Somewhere around my 55th fight, I started filming “post fight updates,” a kind of vlog immediately upon exiting the ring from a fight. The idea was to get the raw emotion or experience right after a fight and, quite honestly, I hated doing them. Certainly after a loss, it sucks to point a camera in my own face and talk openly about having just lost, basically confessing to an audience my super-fresh failings. But it also was a little difficult to do them after a win, when my brain is all lizard-like and I can’t formulate interesting thoughts about the experience. It feels like it’s just “I feel good, I’m happy I won, she was doing blah blah blah.” Wanna know why every football player sounds like a moron and can only think to thank Jesus when he has a microphone in his face right after a game? Lizard brain… it’s real. Despite that I can’t help but feel that some of my history and development has been captured in a time lapse way.
My Post Fight Video Play List – Vlogging the Atmosphere
Marq Piocos @WMMANews on Twitter has begun the prospective project of editing together my YouTube vlogs of which there are maybe 155 or so, and my post-fight vlogs, creating a documentary film through that footage, so we put together a playlist of my post-fight updates to help him out by organizing them in one spot. Below is that playlist if anyone is interested. Because so many of the contexts are the same, you can feel the small way ways I’ve grown and changed over my 120+ fights in the country. If you want to click around in the list watch on YouTube.
I’m actually a bit surprised looking back and seeing I’ve been doing these for so long. I thought they were still a pretty recent thing, but starting at 55 and now being at 131, I’ve actually done them after more fights than not. That’s kinda weird. I guess in my mind I still think of them as an “experiment,” something I’m trying out. But it’s also kind of interesting to see them as a whole story arc – like when someone photographs themselves every day for a year and then time-lapses it. It’s the same spot in the house, against the same white door or wall or whatever, but you can see all these changes in mood or style or emotion because of that common background. My lizard brain says the same words after fights, but my voice or face or pace of talking totally betrays differences in how I’m feeling right after each fight. Those are things I might forget about the experience; the details kind of smooth out to create a thread that ties them all together. But the thoughts or emotions immediately outside the ring are something I can’t plan for and can’t hide from. And maybe 10 years that’s something I’ll be grateful to remember. It’s pretty cool to see them now.
From the beginning though I started vlogging because I wanted to connect with other potential female fighters. I wanted them to see what I was experiencing, and connect to me. In the beginning I was very isolated as a fighter, living an hour or more from any suitable Muay Thai training in a fairly rural part of NY, with no training partners. My vlogging was a reaching out. But in the larger sense, and everything that I’ve done on 8limbs.Us has been towards this, once I got to Thailand I’ve wanted to bring the Thailand fight experience out there to others, to make it more concrete, more real, and more human, so that others can say: I can do that! As I’ve often said, I’m no one special. I’m just an average girl with passion and determination, something all of us can have.
More of My Fighter Vlogging
Below are the rest of my vlogs, everyday stuff over the years, something I’ll continue on in my quest to fight 200 times in Thailand – and a playlist of vlogs I did a year ago, every day in January, what turned out to be a very hard month.
All my everyday vlogs in reverse chronological order:
When I vlogged every day in January last year:
This playlist of my attempt to capture some of the emotional up and down of what I’m doing. I vlogged every day of the month of January in the year 2014:
