“Fear and the Coil”

My sister, Nyxi, and I follow her mother into a small practice studio on the Naropa campus. The room is spare and has no windows, with just a minimal...

My sister, Nyxi, and I follow her mother into a small practice studio on the Naropa campus. The room is spare and has no windows, with just a minimal amount of space between the piano at the center and the bare, white walls. Nyxi’s mother, Roni, has rented out the room for the next hour, so she can practice music, and seats herself on the bench to begin pulling out her sheet music and spreading it across the reading stand. Nyxi and I start scanning the room, wordlessly assessing where we’ll park ourselves for the duration of the practice and keep ourselves entertained. Our eyes fall on a door, the only interruption to the blank of the walls, and we sidle over to it to investigate.

The door is unlocked and opens to a small storage closet. I don’t recall at all what was in it, but there as enough room for us both to sit inside, and so we slipped in and closed the door against the starting notes of Roni’s practice. The door barely muffled the piano’s percussive tones, so we leaned our heads into each other and projected our whispers, occasionally giggling as we spoke too loudly at the exact moment Roni’s fingers would pause on the keys. The space was quite dark, as our little bodies blocked most of the light that crept in from under the door. I wore a black shirt with a half-moon mask on the left breast, from the “Phantom of the Opera” show we’d been able to see in New York last summer, visiting with Nyxi’s grandparents. The mask glowed in the dark, a kind of ghosty greenish light, floating in the black space. Maybe this is what set the mood, but we began telling each other scary stories; we are from the Scholastic generation and well-versed in the structure of, and borrowed heavily from, the young adult horror series, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” Those books were illustrated by Stephen Gammell and his horrific, single-image, scratchy sketches absolutely primed the reader’s mind for terror, even though most of the stories were pretty appropriate for their young audience. I can still see them in my mind, even decades later, the same uneasiness coiling into my stomach, as I recall them.

As we spun our stories together, the sound of the piano faded into background. The goosebumps began to texture forearms, the chilly tickle of ghost-fingers gripped at the backs of our necks. We sat in there for probably 20 minutes, riling each other up with terror, scaring ourselves with our own words and imaginations; Nyxi’s hand gripped mine suddenly and tightly and then, unable to stand it any longer, we both burst, shrieking, out of the closet door and into the pale flourescent light of the studio. Roni’s hands crashed into the keys and stopped, she stared at us with her mouth open,” “what is going on?!” In the thinly spread nothing of the lighted room, our screams melted into giggles and we clutched each other, hearts racing through our chests pressed together, and we darted to a corner of the room and sat down to recover. “Can I just have 30 minutes, please?” Roni pleaded, and adjusted her glasses to relocate her place on her sheet music.

We sat together, silently, for a few minutes as we regained our comfort in the room. Surely, we found another way to pass the time, but I don’t remember what it was. It certainly wasn’t as thrilling as the horror stories in the broom closet.

Having been born in the 80s and with older brothers, horror movies and shows were very present in my upbringing. Much of it wasn’t especially terrifying and, other than the most classic (like Freddie Krueger and a few out-of-context images that stuck in my mind when the rest of the films faded), I don’t feel I was especially moved by the genre. Like the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and the various samples of the booming Horror genre of the 80s, our thrill in riling each other up with scary stories acted as a kind of innoculation against that kind of fear. The same way a rollar coaster’s stomach-churning effect is saught out, these controlled-burn terrors are exciting and can be escaped from with fairly immediate relief. With the exception of a nightmare I had when I was little, one moment from “The Exorcist,” and the depiction of the title character from the series “Marianne,” I am perfectly able to calm myself out of my fright. Those three examples, however, do still make it impossible for me to awake in the night and get out of bed without turning on a light.

This kind fear has a signature; the squirmy stomach, the leaping heart and chilly fingers on the neck. It’s exciting. It is not the same as unexpected fear, like encountering a predator out on a trail, life-threatening jobs, being followed by a stranger, or finding yourself in an unknowable enounter with someone that feels dangerous. I suspect there are demographics of people who find themselves much more familiar with these kinds of fear, for whom the world is truly dangerous. This is not the kind of fear one seeks out, nor that can be “turned off” at will.

Two weeks ago, my rabbit got his toe broken by the sliding door of the house. He had to wear a little cast on his foot and was feeling very sorry for himself. As a prey animal, he’s got a kind of relentless apprehension of the dark anyway, and I felt perhaps a little overly protective of him. I feed the animals at 5:00 in the morning, before the light has crept into the sky, and due to his hinderance, I brought Bun into the house fo his breakfast and sat next to him on the floor, stroking his nose. He melted into the floor and enjoyed my affection for probably 5 minutes before suddenly he tensed – his whole body – and his head shot up in alertness. I also tensed, startled by his sudden change. Before I could even form a thought, Bun tore off into the kitchen, the sound of his nails scratching on the floor in a panicked patter, and the cat leapt after him. I hadn’t even seen her, given the darkness of the house at that hour, but she’d been hunting him and he became aware moments before she pounced. I give this example because the relay of Bun’s fear (of being hunted) and my fear at his sudden startling (my fear had no object other than his response) was purely physical. There was no thought to it; the thought came after. Just as the final, unbearable moment in the crescendo of my fear in the closet with my sister as a kid came when Nyxi gripped my hand, the instinctual fear from those physical signals is completely apart from the mental tease of intentional fear. You can innoculate yourself against the latter, but the former can only be addressed by practicing your response to it.

This is the difficult thing about fear with fighting. It never goes away, and quite frankly you shouldn’t expect or even want it to. Tension is the body’s way of preparing for action. Too much will cause a freeze (inaction) and too little will make you slow. I’ve written about fear before, and its integral relationship to fighting, and the short of it is that you can’t get entirely rid of it, you can use it to your benefit, and trying to suppress it or pretend it isn’t there will never help you. But even identifying it can be tricky, perhaps especially for men or those from cultures that teach one to rebuff or refuse fear. Just the other day I was working with my therapist over Zoom, talking about an event in my fighting that had caused me “great embarassment,” I told her. As I said this, she saw emotion flash into my face; I felt it, obviously, and I refocused my attention to keeping from crying. “What is that?” she asked me, “that looked like a trauma response.” “Shame, I guess,” I said, following with my assessment of having felt embarrassed. She asked me to describe my somatic experience of that emotion: the base of my tongue feels like it is locked and heavy, weighing down the canopy of skin under my jawbone; my throat and upper chest feel like a column of tension, my limbs pull in toward the center of my body and interlock at my ankles and wrists, as if bound. After a while in this state, fighting back tears, my diaphram starts to ache as my breath is very shallow. “Maybe I’m projecting,” my therapist offers, “but that doesn’t sound very much like shame.” I blink, unable to reckon that I’m feeling something other than what I think I’m feeling, “what does it sound like?” I ask. “Fear,” she offers. I sat there, nonplussed. Why would I be afraid in this situation? I wonder to myself. I’m not going to go into how we worked that one out, but she was right. Figuring out why fear was my response, now, to talking about that situation was a revelation, but the important part of it for this writing is that I couldn’t even identify it, because it didn’t make sense to me for what I was thinking; it was a physical response to a psychological trigger.

And that’s the bit about fear that fighters really have to keep an eye on. Your body will respond, whether or not you acknolwedge or accept that you’re afraid. With my therapist, I will go forward working on how to not have this fear in response to something I didn’t recognize as its trigger. In this context, I don’t know what to do with those somatic invasions. With fighting, however, I know what that is and how it helps me. Tension is a precurser to action; I want to be a little bit coiled, because that coil makes me alert, responsive, quick, and instinctual. For a very long time, the majority of my career, I’ve experienced a freeze response to the real and involuntary fear I feel in the ring or practice space. I get heavy, my feet grip down into the canvas and I brace. This can be helpful in some ways, but it’s not ideal. Only very, very recently have I started to keep my feet moving under that duress, and in doing so, in not stopping, I can release myself from that frozen state. It’s like kicking out a stone from a damn, allowing just enough pressure to be released from the swelling current. Just move my feet. I’m not thinking, really, or choosing what to do when I’m truly afraid and under pressure, but it’s as true an instinct as it is to freeze, just a much more useful one. I can’t stop being scared, I can’t refuse the physical sensations, but I can guide myself toward responses that move rather than shut down. When you’re scared before a fight, that’s something else. That’s the thrill-seeking anxiety of whispering scary stories to your sister in the dark, your brain telling yourself horrors to bring rise to some of those sensations. You can talk yourself out of those, or you can burst through the closet door into the lifghted room. But you can’t talk yourself out of the instinctual, physical reactions to fear, because they’re non-verbal. Telling my rabbit he’s safe when the cat is going into a crouch in the dark of the doorway isn’t the right way to protect him; his tension is the right response, the coil protects him. You want the fear, but you want to know it and use it.

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Posted In
Muay Thai

A 100 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100, and then 200, becoming the westerner with the most fights in Thailand, in history, my new goal is to fight an impossible 471 times, the historical record for the greatest number of documented professional fights (see western boxer Len Wickwar, circa 1940), and along the way to continue documenting the Muay Thai of Thailand in the Muay Thai Library project: see patreon.com/sylviemuay

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