Defend Yourself

I’ve been studying martial arts on and off again since I graduated college. People always seem surprised that I fight; me seemingly so poised and ladylike, perhaps due to my figure skater and dancing background. But I love the fight. Compact, Brutal. Explosive…. The concentration, being on the edge, where body and mind have to be connected, tiny muscle fibers firing, the feedback when you connect, when you get hit. It is a reminder that I am alive in this world where everyone has their ‘personal space’ and conducts most of their daily lives through a digital medium. I have to confess to liking my bruises.

I write this post today because I posted this picture:

It was right after I had finished a training session. The comments echoed a sentiment I’ve heard for a while now: ‘You’re scary’. It sparked a realization: It is the viciousness, the ferociousness that always seem to affect people – like as a woman, it is alien to see such a thing unless it is the Brazilian ‘cyborg’ in the MMA ring or a movie starlet’s alter ego (and stunt double) on the big screen (because once they hit the red carpet, they are all dresses, makeup and smiles). Why is being a ferocious woman so… rare?

I love how my friend, astronomer Phil Plait mock commented on my picture:

As an actress, my strength is my emotions. I may not be Cate Blanchett in my chameleon like abilities or technique, but if you want me to feel something, I will fucking feel it. From overwhelming inspiration and awe, to heart melting love, to the depths of torment, grief and pain. It all lives within me, primed for action. But there also exists the rage, the anger, even the hatred — where through my inner eye I could see myself tear someone to shreds, willing to defend myself… in the most brutal way necessary. Maybe that is what people see and it scares them.

So it’s fitting that when people see me train, inevitably they ask me the  same question: If I got in a real fight, could I defend myself. And I tell them, usually with a self effacing shrug, that I could (but make sure they know I don’t condone fighting). And the crazy thing is that their eyes light up, thinking it’s so cool. But really… in thinking about it today… it’s so innately human. Fighting, defending ourselves, speaks to our primal nature, lodged deep within the parts of brain that have traveled through centuries of evolution, where pattern recognition was about knowing that the bird scattering and the movement of tall grass meant that a lion was about to pounce, not that Apple stock was about to fall.

Perhaps this is why a character like Wonder Woman speaks to me. At the root of it she is an Amazon. They were primal and vicious warriors (if the ancient texts are true) with nothing shiny or princess-like about them. There is something in my deep genetic code that likes that. So how ironic that I have just realized that it was the recognition of my primal warrior side which led me to wanting to play one, which compelled me to start training, where I figured out that I would have a better chance of playing said character if I wrote it, so of course it had to be sci-fi, which compelled me to study the underlying science, which finally threw me down the rabbit hole from which I emerged a student and advocate of Science and STEM literacy.  Boom! From Amazon warrior to citizen scientist. William Marston would be proud.

Because of this journey to the sciences – I am able to ‘defend myself’ in a far more complete sense of the term. Critical thinking has become my weapon of choice.

I spent a wonderful afternoon with Cara Santa Maria recording her podcast Talk Nerdy. (This lady is super smart, savvy and fun, and has had a gazillion brilliant and engaging people on her podcast so definitely check it out.) We covered so many great topics, from being a sci-fi geek, to skating, to STEM literacy and to Scirens.  What came up again and again was the importance of critical thinking in our population. We are inundated — our iPhones seemingly fused to our optical nerve — with information, opinions, sound bites, politics, sponsored tweets, bad science, likes, favorites, filters. We are proverbial teenagers when it comes to mainlining our shiny connected tech — all this new stimuli causing rapid firings of dopamine, hormones.  Both Cara and I agree how fundamentally important encouraging critical thinking is — and the rational evidence based approach that underlies it — as a way to navigate these data heavy, social media infused times. How can we thrive if we simply respond ‘primally’ to everything, letting our emotions get the better of us, influenced by trends and imaginary patterns? Rational, critical thinking is the only way that we can survive the onslaught 4.69 billion pages of data.

It can’t, however, just be about critical thinking. It is my hope that our population can become equipped with a basic scientific and technical knowledge that will allow us to navigate a future fraught with climate change, exponentially advancing tech, genetic ethics, cyber security, the internet of things — (subscribe to New Scientist and read MIT Review’s Twelve Tomorrows for brilliant insight into our imminent future). But if we don’t understand the basic pillars upon how scientific discoveries are even made, we are in big trouble.

And I’m gonna have to go all Amazon on the Terminators. And I’d really rather just do that on screen.

I guess I wrote this post as a public journal entry, realizing how my deeply primal ‘scary’ side ultimately led me to my most critically aware one. And can I say enlightened? Where I marvel at the beauty of nature and all her laws, laws that have been uncovered not through magic or prophecy, but through an observation, that led to a hypothesis, that led to an experiment and research that been tested and tested again. I will defend that to the end.

Thanks for reading –

Fight the good fight!