I grip my fist tight in the palm of my hand, plant my feet shoulder width-apart and whip my elbow around, making firm contact with the shield. I repeat this three times with each elbow before I move on to the next shield, gripping it along the top with both hands and swiftly crushing my knee into its center. I finish with a series of swift kicks, driving the edge of my sneakers into the center with as much force as I can muster.
It’s barely ten in the morning and I rolled out of bed only 20 minutes before, but my energy levels are picking up. We’ve finished our warm-ups with the shields, and are gathering together on the blue mats in the center of Brodie gym. It’s time for self-defense.
I’ll admit that for a while, I was a bit overconfident in my ability to handle myself. I’m small in stature—5-foot-nothing—but I’ve always believed I’m much stronger than I may appear to others. I trust my ability to handle situations with calm composure, and I’m as stubborn as they come: I know I would have no trouble giving someone a piece of my mind.
And too many years of watching football from the sidelines has only built-up my desires to hit someone once in a while.
But after months of travel abroad and too many instances of cat-calling and being followed by strange men, I realized that I was starting to feel anxious. Anxious to do simple things like walk down the street without someone, anxious to be in a group of girls without a male accompanying us.
The news only promotes those feelings of fear and anxiety. Each day the headlines tell the same sad stories from college campuses and city streets across the country: “Girl gets abducted/kidnapped/attacked/raped”.
So this semester, I signed up for a self-defense class through the Health, Wellness and Physical Education department. I’ll admit that much of my excitement leading up to the class was due to the idea of getting to hit people. Nothing provides stress-relief during thesis crunch-time like a few good punches to the gut—or a good “grab and snatch” as my professor likes to refer to it, though I’ll leave the details of that one up to your imagination.
But my primary goal was to prove to myself my own strength again. I’m small but tough, and wanted to be able to build up my confidence levels so I could walk with a little less anxiety.
It’s been eight weeks of shields, mats, kicks, chokeholds and shrimp rolls. But here’s the reality of it: regardless of how many miles I run or burpees I do in HIIT classes at the gym, this 5-foot-nothin’ girl isn’t taking down any moderately sized males anytime soon. The fact of the matter is that his physical strength—particularly upper-body strength—will probably always have the upper hand on mine.
What self defense has taught me—more than anything—is that that’s quite alright. Our strengths are elsewhere, and we just need to learn how to find them.
So each week, after warming up with the shields, we learn to find our physical strength—in females, that’s often in our hips. We learn to look for weak points: the ways to make fingers break their grip, to pull the feet out from underneath someone.
And we also look for our mental strengths. We learn to keep calm under pressure, and to react quickly. To keep cool and remember where our strengths are, even when we feel weak, powerless and unable. We learn be confident in ourselves, regardless of physical size, strength or power.
I recommend to every female—and male, too—to take a self-defense class. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to start off your morning knocking people to the ground and pulling out of chokeholds. But it’ll also change your mindset on how you carry yourself. And that’s enough to walk down the streets a little easier.
Julia Janco is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Thursday.
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