Much of my time is spent with artists and academics which means, when it comes to boxing, there are often a lot of questions. The biggest FAQ I’ve gotten post-fight has been about fear and managing nerves. Weren’t you scared? How did you not flip out when the bell went off?
I was scared. Of course. My coach always says being at least a little scared is a good sign—it means you’re taking it seriously. An MMA fighter once told me that the only fighters he knew who were truly unafraid before getting in the cage were probably sociopaths. Sometimes fear left me feeling like I’d had five espressos and was ready TO GOOOOO and sometimes like I was being marched towards a guillotine I had, for some unfathomable reason, built for myself.
I think of fear as being like fire—powerful enough to heat your home, but if not properly channeled it can torch the whole neighborhood. This kind of fear wants us to disassociate, to yank us out of our bodies, out of our own possibility—what can we do to bring ourselves back to earth?
Here are three things that helped me:
Getting to the source. For a fight, the source might seem obvious. I was about to do physical combat with a stranger! But I wasn’t so afraid of getting hurt. Boxing is a contact sport and certainly anything can happen, but the amateurs have some solid safeguards again grave injury. I was terrified of letting myself down. Of letting my coaches down. Of embarrassment, I guess you could say. Once I got to the source I could then ask myself what would happen if that happened, if I was utterly humiliated in the ring. I imagined I’d feel really shitty for a bit and then I would just bite down and keep going and work to correct my mistakes. I once heard a boxing coach say that he liked training women because they endure humiliation much better than men which is…quite a thing to say. But also it’s true: I can endure humiliation. I mean, I would certainly prefer not to but it would not be nearly enough to make me quit.
Overcoming a terror of humiliation can be vital for writers too. Better to be silent than to be a fool—I remember a writer friend telling me this, in the midst of a long walk (he was quoting one of his former teachers, who might have been quoting Lincoln?). But sometimes humiliation—the possibility that we are indeed the fool—is exactly the thing we need to risk.
[the boxing ring before the first bout started]
Journaling: a conversion story. A few years ago I found an old lock-and-key diary someone had given me as a child. There was only one entry, on the first page. It read Dear Diary— and stopped there. Which is to say I have always had a slight aversion to journaling. I don’t even like the word! Fiction is my medium; anything I need to say through language has always gone there. However: journal entries before and after sparring have been wildly helpful. I’ll write down my goals and then reflect on where I met them and where I fell short. I do think the repetition helped certain things stick, and it also creates a visible arc of progress. About a week out from my fight I had a bad sparring session. Nothing wild happened—I just felt slow and had trouble getting into a rhythm and kept making silly mistakes. Like why in god’s name did I keep backing myself into the same corner? I had a wee meltdown at home, convinced the bad sparring was a harbinger of fight night doom, but then I read all my sparring entries in order and there was that very clear arc of progress and all of a sudden I could come back to myself.
I also came up with one affirmation that I wrote down five times right after I woke up in the morning and before I went to bed, which means there’s a chunk of my journal that looks absolutely unhinged in an all-work-and-no-play kind of way. I am tempted to share a photo, but am far too superstitious, as previous newsletters have established. Anyway: writing things down is powerful. Write the same thing over and over and it can feel like casting a spell.
Alternate endings. The imagination is a wonderful thing until it starts spitting out all the different ways your dreams will come to ruin. I’ve read a bunch of sports psychology stuff on visualization and many people recommend walking yourself through every moment of the fight—from parking at the venue to getting your hand raised at the end. But I could only hold the plotline for so long before I got lost in the sauce and started to vanish down weird rabbit holes. A writer-specific liability, perhaps. What did help was visualizing a few very specific moments: the ref bringing both fighters into the center of the ring to review the rules; the sound of the first bell; that initial undertow of fatigue. It was like a deck of mental flashcards: a situation and a corresponding response.
Also: when the what ifs started to run amok—What if I’m exhausted in the first 30 seconds? What if I get knocked out?—I would say the scary thing aloud and then I would either write down or say a counter-argument. You will not be exhausted in the first thirty seconds because you have worked hard on your conditioning and regularly spar many more rounds than you will fight. An experiment in learning how to tell myself new stories.
The bad what Ifs? always come hard for me at some point in a writing project. I am still haunted by a residency I did at MacDowell where I cried in the woods of New Hampshire every day for three weeks straight (to be clear the place itself is lovely—the problem was definitely me!). I was just so convinced of the inevitability of my own failure. I could see no other possibility.
I work a lot with student writers, and often they assume that “experienced” writers (i.e. writers who have published books) are free of doubt and uncertainty. It took me a while to realize that experienced fighters still get nervous—especially when a bout is a shot at leveling up. The better you get at boxing the harder boxing gets. The same is true with writing.
In the new year I’ll be wading into a revision of my next novel, Ring of Night, and I’m interested to see if any of these fear-channeling techniques will carry over. At MacDowell I wish I had known how to at least attempt to tell myself a different kind of story. Then I could have spent more time staring up at all those beautiful trees.
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State of Paradise is one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Books of 2024! SOP also landed on NPR & Kirkus’s 2024 list & I recently spoke with the wonderful Nate Brown for The Rumpus.
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ICYMI: I’m just back from the Miami Book Fair, which was such a good time, & freshly reminded of everything bookstores and libraries and schools are up against when it comes to keeping literature accessible. I wrote an essay on the current state of books bans in Florida for Harper’s Bazaar, and I’m sharing this again because many indie bookstores in FL are doing vital social justice work and it’s only going to get harder from here. If you’re looking for a literary gift and think State of Paradise might delight someone in your life please consider ordering from a FL indie (these stores are also still recovering from hurricane season). I highly recommend The Lynx, Tombolo Books, and Books & Books!
I’m just loving this whole examination.
Love this post. (Also, who has not been to a residency where they haven't cried??)