Anxiety

I'm getting old. I realize that's totally relative, but I can feel it. I can see it. Maybe its my recent injury that has made me feel it more poignantly. While knee sparring with Coke my knee dislocated, or twisted, something happened to sprain the tendons. I didn't jump right back up with youthful enthusiasm, instead my ass sat on the ground for a few minutes. I've spent the last couple days laying in my bed icing my knee taking ibuprofen keeping my patella elevated.

Worry seeps in about my body breaking down before I'm ready for it. I think that's been one of my concerns since my last bout, when I broke my face, I'm not afraid of being broken again; we age and thus we break. My anxiety is about breaking down too soon.



I remember a long time ago hearing older people talk about getting cuts. Come to think of it my grandma would become really vexed when she got cut. I used to think "What's the big deal, a day or two and its gone Grandma." Of course that day was more of a week, or two. Even seven years ago my body was different, I could gnash at myself with alcohol, dash my brains against the wall, engage in the nihilistic destruction of youth, now though my body seems more fragile, more likely to break. My hangovers are longer, my headaches more, and the self destruction seems more self sabotaging.

I don't really know what to do with this anxiety mainly because the worst of the worry is that it is real. What if I don't get to fight again? I knew from the start that I wouldn't be the world's best fighter, nor have the best record, nor be the strongest or bravest, maybe I defeated myself from the start by not having an invicible "winner's mind" by being all too human. I know, like all fighters know, that they have an expiration date. It can come at any time. Realizing that is hard. Any professional sports player must have to deal with that when they get injured. Sometimes there is no last hurrah, no final game, no walking out off the field on one's terms.

It really maddens me, this worry, no matter how real it can be. One of the reasons I got into fighting was because it was a way for me to control my fate. We live in a world we were are tracked. Increasingly every choice we make is a choice that buttresses the world of capital. I don't think that my choices are that important, but I'd like to believe that they are. It doesn't matter how much I study or the personal choices I make more likely than not I'll end up working class or worse with the same problems as my peers or worse. Its not just in what I've read, its in watching my peers.

So what do I do? Sneer at the worrying veneer that attempts to don my countenance? Try to rid myself of worry? No longer engage in dangerous activity and so try to prolong myself a little longer? They just don't seem like choices, at least not the kind I like to make.