“Why Am I Like This?”: Breaking the “Crazy Eight” Pattern

I was driving north on La Brea Boulevard, so frustrated that tears rolled down my cheeks. I’d just driven right past my martial arts school, unable to stop and enter to retrieve a jacket I’d left. Why? Fear that someone might ask me to spar.

And what had happened the last time I’d been there? I’d had a workout, seething with tension that today might be a sparing day. Then, when Steve (Muhammad) Sanders announced we were indeed going to fight, I sat at the side of the room waiting for him to call me up, feeling all the time as if I was going to vomit. When my time came, after a horrible endless wait, I performed fine, actually won, but as soon as the class was over I ran out as fast as I could…leaving my denim jacket behind.

And I couldn’t go back and get it. Just couldn’t. I was back in an emotional hole I’d come to know well.

It all started when I was bullied in grade school. In elementary school, a kid followed me home, punching me in the stomach all the way. When I tried to cover up, he told me to stop, or he’d hit me in the face. In Jr. High I was chased into the middle of Washington Boulevard by a gang, bizarrely, the only place of safety — they wouldn’t chase me out there.

Standing in the middle of the street, close to death as cars zipped past on both sides, oddly, for the first time in my life…I wasn’t afraid. I’d changed something. I just couldn’t figure what.