On my list of things to freak out about, is being single in the big, bad city. I'm relatively competent but still. Lucky for me, my boss is a black belt in karate and has taken many a self defense class so I went over to her house after work so she could show me the basics.
Which is good for me as all my self defense training has been what I've gleaned from Miss Congeniality and the episode of Designing Women where Mary Jo gets mugged.
We went through the initial talking part: walk with an air of confidence, don't look at a map on the subway or the street, walk to your car with your keys in your hand, if one side of the street is lit and the other is dark, walk on the lit side, etc. Things I mostly already knew and practiced but always good to go over.
Then we got to yell. Fun for this Italian! The idea that your voice is one of your most powerful tools, most of the time yelling "NO" or "Don't touch me" causes people to back off but man is it hard to put into practice. With the societal conditioning of not causing a scene or wanting to give people the benefit of the doubt and general deer in headlights syndrome, I, and I think a lot of people, tend to freeze up and feel like the vocal chords lock and (in my nightmares) I try to scream but all that comes out is a faint wisp of sound like Raj when Penny walks in the room.
But, in the comfort of T's basement, it was more like I was yelling at the dog and I bellowed away.
She showed me a couple of release moves if someone grabs my arm - twist your hand up and down on their wrist, which was great. She's strong and was trying to hold onto me and I was able to break her hold each time. Then my rom com leanings came in handy because as it turns out, Miss Congeniality is actually quite good at imparting the basic self defense tactics. I do remember how to sing. I got a second hand jab to add to my heel of wrist into nose move - purse fingers together and go for the eye/orbital bone area.
Then I actually got a surprised nod of approval when I threw an elbow. Yay me!
Where she was great is that she always had an answer - I feel like sometimes people scoff or couch things (ie, well, what if two people grab me and knock me down, off the cuff answer might be well, then you're just stuck but she was always like nope, this is what you do, these are your options). It's a scary thing to think about - I imagine most people have been in situations where they felt uncomfortable and I hate that my natural instinct is to freeze. It's like my body and brain shut down while trying to parse out the unknown, potentially dangerous variable and I want to get it to the point where my reaction is almost muscle memory and involuntary then having to snap my brain into action and remember ok, drop your knees, back with the elbow. And it does make me shudder to think that those few seconds of frozen silence could severely limit my options - sitting in my office now, I know to ignore them when they say I'll kill you if you scream but if the situation was actually happening? Would I be so frozen that I let myself get dragged off away from people/help?
Hopefully I'll never need any of this for more than a hey, look what I can do party trick, but knowledge is power.
Time to go see if I can convince the office manager to practice wrist holds.
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