Make war not love

How I learned to fight

I’m not someone who likes conflict. Or am I?

I didn’t think so, until I found fencing. Picking up a sword, suddenly I had a license to give every unpalatable aspect of my personality free reign: anger, contempt, jealousy, sadism, vindictiveness. These were the bad parts of me. Or so I thought.

Growing up, I learned the fighting was pointless and likely to end in mutually assured destruction. Both the fights I witnessed (long story) and the fights I tentatively joined. Apart from a short-lived career as an aspiring school bully when I learned, after a game of backyard catch gone wrong with my dad, the brief glorious power of threatening to kick an unsuspecting boy in the nuts, I was mainly a pacifist. And when I say pacifist, I mean coward. If there was a fight to be head, I usually just slunk away.

And so began my multi-decade career as a passives aggressive. I prided myself on being “nice”. An easy-going friend, a laid-back colleague and a graceful dumper. The human equivalent of the “no worries if not!!” meme. Fighting was for arseholes, people who didn’t know when to admit defeat and move on. I watched baffled as writers’ rooms fought over two near-identical versions of the same punchline and moved seats when someone kicked off on the bus. Fighting was time-consuming, embarrassing and sometimes dangerous. A hobby for people with too much spare energy. Better to duck your head and let the other side “win”.

The problem with this, of course, is that fights are easier to avoid than anger. And every fight avoided tends to resurface as inner turmoil or the low-level warfare of passive aggression. “This is the nicest way anyone’s ever been dumped!” said one ex-boyfriend, unaware the icy calm of my surface politeness was in direct proportion to the volcanic depths of my secret fuming. Choosing not to engage in open conflict didn't actually make the conflict disappear. It just drove it underground, to pop up inconveniently as self-sabotage, awkward silences and sarcasm. Avoiding fights didn’t make you nice, I discovered. It made you peevish, resentful and scared.

My ex-partner and I never fought. Then, suddenly, we broke up. Around the same time, I took up fencing, which I once upon a time playfully referred to as the art of stabbing posh men in the nuts (guess I didn’t entirely get over my bully phase). There is no getting around it: a fencing bout is a fight. There are two of you, holding swords, called on to use every ounce of strength, courage, cunning and luck to hit each other first. One of you will win and one of you will lose, and the electronic scoring system ensures no pride-saving rationalisations are possible after the fact. Either your light goes on, or it doesn’t. Your only option - if you want to win - is to fight.

And so I was finally liberated to be a bastard. And I discovered not only was I quite good at it, but it was rather fun! All the things I thought I had no interest in - hurting other people, making them look stupid, embarrassing them - I realised were actually brilliant and I was a massive fucking liar. To add insult to injury, ideally to the other party, I was not bad at it. Not good-good, the only time I’ve ever fought an Olympic fencer it was an outer-body experience akin to watching a piñata get obliterated by a tank, but I clearly had a natural feel for the meticulous and patient sadism that fencing demands. This is a rather embarrassing discovery if you think of yourself as “nice” so I decided to only let it out when I was wearing a mask (a bit like comedy writing). I’d caper around in disguise like Zorro, disappearing into the night as soon as anyone threatened to tear off my disguise.

This was fun, at first. But the more I fenced, the more my inner fighter came in conflict with my inner coward. While outwardly I was happily prodding away at everyone from 15-year-old champions to retired 80-year-olds, inside I was having a much more agonising fight of my own. No matter how much I wanted to win, inside there was a little voice telling me there was something not nice about it. “You want to kill me!” shouted my fencing coach, noticing my growing habit of bottling just as I was about to land the hit. The trouble was I wasn’t sure if I was allowed. 

