Chapter Ten: Hit Me
One of the only feelings I could identify with after getting sober was anger. Actually, rage is more accurate. I was on edge all the time, irritated with everyone and everything. I had a high-stress job in the tech industry where I spent the majority of my days talking to people who were angry about their websites or digital marketing solutions. After a day of using my customer service personality and listening to people’s complaints, I was always borderline homicidal. This rage came out at everyone, including the friends who were already tiptoeing around me, scared that any provocation would lead to a bottle — alcohol or pill.
Their fear wasn’t unfounded. But I’m one of the lucky ones in that once I was done with drinking and drugs, I was done. For me, a drink or a drug was no longer an option, no matter how awful I felt. The unfortunate result was that I was miserable and angry pretty much all the time.
I knew I needed to find a solution to this rage before it cost me my job and all of my friendships. I was always one phone call or one argument away from saying things I couldn’t justify or take back, and having that much destructive capability right under the surface terrified me.
First I turned to yoga. I’d tried it for the first time in college as an attempt to tone down my workout regimen. I figured I needed something a little more low key on the days I chose not to eat, and yoga seemed like the perfect solution. There was a part of me that truly wanted the path to wellness that yoga could offer, but the part of me that was attached to my various addictions won out.
In the aftermath of getting sober, I figured that yoga and meditation were exactly what I needed to calm the beast that was threatening to attack at any moment. I worked at one of those tech companies that had fitness classes, including yoga, scheduled throughout the day — their attempt to promote work-life balance — so I signed up for the next yoga class offered.
In that class and the few I made it to after that, I learned the hard way that yoga and meditation can be literal torture if your internal monologue is as nasty as mine. It was impossible for me to sit with my thoughts during the meditation portions of the class. My mind raced from one worst-case scenario to another. I couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting happening that afternoon, or the latest tiff I’d gotten into with my roommate, or how uncomfortable life was without my chemical buffers, or how I generally wasn’t good enough to exist, and sitting too long listening to this soundtrack of insanity filled me with palpable, existential dread.
The movement portion of the class was even worse. I looked all over the room, comparing my poses to the others. Then I would obsess about how skinny the other women in the class were, how they looked better in each pose than I did, how my arm fat hung in Warrior II. Instead of getting relief from my dizzying negative thoughts, I was trapped in them; instead of getting relief from my rage, I left class more rageful than ever.
I kept browsing work’s fitness class offerings, convinced that some kind of exercise would be the answer to my feelings, convinced there was a way to fix my feelings without actually dealing with them. I tried Pilates, Zumba, and spinning, but each of them made me feel ridiculous and inept, which just made me angrier.
Then a new class appeared on the schedule — mixed martial arts. I’d been following UFC for a few years — mostly because it was a great excuse to go out to a sports bar and get wasted with the guys — and I was immediately intrigued. A class where I could hit and kick things seemed like the perfect answer to my rage problem.
I fell madly in love with combat sports in that first class. I could give into pure rage and let it flow out of my body without hurting anyone or destroying any property. For someone who’d been big on punching people, walls, and lots of other things when I was drinking, being able to hit things without doing actual damage gave me a release that I’d only ever found in substances. When I put on the MMA gloves and slammed my fists or my leg into the mitts the coach was holding, it was like nothing else in the world existed. I tasted the freedom substances had given me.
Because I was incapable of doing anything halfway, I started taking MMA classes three times a week. When my trainer suggested that adding a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class to my repertoire would help me improve, I added two. Within months of starting, I was at a dojo five days a week, six once I’d trained enough to attend the open mat, an informal training session, on Saturday mornings.
It wasn’t long before I decided that I wanted to compete. My new, all-consuming life goal was to be across the ring from another woman whose ass I intended to kick. In pursuit of that goal, I started sparring. I’d don headgear, shin pads, and gloves pop in a mouthguard, and step onto the mats across from a training partner whose sole goal was to hit me, kick me, and throw me to the ground.
I was nervous about getting hit hard… right up until the first time it happened. The first time I really got clocked, enough to really feel it, I felt a rush I hadn’t felt in years — the same rush that came when I’d run a blade across my skin. The sharp sting that let me know I could feel, the ache that let me know I was still real, the rush of knowing that I was truly alive.
As my training partner paused to make sure I was okay, I stepped back for a moment, shook my head a bit, then gritted my teeth, steeled myself, put my fists back up to my face, and plowed forward, ready to hit and be hit; ready for the pain.
Sparring days became my favorite days. All the pent up rage and discomfort and depression and anxiety that came with being newly sober came with me to the mats and to the ring. Every time I took a hit and felt the sharp pain and the adrenaline coursing through me it was an intoxicating release from all the pain I was holding inside. I didn’t have to feel my emotional pain as long as I was feeling physical pain. I didn’t have to feel anything except the black eye, the bloody nose, the bruises on my thighs.
All the pain I was carrying inside was visible once again. And instead of chasing a drink or a drug, I started chasing the pain.
