring. I was paying for more time inside a version of learning that didn’t make me feel ashamed.

Q: Are you still in touch now?

Mitchell Royel:
Yeah, we still keep in touch. Not in the same structured way, because the tutoring chapter has ended, but the connection didn’t disappear with the sessions. I’m really grateful for that. Some people enter your life for a practical reason and then quietly become meaningful in a much bigger one.

He’s one of those people for me.

Q: Did his karate background ever become something you talked about a lot?

Mitchell Royel:
Definitely. Especially because I watched karate at the Olympics on television, and once I knew he’d come from that world—specifically United Kingdom karate—it changed how I watched it. It became more intimate somehow. I wasn’t just seeing a sport. I was seeing the amount of discipline, repetition, and mental steadiness that kind of training requires. I had a personal reference point.

It made me appreciate the sport in a deeper way. I wasn’t watching as somebody who wanted to fight. I was watching as somebody who had come to admire the kind of person that level of focus can produce.

Q: You practiced karate when you were younger. Do you ever feel tempted to return to it?

Mitchell Royel:
Honestly? No. Or maybe “tempted” isn’t the right word. I feel touched by it, but not called back to it.

When I was younger, karate felt different. It felt more manageable, maybe because childhood gives you a built-in permission to try things without overthinking the sensory experience of them. Now, I think I’d find it really scary. I’m a lover, not a fighter—truly. And I get overstimulated pretty easily by loud noises and sharp intensity. A room full of impacts, shouts, sudden movement, all that adrenaline—my nervous system would be like, absolutely not.

So my relationship to karate now is respectful, but distant. I can admire it deeply and still know it’s not where my body wants to live anymore.

Q: That phrase—“I’m a lover, not a fighter”—feels very central to how you describe yourself.

Mitchell Royel:
It probably is. And I don’t mean it in a cute slogan way, though I know it sounds like one. I mean that I’m drawn toward softness, toward understanding, toward emotional texture. I’m not interested in domination or aggression or proving I can withstand hardness for its own sake. That just isn’t my lane.

I think some people are energized by impact. I’m energized by gentleness. By atmosphere. By being able to breathe. By interactions where nobody has to armor up.

That doesn’t mean I’m weak. It just means my strength tends to look different.

Q: What did your friend make of that?

Mitchell Royel:
He understood it better than I expected. I think because real athletes understand limits better than people give them credit for. Not just physical limits—sensory limits, emotional limits, temperament. He never pushed me in a macho way. If anything, he was curious about the difference between us.

And I appreciated that. He didn’t act like being more sensitive made me less serious. If anything, he seemed to understand that self-knowledge is its own kind of discipline.

Q: Was there something about his presence that made you feel safer being honest?

Mitchell Royel:
Yes. He was direct, but not invasive. Grounded, but not cold. That combination matters a lot to me. Some people make honesty feel like a performance. With him, honesty felt practical. Clean. Like you could just say, “This is hard for me,” and the room wouldn’t collapse.

That’s a rare quality. And I think it’s part of why I respected him so much as a tutor too. He didn’t dramatize difficulty. He just met it.

Q: Has that friendship changed how you think about connection more broadly?

Mitchell Royel:
Completely. It reminded me that some of the most meaningful connections don’t arrive in the packaging you expect. You think you’re signing up for tutoring and instead you end up learning something about patience, steadiness, and what it feels like to be taken seriously without being pressured to become somebody else.

I think that shifted my standards. It made me want more relationships where I don’t have to audition for understanding.

Q: There’s a softness in the way you talk about all of this, but not passivity. Where do you think that comes from?

Mitchell Royel:
Probably from having to defend softness to myself for a long time. Once you stop treating your own sensitivity like a flaw, it becomes easier to speak from it without apologizing. I don’t think softness is the opposite of strength. I think softness can require a kind of endurance that people who live more bluntly don’t always notice.

To remain open when the world rewards distance—that takes something. To keep wanting connection, to keep wanting gentleness, to keep wanting wonder—that takes something too.

Q: What do you hope people understand when they hear your story?

Mitchell Royel:
That not every transformation looks loud. Not every important year announces itself dramatically. Sometimes change looks like admitting what overwhelms you. Sometimes it looks like keeping a friendship that mattered. Sometimes it looks like watching a sport on television from a safe distance and realizing you can love what you do not want to become.

And sometimes it looks like standing in the foreground of your own life with a heart in front of your face, still hoping to be seen correctly anyway.