What boxing taught me about fear, shame, and self-worth

Redefining strength: I went to war with myself, and found peace

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It's the 15th of December, 2013, and I'm warming up to box for the national title. All around me, fighters sit with towels draped over their anxious faces, each one waiting for their moment. Alone.

One by one, the boxers’ names are called and they disappear into the arena. The victors come back beaming and taking selfies with their coaches and their medals. The losers return bruised, dejected or in tears.

Normally, by now, I’d be beside myself. I would be questioning everything: my skills, my cardio, my arrogance at even thinking I could do this. Even though I would want to picture myself grinning for photos with the other winners, instead I’d be cycling back on what I’d been told about my opponent. Someone had said she was a big hitter. The words ‘that girl can bang!’ would be echoing around my mind as I’d picture myself laid out on the canvas overcome, overwhelmed ... over.

SLIDE: Skipping

But not this time. This time my feet dance expectantly to the song of the skipping rope as it whistles past my ears. I am absorbed in the task.

After eight years of competition, something profound has changed. I completely inhabit my body as I make my way out to fight. One purposeful step after another. And as I enter the arena I feel ... at peace. It’s as if the crowd has been hushed by a crisp layer of freshly fallen snow. The stillness in my mind is interrupted solely by a curious little voice that says: ‘I’ve got this.’ Is this the sound of self-belief ? It’s not something I’m used to hearing at this stage. But there it is. Clear and unerring. For the very first time, I know that if I fight well, I'll deserve the win.

The bout is no walkover; it turns out the girl can ‘bang’ and I take some good shots. But my focus is unshakable, and as we begin exchanging punches, my belief only grows stronger. For two minutes at a time, I’m living in a soft, slow-motion version of reality. I feel present and alive. Focused without focusing. My hands do the work for me, and my feet know where to go without a thought. I’m relaxed. I’m enjoying myself. I’m in flow.

The real difference between this fight and any other, though, comes at the end. As we stand, side by side, waiting for the judges’ verdict, I suspect we both know that I will get the decision. But as my hand is raised, I feel a surge of alien emotion. I’m not sure if it is happiness, or pride, or just a good old-fashioned sense of achievement. But it is new.

With every win before this, when my hand had been raised, I had hung my head and averted my eyes. I have never felt that I deserved victory. I've always been ready to write off any achievement as a fluke or chance. Just another lucky day when I got away with it. Looking back, I can tell you that what I had felt upon winning – up until now – had been shame.

This time I own the triumph.

What's the meaning of strength?

I tell this story because it marked the moment I knew I had changed. Prior to this, I'd struggled through decades of anxiety, shame and self-doubt that eventually left me in a state of chronic mental and physical illness. Although I won that fight, I never got my strength or fitness back fully, but psychologically I came out of the whole experience much, much stronger than I had been before.

That strength didn’t come about in the way that people tend to assume, though. It wasn’t only that I was empowered by the ability to fend for myself or fortified by the stress of the contests. I didn’t end up becoming famous or going to the Olympics. Even if I had done those things, they would not have been the point of sharing my story. Competitive fighting put me on a journey of self-discovery by painfully exposing my vulnerabilities and making me face them.

So, that moment when I first felt joyous in victory was about far more than just winning a boxing title. It symbolised a departure from my old, self-defeating mindset – something I hadn’t even known I was doing until I was forced to address it.

And what I had to do to get there, I know now, was retrieve something precious from the shadows of my mind. What that was may come as a surprise, though – my lost treasure was fear.

Over a life of being a tomboy child and renegade teen with a competitive father who praised my physical prowess, I learned to reject and repress the emotion of fear, because I thought that to show this "weakness" would be to expose myself as unworthy. Ultimately, I pushed fear so deeply into the darkest realms of my unconscious that it turned into a monster.

Of course, I didn't know this while it was happening because fear was so far off my radar. Instead, I'd have panic attacks that I couldn't understand were panic attacks. I overreacted when people pointed out my nerves. And with all that denied emotion bottlenecked, I became ill – insomnia, fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, allergy flare-ups, the list goes on. My refusal to admit or accept my fear meant that my fear had started to consume me, until it all got too much and I shut down completely.

Therapy brought me back from the brink. Slowly, I learned to accept fear, along with other emotions and the shameful self-judgements I made. I rediscovered my values, creativity and sense of purpose, which was not to be a fighter, by the way. That stage of my life was over the moment I felt that alien sense of worth. I had learned the lesson. The fight was over.

Now, I look back on boxing as if it were a long course of rather brutal therapy. I believe I gravitated towards it because I needed to learn what it would force me to face: vulnerability, emotion and outdated stories about what it means to be strong.

What are you chasing?

I'm telling you all this in the hope that it might help you to see your challenges in a new light. Obviously, not everyone finds themselves literally fighting for a feeling of self-worth. But I think we all know what it's like to battle our inner demons, and the flaw in this strategy is that the harder we fight our fears, the larger they loom, and the more disconnected and fractured we will feel.

And there's another paradox at play, too: I used to think that I needed to be a success before I'd be worthy of connection. But it turns out I had that the wrong way round. Now I know that unless we allow ourselves to feel connected – to feel seen as who we are, vulnerabilities and all – then we'll stand little chance of experiencing a true feeling of success.

So, let me leave you with this one simple question:

What are you really chasing?

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We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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