Alex Caceres exudes confidence as he sits in his Las Vegas hotel room just days before his latest visit to the UFC octagon.
He faces Daniel Pineda on Saturday, 3 June and is full of confidence after a first-round head-kick knockout win in his last fight.
But that hasn’t always been the case for the UFC featherweight.
“I used to be ostracised by many friend groups, even when it came to close friends or my brother’s friends. They always teased me out of the group,” Caceres tells BBC Sport.
“Growing up in a Caribbean-Latino family, there was a lot of white-washing. My hair was always ‘bad hair’, my skin was ‘too dark’ or my nose was ‘too wide’.
“I began to not enjoy my physicality so much because it wasn’t getting me girls, it wasn’t getting me friends and it wasn’t making me happy.
“Hearing that as a kid I began to not like the features of my body or myself.”
Growing up in Kendall, Florida, Caceres’ childhood changed when his father was handed a two-year prison sentence for selling drugs.
He was eight years old and his family home became an easy target.
Caceres, now 34, recalls his father’s rivals “robbing us blind”, which forced him and his family to move to a more affluent neighbourhood in the hope of finding a greater sense of security.
But he quickly became an outcast in a new environment and began to develop body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) – a mental health condition that leads to distress about one’s physical appearance.
“I had to adapt,” he says. “I’d never dealt with racism until I got there. I’d never felt like I didn’t like myself too much before but people were pointing at me and saying I didn’t have the right qualities to fit in.
“Miami is a huge melting pot, there’s a huge amount of diversity but racism doesn’t go away.
“Racism from Latinos against other Latinos is some of the worst. There’s a big stigma about being black in the Latino community.
“We’re going to grow up thinking black isn’t beautiful or having curly, afro hair isn’t good. We even call it ‘bad hair’ and straight hair is good.
“If you repeat something it eventually becomes normal and then you start to view yourself as being lesser – and that’s what happened to me.”
Caceres was unsure of his place in society and would regularly find himself getting into trouble.
Fighting was a way of life from a very early age as he refused to bow down to bullies – even if his struggles with body dysmorphia led to him inwardly question his worth.
Caceres didn’t graduate from high school, leaving without a diploma, after he was suspended for trying to apprehend a thief.
“We were in school after wrestling practice and some guy stole a purse and started to run away,” he says.
“I didn’t mean to but I rammed his face into the lockers. The teachers said ‘you can’t do that, you should have let someone know’, but if I’d done that then he would have got away.
“They weren’t going to suspend me but I said ‘it’s because of people like you that we live in the world like it is today, people don’t stand up for each other’. So they suspended me.”
With a formal education off the table, Caceres turned to the thing he knew best – fighting.
Initially, he stepped into the world of backyard brawls where he would fight for a $600 (£480) prize before being urged to make better use of his talent and pursue a professional career in mixed martial arts.
“It was like a movie,” he adds.”First we train, then we do street fights and then someone says ‘you’re pretty good, do you want to fight in a cage?’
“I didn’t even know the UFC existed back then.”
It’s now 15 years since Caceres’ professional debut and 13 since he appeared on season 12 of reality tv series The Ultimate Fighter, which would prove to be his springboard into the UFC.
He is ranked number 15 in the UFC’s featherweight division and has won six of his last seven fights. He has fought 27 times in the UFC and has no plans to scale back.
“It’s just coming together after years and years of tough competition. You either match up or you get left behind,” he says.
“I continue to train hard and get better. I feel like my body has matured a lot I don’t feel outclassed by strength or feel smaller than my opponents.
“I have more trust in my abilities. I just feel more comfortable.”
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