Sewanee Review

1. The Uses of Fear

In 2017, I walked into my first boxing gym. This was up in Boston, where I had found myself—at the age of thirty-four—derailed by a panic disorder that manifested most urgently as an intense fear of flying. The flying anxiety had come as a major surprise to me and to the people in my life. I traveled frequently and had never been afraid of flying until one day I suddenly was. I was left feeling betrayed by body and imagination alike, and I also had a logistical problem: I had places to be, from speaking engagements to making emergency visits to ailing parents, and going places had unexpectedly become far more grueling than it used to be.

For a while, I gritted my teeth and "powered through," but with time the panic only escalated. Days before a scheduled flight, I would be up all night with insomnia, pacing, my mind brimming [End Page 217] with catastrophe. The trip to the airport felt like approaching a guillotine; at times, it seemed perfectly logical to hurl myself from the cab or to rush from the T-car at the wrong stop, to stage a last-minute escape. On the flights themselves, I wept myself snotty; had gasping, heaving panic attacks; and apologized profusely to my seatmates if I was cogent enough to remember social etiquette. If I was lucky and the flight was long enough, I eventually passed out from exhaustion and came to feeling like I'd been hit by a bus.

In hindsight, the sensible thing might have been to stop flying altogether until I could get myself sorted out, but I hated the idea of fear curtailing my usual activities; I worked hard to sell myself on the notion that I was too tough and too stubborn to not do something just because I was afraid to do it. How ridiculous! Also, to stop flying would have meant to admit, to myself and to others, that something was wrong. So for about three years I pressed on, through these waves of anxiety that were intense but endurable, until I finally ran straight into an immovable wall. One morning I called my husband from Logan, sobbing by the gate as my flight boarded. I can't get on that plane. At the time, I believed that to board the plane was to give myself over to certain death. I wept and shook in the terminal until my husband convinced me to come home. An hour later I was back in bed, exhausted and ashamed. My body had been trying to tell me something and I had been refusing to listen, until the message came through at such a high pitch it was impossible to ignore.

In the weeks that followed the abandoned flight, I started therapy and agreed to slow travel until boarding a plane felt less apocalyptic. Around the same time, I signed up on a whim for a class at a local boxing gym. I had envisioned a cardio-boxing situation, where we would listen to loud music and whale on a heavy bag and the room would be too dark for anyone to notice that I was inept [End Page 218] and uncoordinated. I did not realize that I had in fact signed up for a technical boxing class—which is to say a class that focused on teaching the vast landscape of the sport, with the goal of working up to sparring (and, for some students, to fight competitively).

At my first class, we were instructed to warm up by jumping rope for five minutes. No problem, I thought. Who doesn't know how to jump rope? As I fetched a rope, I searched for a clear memory of myself jumping rope as a child and started to worry when I could not retrieve one; before long, I was convinced I had never learned to jump rope at all. I couldn't get through one rotation without getting all knotted up and having to start over. The coach took one long sad look at me...