Boxing Makes Me Uncomfortable, and That’s Okay

How I’m learning to be bad at something, and to sit with that discomfort

Siham Lee (left) at the boxing gym

I got punched in the nose the other day.

Nothing alarming. There was no blood, and it wasn’t even that painful—it was more that I’d never really gotten punched anywhere, at least not for real. Silly dares as a kid to see how much it hurt getting punched in the stomach were the extent of my experience in the matter—until I decided to take up boxing.

I’m still not entirely sure how this decision came to be, if I’m being honest. The why might be irrelevant, except that whenever I tell people I’m boxing, that’s the first thing they want to know. Maybe because I’m a woman, and I’m small, and except for my recent Buffy, the Vampire Slayer obsession, I’d never exhibited an interest in physical fighting. Did I want something new? Was this my post- breakup version of “I got bangs?” Did I feel the need to prove anything to someone, or to myself? Or was I just…bored?

Regardless of the reason, on a pretty uneventful Tuesday evening, I showed up at a trial class for women’s boxing. Nervous, awkward, feeling out of place amongst women who clearly knew what they were doing. But I was committed to liking it—I very, very badly wanted to. So I bought hand wraps, gloves, and a mouth guard, and I signed up.

Perhaps rather naively, one of the things that stood out to me during those first couple of classes was how much technique there is before you even attempt to punch something (or someone). We spent most of the hour burning our legs (squats, lunges, and some painful variations of both), learning how to move swiftly, aligning the body in a way that felt odd, foreign. It all moves as one: arms, elbows, core, legs, all together to hit, to block, to duck. I enjoyed the technicality, probably because it’s something my body is good at. It was a confidence boost, and in my sometimes overconfident brain, I could hear a voice saying, “Look at you, being so naturally good at this!”

And then, at the very end of my third class, my brain high on self-praise, we were told to spar.

I knew sparring was just a fake fight, but I felt immediate panic. No more confidence, just plain fear. I didn’t want to hit anyone, nor did I want to get hit back. A ridiculous notion, really, when I had willingly joined a sport in which the point is to knock someone out. What was I thinking?!

Within those first two minutes, the duration of a sparring round, it became clear to me (and to anyone looking) that I was undeniably bad at boxing. A true human punching bag, no technique whatsoever.

Be it stubbornness, hope, or simple stupidity, I kept showing up. Like a fish out of water, I wondered every class if maybe this just wasn’t the right sport for me. I dreaded a surprise sparring at the end of the day. I felt silly throwing out punches with my spaghetti arms, unable to move my head out of the way, my gloves only good at protecting me from the jabs and crosses that kept landing on me. My coach, blessed be her endless patience, shouting from the sides for me to move.

Sparring didn’t feel natural, didn’t feel fun—my brain easily forgetting everything it had learned the previous hour. No surprise to anyone that I got hit on the nose, to be fair. But I didn’t want to quit. There wasn’t any blood, after all. Yet.

We were stretching at the end of one of those earlier classes when my coach said something that stuck to my brain better than any technique or sparring instruction. On the floor, legs wide open, leaning forward to stretch the muscle in my inner thigh, she said ,“Ahora nos quedamos ahi, en la molestia.”.”We stay in the discomfort. My brain, very much trained to find analogies, metaphors, and meaning everywhere, clung to this phrase. We stay in the discomfort. She just meant stay where it hurts, where the muscles are stretching the way they should. No real hidden meaning in her words, no pep talk.

We stay in the discomfort. I repeated this to myself over and over again, at home, out and about, in bed, working, reading, walking the dog. Whenever I showed up at the boxing gym, hand wraps and gloves and mouth guard in my bag. Ready to suck, but also ready to learn, and hopefully suck a little bit less every day. Ready to stay in the discomfort, for as long as needed. I’d been hoping for some kind of cinematic montage: Disney’s Mulan suddenly finding her inner and outer strength in the span of a three-minute song. All I was given instead, all I could cling to, was patience in the face of deficiency.

Because I’m not doing this with any other intention than to just do it. I don’t want to compete, I don’t want to be the best. I want to be healthy and fit again, yes, and I wouldn’t mind getting better (which I am, for the record!), just enough to have a decent sparring round. But that’s about it.

There’s something freeing about taking up something without many expectations, even if this can make slow progress more challenging. I’ve found myself less and less worried about the discomfort, though, less bothered with not being as good as I’d want to be. I’m okay with not being the best, with never being the best at this. Not because I don’t care—would I be getting punched if I didn’t?—but simply because I don’t have to be.

I just need to be good enough not to get punched in the nose again, and even that might be unavoidable. But I’ll survive. Worst case scenario, broken nose and surgery it is.

Siham Lee is a Chilean writer. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing and spends most of her time writing short stories, and personal essays in Unfortunately…No. In her free time she enjoys curating her TBR list, rewatching the same old romcoms and editing the first draft of her first novel, all at the same time.