Boxing Over Your Weight Class
Erasing your impossibles takes risking
When Jimmy Kimmel was asked about the biggest risk he ever took, he said,
“I haven’t really had to take any risks because I’ve been fired from each job. It’s worked out, but there’s no risks whatsoever.”
After I got back off the floor from breaking my funny bone, I recalled that Danny Devito was once working as a cosmetologist early in his career. The only reason he ended up an actor was that he moved to the stage to learn more about cosmetology.
DeVito, all of 4'10," is a giant. Has been now for a long time. My favorite story about him:
His big break came in 1978 when he auditioned for a role on an ABC sitcom pilot called Taxi (1978), which centered around taxi cab drivers at a New York City garage. Danny auditioned for the role of dispatcher Louie DePalma. At the audition, the producers told Danny that he needed to show more attitude in order to get the part. He then slammed down the script and yelled, “Who wrote this sh**?” The producers, realizing he was perfect for the part, brought him on board. The show was a huge success, running from 1978 to 1983.
What did he have to lose? Cary Grant he wasn’t. Yet DeVito was willing to get in the ring and take on huge odds. He won enough- more than enough.
Speaking of cosmetology….
America’s first well-documented self-made female millionaire was Madam C.J. Walker. A victim of child abuse, the first child in her family to be born in 1867 into freedom, she had barely three months of formal education. Yet step-by-step she managed to work her way into the cosmetics and hair care business at a time when white women were ornamental chattel, and Black women were barely even acknowledged- perhaps as beasts of burden, but certainly not as humans. It would be fair to say that Sarah Walker spent much of her early life boxing above her weight class, and later took it to a whole other level.
It’s easier to track down stories about celebrities and famous folk who took huge chances and ended up making it big in one way or another. However, for my part, it’s even more interesting to look at those folks who hang out at the less-than-stellar level of the non-celeb variety, who have done something remarkable. Those folks are everywhere. Because they’re more accessible to you and me, their accomplishments speak far more directly to what is possible for us.
Most of us don’t see them or know about them because most aren’t necessarily braggarts. Typically the folks I’ve met who box above their weight classes are people who have overcome something pretty significant.
Once when I was in a gym in Spokane over Christmas I met a man, or kindly, what was left of him after both his legs had been amputated, who was vigorously pushing a heavy sled across the gym floor. This fellow military vet had been a physical therapist. Left the service, over-ate due to depression. He ballooned, developed diabetes and lost both legs. These days, after losing a massive amount of weight (without his legs, so no running or cycling, thanks) he is working as an inspirational speaker for other vets who have severe disabilities.
Yeah. Just your average schlub boxing over his weight class.
My social media buddy JC Spears, after living in deep poverty for several years, hitchhiked cross country to Austin Texas to negotiate a meeting with a businessman he had dreams of being able to meet. A man with a seven-figure business, who shortly afterwards invited JC to be his business partner.
His business partner.
Spears was in his mid-thirties at the time. Ridiculously poor, but willing to do whatever it took to get him in front of the right person.
JC was the one who handed me this phrase. He knows whereof he speaks.
Usually it implies that we’re operating out of our class, in that perhaps we are dating someone society or our family deems “too good for us.” We don’t belong there, apparently.
Well, kindly, who says?
I beg to differ. Boxing over your weight class describes many people perfectly. Life has dealt them one hell of a blow, or they started out stunted. One of my favorite examples of this is Lizzie Velásquez, dubbed the World’s Ugliest Woman.
Lizzie was born with a terrible congenital disorder. She can’t gain weight at all, and has to eat 5–8000 calories several times a day. She is blind in her right eye and has limited sight in her left.
Lizzie was bullied as a child, then cyberbullied. She now gives TED Talks, is a motivational speaker, and her YouTube videos have received 54 million views.
It would be something of an understatement to say that this enormously brave woman has been an inspiration for many. Given the battles she has fought and won, beginning with being born at barely over two pounds, this woman has spent her entire life boxing over her weight class. She can barely keep just under seventy pounds on her body and her fat percentage is zero. Yet she battles against bullying to help others. That took, and continues to take enormous courage.
If you cannot see how beautiful she is, I would posit that you are blind.
It would be fair to say that the kids and the adults who attack her on line haven’t had movies made of their lives. I would call that sweet revenge.
I might offer that those who are willing to bravely embrace life and push their boundaries are simply…fully their own selves.
This sounds simple, but it’s not. For most of us are driven in part or even in full by other’s expectations, their demands, societal customs, religious requirements and a great deal more. When you and I choose to break those bonds, we rewrite the rules in our blood. For bleed we must, from the censure of those who feel they own us. People who feel we owe something to our families, our churches, our schools…what, pray tell, do we owe anyone, other than to live our best possible lives?
Studies about high school achievers, the valedictorians, show that they typically end up living rather ho-hum normal lives. Two point one kids, house in the burbs, no arrests, no tsunami waves. Heavens no.
Not exactly Jane Goodall, or Bill Gates. The people who make waves, wave down the cars on the freeways to Austin.
Billionaires typically have a 2.9 GPA in college, if they bother to go, or complete their studies at all.
Valedictorians protect the status quo. Rebels smash it.
