I’ve spent most of my life being devoured by heart-exploding anxiety. “Doing scary things” has meant stuff like being out after dark and calling someone on the phone. It has never, for one minute, meant fist fighting in front of a crowd of people.
But a while ago I decided to try countering the anxiety by doing new stuff. With that in mind, I went to a boxing class. At worst, I figured, I could write a column about being a middle-aged mother in a young man’s world.
It was nothing like that. Boxing demands that you do it over and over. You hit a heavy bag and you think, oh wow, that solved at least five of my problems. You get sweaty and furious and the people around you are sweaty and furious and you think, if I punch hard enough, nothing will ever hurt me again.
I needed more. I chose a nearby gym and boxed two days a week, then six days a week. I felt as though I had discovered something about myself that had always been true. When the gym management decided to run a fight night, I didn’t think twice. Not thinking is how a lot of Future Anna’s trouble starts but she simply chickens out and goes into witness protection. Even as I said yes, I don’t think I believed I would step into the ring.
For six weeks, I trained like a fighter. I skipped. I shadowboxed. I rolled and slipped and pivoted and shuffled and sidestepped, threw straights and hooks and uppers and rips. I imagined what it might be like to cop a fist in the nose, the jaw, the temple. My wonderful boxing friends assured me I could do it and I started to believe them, even though I was definitely going to pull out at the last minute.
On the morning of the fight, a friend braided my hair. I bought new wraps. I packed my bag. I did all the things a person might do before a boxing fight, like driving to the gym and warming up and trying on the match gloves. I did all of this knowing I would still, at the 11th hour, run away and never come back.
The curtains opened and Limp Bizkit’s Nookie played. I had spent weeks choosing a walkout track that was exactly the right balance of very serious and absolutely unbothered. Now I thought: I should have spent less time making playlists and more time practising body shots. Also, if anything, taking up boxing has got me less nookie than ever.
The room reeked of bloodlust, of manufactured rivalries. I breathed. I blinked. I had the sudden, exquisite, invigorating realisation that, although it was very unlikely, I might die. This is what I thought while I walked in: I hope my shorts don’t ride up while they drag my lifeless body away.
The ring appeared. The crowd erupted. Everything I knew about boxing evaporated. “Oh no!” went my brain, with too-late clarity. “I don’t want to hit anyone in the face!”
The ref had a mohawk and a tuxedo. My peripheral vision was blocked by headgear, my mouthguard suddenly hard and mean against my tongue. My opponent was taller, younger, less consumed by existential panic. Inside my gloves, my fists curled tight like a newborn’s.
The bell went. I threw some jabs and crosses; a couple of them even connected. My opponent shouted, “Nice shot!” and we laughed. We were beating each other up in front of some 300 people and we were laughing together as if it was a Christmas lunch. And then there was an almighty crack and suddenly I could see the entire space-time continuum.
In less than two rounds, I had lost – by total knockout.
It’s important at this point to acknowledge the possible consequences of being repeatedly hit in the head, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy (a condition linked to repeated head trauma, though its prevalence, thresholds and diagnosis remain contested, particularly in amateur boxing). Fortunately, stepping out after two knocks makes me both a coward and an unlikely CTE patient.
I remember feeling a surge of anger as I left the ring. I remember the nurse asking me to follow her finger. I remember telling her there was no way to know if the nausea was concussion or the adrenaline pulverising every organ in my body. I remember a gorgeous friend buying me a burger but I don’t remember eating it, and I remember sitting on the floor and crying because I had catastrophically embarrassed myself.
My friends said “most people will never even get in the ring” as though it was comforting instead being of a reminder that I was extremely stupid. I stashed my finisher medal in my boxing bag and fumed that I hadn’t had my redemption story, that I was not the anxious middle-aged mother who stunned the crowd with her shock victory.
But a few days later, having slept off my rattled brain and cortisol overdose, I began to feel something else. The self-loathing lifted and underneath was my anxious old self, wide-eyed, shouting, “You did WHAT?”
Five years ago, I wouldn’t walk to the shops alone. Doing hard things was as alien to me as replying to emails and having my car serviced. Boxing changed that. I put one foot forward and then the other, climbed into a boxing ring and had the shit beaten out of me. On purpose. For no reason other than a good story, cool videos and the glory.
It doesn’t matter that I lost (it does matter very much, I’m not owned, etc). Most people won’t get in the ring. I did. And I would do it again.
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Anna Spargo-Ryan is the author of A Kind of Magic, The Gulf and The Paper House, and a winner of the Horne prize