Theme Park at its Darkest

The Driving Force of a Crucially Diminished Intellect

Psychological injury is different to physical injury. It’s something that settles over a period of time, as whatever has occurred continues to resonate inside you. Caroming off your thoughts and feelings; creating persistent resonances that shape the thoughts and feelings that follow.

It’s simple for a reader to understand, and should be, if I’ve explained myself properly. J had been crucially emasculated in his own home through the betrayal of his friend with the mother of his children. Then, I’d made him look like an idiot where his relationship was concerned with his new girlfriend, V.

That subversion must have been very painful for him. His physical prowess, superior to mine as a teenager, as well as one of the primal evidences of that, his ability to attract a partner, had once again been proven inferior. Grabbing me by the genitals was a symbolic act of emasculation, intended to reassert the dynamic we had lived under in high school.

This is where the tale becomes universal.

Fighting

Fighting, for me, was the fairy tale. It gave me almost everything I have. I didn’t have a terrible time at high school, and I made a lot of really good friends, but I was bullied and it left a mark. In fact, being bullied, and that feeling of weakness and powerlessness, were at the core of my sense of self.

Fundamentally, and I’ve talked about this at some length before, the essential theme of bullying is shame. You’re told something about yourself; that you’re a failure, or crucially inferior, and the physical impact is used to nail it to your soul. In your mind, it becomes a fact.

My father had ridiculed me ruthlessly over the course of my life, and that was something confirmed at school – particularly boarding school. In boarding school, it was something I couldn’t escape from. And from experiencing the facts of my worthlessness and inferiority constantly asserted and reasserted, I believed it more than anybody.

When I first walked into a boxing gym, it wasn’t with the intention of proving anybody wrong. It was with the intention of finding out whether or not what they had said was true. Was my physical weakness emblematic of my essential worthlessness?

That sense of being shameful, without worth, was far more painful than bruises, broken bones or concussions. And a broken bone is a small price to pay for redemption.

I stuck with it for two reasons, in the beginning. The first is that intense exercise, to the point of collapse, gave me catharsis from day to day. I settled down emotionally and life wasn’t painful every second I was conscious.

The second reason is that I made some wonderful friends. The people I sparred with, the people that were hitting me were people who were gracious enough to act as proxies for my shadow. That is the mutual pact of sparring and fighting.

The contact is no longer about harm and disgrace. Those people are lifting you higher. They show you your courage and your skill. Whenever I see old opponents and sparring partners now, there’s a bond between us that I can only describe as love.

There’s a crucial quotation that I always think of when it comes to fighting. It comes from a book on screenwriting by Robert McKee, called Story. McKee says there is a distinction between deep character and superficial character.

Superficial character is the clothes you wear, the colour of your hair, the colour of your eyes, the car you drive, the foods you like, the foods you don’t. Deep character, on the other hand, is a mystery. Deep character is something that is revealed moment to moment under pressure when you make the choices you make to take the actions you take.

One of the essential themes of boxing is fear. When you get into the ring, you climb into the crucible of your fear and assert your right to choose who you want to be.

When I fought, I won and won and won. It changed my life in ways that were reflected back to me by the people around me, not least of all in terms of how certain people became more reticent to fuck with me from day to day.

And now, here was J appearing in the supermarket, trying to drag me back to sixteen years old, literally by the balls. However, J had spent his life drifting from mistake to mistake. Every fight I’d had was a crystallisation, a certainty. A fact.    

This entry was posted on March 22, 2024 at 9:49 am and is filed under The Duel with tags Boxing, bullying, emasculation, Fighting, Robert McKee, school, Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.