Karate Tag, Seven Years Old?
Karate Tag, Seven Years Old?
2023-12-17
A couple of days ago my therapist was trying to pull together a metaphor for the way she was perceiving my mode of thought. She thought for a few seconds and finally said, "It's like...you're running a race, and you've decided that the easiest thing for you to do instead of running your hardest is to leave the track entirely…"

Her thought continued, but somewhere between "easiest thing" and "leave the track" I started to smile and my eyes must have lit up, causing her to detour mid-sentence to verbally acknowledge what she’d noticed just then.

I glanced at the clock. It was quarter-to, which meant we were at wrap-up. She usually tried to avoid starting anything new at that point, to avoid ending the session on something unexplored and nowhere close to unresolved. So I put together a version of the memory that I could tell in under a minute. This is very clearly not going to be that version of the story.

-

I started martial arts as a 5-year-old. I was a small student. Not the smallest, usually, but one of the smallest, consistently. The presence of kids who were older than me, or just bigger for their age, would put me at an automatic disadvantage when it came to sparring lessons. Years later I'd learn to use my size and speed in a way that benefitted me, but when you're just starting out you really don't have great control of your motor skills, and to refine them you really have to grow out of the phase where karate is just a thing you do after school and into the phase where it's the only sport you’re really interested in because you feel out of place on most teams.

The first half of each fifty-minute-or-so class was made up of rudiments and their applications, and the second half involved sparring, where students would actually fight one another. Sparring started with traditional 1-on-1 matches, and for the last ten minutes or so of class we'd shift to more game-like scenarios: two-on one matches, and four-person battle royales dubbed "Karate Tag," which I didn't realize (until recently) were meant to teach us more about strategy than proving who was the strongest. The class was divided into four teams, each one relegated to one corner of a square ring. Four players at a time, one from each team, would step into the ring and try to tag one-another “out” by making contact with an opponent’s helmet or midsection. This was hard enough 1-on-1, but four person matches meant keeping eyes in the back of your head to monitor two additional threats.

There would be modifiers to Karate Tag—for example, matches with no punching, no kicking, dominant or non-dominant limbs only. The most celebrated of the modifiers was the "squatting" match. Players would crouch in that spidery way that only kids seem to be able to, bent knees level with their shoulders. Hands had to remain touching our helmets at all times to prevent using them to keep balance. Instead of the regular “out” system, squatting matches were won by being the last player standing, with elimination occurring by topping your opponents. Combat was reduced to pushing and, in fewer instances, dodging.

What this ended up looking like was four squatting players starting in their respective corners. When the instructor—Sensei we called him, less like a formal title and more like a first-name—called hajime, or "begin", each player would hop from their corner and enact their chosen strategy.

Bigger kids would tend to be more predatory, smaller kids were more evasive. "Striking" really just became aiming yourself at where an opponent happened to be and throwing your body weight at them. There was no weight-classing at this age level, so these matches typically played out how you'd imagine they would, with the heaviest student prevailing in each match unless two were especially close in size, in which case it came down to who had better balance or managed to make the first move. Less frequently, a smaller student could bait a larger one into toppling over or hurling themselves out of bounds, but this was less the age of critical thinking and outsmarting opponents than it was a time where your instinct was to either brute-force your way through a match, or flee in terror.

When all students had competed in a four-person match, teams were dissolved and everyone was called into the ring for a complete free-for-all—fifteen to twenty-five squatting bodies hopping around the ring with no designated alliances. To signify this match was occurring, Sensei would yell, "Find a safe spot!" The class would scatter across the ring, positioning themselves in whatever way they saw as most advantageous, either whatever area would give us the most room to maneuver, or the best location to minimize exposure to opponents.

The first few times I experienced these free-for-alls I probably tried in earnest to win, before getting knocked down by someone smarter or stronger than me. I can't remember a time when I was the last player standing. Losing that consistently ultimately reinforced the idea that this game was a competition that I couldn't win. And where four-person matches provided an atmosphere of spectatorship, with most of the class observing from outside the ring, the squatting free-for-alls were a layer of chaos that provided cover for my inevitable failure. Players fell every second—the same second, even. And once you fell, you moved to the outside of the ring to watch the rest of the match play out. It was impossible to tell who’d knocked out who unless you’d done it yourself, and most combatants were too focused on winning to care about who might have already lost elsewhere in the ring.

So it came to be that, when "Find a safe spot!" was called, eventually I started positioning myself just outside of the ring. And at the instruction to begin, I'd just...sit down on my ass. The mass-slaughter in the ring was my camouflage, I was just another body outside the ring by the time the match came down to its final contestants.

This probably happened for weeks, or a few months, until Sensei caught on. He may have seen it earlier, but at one point I was brazen enough to commit my act of cowardice (or self-preservation, depending on how harshly you want to judge a 7-year-old) close enough to where he would observe on the edge of the ring. He spotted me just after starting the match, but just before I sat down. When I noticed him looking down at me, unimpressed, I looked back up at him and, on the cusp of embarrassment and humility, said, "This is my safe spot," before plopping down outside the ring.

He chided me, invoking some version of "quitters never win." At that moment any confidence in my strategy was obliterated. This was far more embarrassing than losing.

And you could say that, from that point on, what was initially my mode of self-preservation then took a backseat to proving to this man in his fifties that I was not a quitter. You could say that, from that point on, Sensei became a more motivational father-figure to me than my actual father, who was very present, but treated my failures less as an opportunity for improvement and more as an indicator of his own failure, which turned my failures into acts that I was inflicting upon him. You could say that it was one of the many moments in which I started prioritizing others' perceptions of myself over my own desires or aspirations.

But at the time, what it felt like to me was that I would probably ultimately be better off trying than not trying, at the least for the sake of appearances, and at most for the sake of maybe winning something at some point down the line. I didn't sit myself down outside the ring again.

-

I finished telling the minute-long version of this story to my therapist—definitely in under less than a minute—and she was amused by it, partly, I'm sure, because she was pleased with herself for being able to peg this pattern of behavior in me after a year, but also because of how amused I was recounting it. And I kept going, inching closer to ten-to—by when I absolutely needed to be out of her office—acknowledging that every bit of dread I’d given voice to, every expression of how futile and arbitrary I viewed the life-decisions I had made or needed to make, was encompassed in this thing I unquestionably did as 7-year-old, and was subsequently called-out on back then, and then again that day in her office.

And that, as a 36-year-old adult trying to make a change, looking back on being that 7-year-old who was half the weight and up to a foot shorter than some of his classmates, who either didn't want to get hurt physically or get hurt emotionally, what I really wish I had done as that 7-year-old, was to have attacked the task of knocking over all the bigger kids tenaciously, disregarding odds governed mainly by the laws of physics, disregarding the inevitability of loss, disregarding the difficulty of bringing yourself to try, not because I think it would have pleased Sensei or my dad, or because I think it would have made me a better person in the long-run, but because it would have been so entertaining, so endearing, so admirable, to observe a case so hopeless still giving its all and being obliterated in the process, rather than forever blending in with the background on the outside of the ring.

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