Growing up, particularly as a woman growing up, you receive a lot of mixed messages about fighting. Fights are uncouth, something to be broken up by the grown-ups, and if you’re unlucky enough to come across a child who hasn’t read the memo, you’re invited to be the bigger person and turn the other cheek. Once I got told off at an after-school club because I’d shot back at a boy who’d called my mate a slag. My comeback was clever. His initial insult, I am going to say 100 per cent objectively and with hindsight, was lame and shit. So the teacher disciplined me for making him feel bad. It was an early introduction to the double bind of being a woman in a fight. If you do not defend yourself, you’re weak and get what you deserve. If you defend yourself you’re aggressive and same. Do not make a man look silly, do not make a man look weak, do not make a man look stupid, do not make a man feel small. Do not lose but above all, above everything else, do not win.

All of this got dragged onto the piste with me, holding me back whenever I tried to get that hit. I expected shame about losing to be a major psychological block to fencing, but not guilt about winning. But again and again the most formidable thing I encountered on the piste wasn’t the superior speed, strength and strategy of my opponents (although I encountered plenty of that, the bastards) but my own suspicion that I wasn’t really allowed to be there. That I shouldn’t really be fighting. That winning was like the last cake on the plate, and it was only polite to offer it to the other party. That it was nicer to hang back, not to exploit that gap you’d spotted in their defence, to lose.

This would ideally be the bit where I described the single heart-stopping moment that transformed me from a blithering sap into a tear-drinking killing machine. But in truth there wasn’t one. This thing I’m writing should really be called “How I am learning to fight,” present tense, but there is enough of a fencer in me that I wanted to give it a fighting chance of being read. People, including me, prefer tales of phoenix-like rising-from-the-ashes glory, instead of a more mundane story of someone having the same fight over and over again, losing by a narrower margin every time. In some sense, I took up fencing because I am drawn to these kinds of fantasies of triumph too. The history of fencing is full of heroic figures who’ve fought for what they wanted in the face of obstacles, people like Peter Westbrook or Helene Mayer, and I felt a constant urge to identify with them instead of the slightly pathetic figure I sometimes caught sight of in the mirror beside me. I wanted to fight my way out from being the underdog, like the token woman in an action film, not hang back riddled with self-doubt, like the boring woman watching her. With its demand that you conceal your vulnerabilities to impress your opponent, fighting can be a way of hiding too.

Despite this, part of me still wished I could win without hurting anyone. But my first visit to a fencing tournament showed me the futility of this hope. A fencing bout is a story told without dialogue, and it is easy to see when someone’s feelings, or ribs, or self-image, have been wounded. The victor leaves the piste, head high, thanking their opponent with steady eye contact and a firm handshake. The loser slinks off with slumped shoulders, a shifty gaze and a grin like they’ve just downed a goblet full of piss. Losing sucks and no matter what people say with their lying mouths the reality is right there written all over their bodies. From this, I learned something: sometimes, the only way to make your opponent happy is to lose. In fencing, in order to win anything at all, you have to get comfortable with sticking up for yourself, even when other people hate it. You have to make peace with not being nice.

Over time, my ability to stick up for myself on the piste, even in the face of shouting, frustration and once even crying, leaked out into the rest of my life. I told a rude guy in the street to fuck off. I got involved in my first non-violent road-rage incident (responding to, not instigating). I negotiated a massive discount on my car insurance using fencing tactics (it’s all about the pauses) and told more than my usual number of people when they pissed me off. Far from being scary or horrible, I discovered, fighting could actually be constructive. Not being able to fight wasn’t nice, it was surrender, depriving yourself of the means of getting what you want and others of the truth about who you are and what you can do.

Of course, not everything in life is a fight. Fighting is a metaphor you can ride too hard, turning everything from a romantic encounter to negotiating a pay rise into The Art of War. But sometimes life does send fights our way, and learning to recognise and engage in them, with dignity and conviction, is as essential a part of being human as kissing and making up, which would be meaningless without it. Fighting is a way of connecting, of clarifying what you want and how much, and sometimes of getting it.

I’m still not someone who likes conflict. But I’m not scared of it anymore.

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