In retrospect, they got me with The Karate Kid. I was 7 years old when that movie—about a not-particularly-athletic teen who studies martial arts, finds confidence, and then publicly kicks a better-looking teen in the face—hit theaters and solidified my growing sense that, if I was to live happily as the weird and slender person I was turning out to be, I should learn to fight. I became part of the 1980s tae kwon do boom and practiced a series of movements that could arguably debilitate another person, especially if they held still. I went on to formally train in kickboxing, freestyle wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, picking up a general understanding of boxing and judo along the way.

Let me be clear: Although I could feint an uppercut and transition to a double-leg takedown pretty reliably, at no point was I good at any of it. Mostly, my experience of fighting trained opponents has been an experience of losing. The question of why someone not especially talented at combat sports would pay the costs of participating in them might be answered by armchair psychology; I am willing to consider that I am a masochist or reactively fixated on violence. What I believe, though, is that I love fighting not in spite of my athletic limitations but because of them. Fighting is hard. The defining aspect of combat sports is discovering that you are worse at fighting than you had assumed and that getting better will be a grueling process that will chew you up, physically and mentally, unless you spend a life-altering amount of time on it. Therein lies the appeal.

If you have not trained to fight in ways that involve live sparring against resisting opponents, you should know that it is the kind of activity you can rearrange everything else around.