Rebels can and do cause us extreme discomfort. They challenge, force the issue, they create small earthquakes in our comfortable assumptions. That’s their job. Without them we don’t have scientific breakthroughs. We wouldn’t have light, or flight, or much of anything else. We would forever be in the Dark Ages (I might posit that in some ways the US is doing its damnedest to return there, but I digress.)
Society loves to lynch its thought leaders, s/heroes and rule breakers. We are collectively terrified of them. They force us to confront our beliefs.
Here’s an example I just pulled out of our Illumination writers’ offerings about two minutes ago. Here from Sukhi Ch.:
It can be horribly expensive to be brave.
Or this girl who survived and who now stands as a world beacon for truth:
Being brave can cost. But those who box above their weight class can do more than change their countries. They change history, and health, which affects us right here, right now.
Many don’t know the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, who called out the notion that doctors’ hands needed to be washed if patients were to be saved. That was in 1847. This so offended the sensibilities of the doctors of the day, Semmelweis was forced out of his profession, suffered a mental breakdown at 47, and was beaten by guards at his mental prison. He died of a gangrenous wound, likely caused by the beating, an infection of the very kind he was warning his fellow doctors to protect against. Years later Louis Pasteur validated the good doctor’s beliefs. Too little, too late.
We only thank our pioneers after we’ve burned them at the stake of our ignorance, it seems.
People who become fully themselves challenge the fears and bounds of societal normalcy, accept the results of their actions and have the grit to stick things out to the end. Pull back the veneer of an “overnight success” and you’ll often find years of sometimes awful circumstances. The dues paid to have a different life. In one way or another we suffer the censure of society, we are shunned, hated, reviled. How. Dare. You. Be different.
Becoming your own person can be expensive. You lose friends. You lose family members, sometimes. You often lose all kinds of things, possibly every single thing you think is important. Maybe you are professionally pilloried, like Semmelweis. Maybe not.
But when you do take chances, you make room for what you can be.
By choosing to challenge my family, challenge my father, I lost my Dad, access to my mother until after he died, his approval (which wasn’t ever available anyway), my inheritance. But I claimed my freedom from his alcoholism, his verbal abuse, his viciousness. I refused to produce progeny to give him a second chance at being a great “father figure.” He felt I had robbed him of that. Not his life to live. Mine. I didn’t owe my family additional name-bearers. I had enough burdens to bear as it was. Those choices set me on a very different path. That path has cost me dearly. But it is MY path, not one that allows people to be comfortable around my out-sized personality.
I still get pilloried for being different. You should read some of the comments I get. They are fuel for my fire, and fodder for my motivation. As they should be.
Thoreau wrote, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I don’t suppose, although I don’t know this, that he didn’t give what women felt on the topic much thought. However I have met plenty of people for whom this is a great truth. Trapped in hateful work, a loveless marriage, or any one of a thousand large or small emotional jail cells, they dampen their creativity. Crammed into classrooms where they don’t fit, shoehorned into work for which they aren’t suited, locked into relationships that rob the world of their gifts.
Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is a waste of energy. It’s part of how we break from our families and begin to self-actualize. However, if all we do next is conform to our churches, our countries, our employers’ expectations, we have in some ways simply sold our souls to the next Devil who can use our creative energies for their own purposes.
There is an important price we all pay, and I might offer should pay, to benefit from society. We behave as decent citizens (something we’re a little short of right now to be fair) we pay our taxes for the greater good (some of us do), we behave without rage or rancor towards our fellow man (something else we’re a little short of right now, if the outright murder of yet another Black man is any indication, committing the crime of Running While Black), we color inside those lines that allow the majority of us to live in relative peace.
We’re not doing that very well either, as a species. Never have. It’s ever been an uneasy business, keeping the internal beasts at bay, many of which are on public display right now.
Part of evolving is learning how to be in society. At some point, once we learn the ropes and rules, we may begin to quietly question which of those is a noose around our necks, choking off the gifts of our greatest expressions.
What I refer to here is what it takes for any one of us who aspires to a different way of being, a different way of thinking, to have a different quality of life. This most certainly doesn’t apply to everyone. But it does, in some ways, call to many of us.
To choose to erase other-imposed boundaries of acceptable behavior and societal expectations. Each step takes courage. To choose not to have children. To choose to eschew marriage. To eschew traditional education. To challenge long-held assumptions in science, the arts, cultural norms. To upend the status quo about racial injustice or sexual assault (or both).
To get in the collective faces of the corporations who lead us by the collective noses, manipulating our tastes and our beliefs to the point where we hate ourselves and each other over nothing.
Or, on a more micro scale, simply getting into our own faces, challenging our negative assumptions about who we are or can be.
“I could never do that.”
“I’m too old to try that.”
“I’m too scared to give that shot.”
“She’d never go out with me.”
“I’m not (pretty, smart, thin) enough.”
Every time you challenge an assumption like this, you box above your weight class.
Wanna Start?
You train. Begin with baby steps. Learn a new skill, do something small that’s different every day. Make small changes in your habits. Begin to surround yourself with people who either do what you want to do, or who think in ways that challenge or shatter your assumptions. Read different, new and challenging material. Find stories that appeal to you and ask why?
What is it about this person’s journey that speaks to my conjurer’s soul? What calls to me in the empty hallways of my heart?
Every single time you hear that (other) voice telling you all the reasons why you can’t do X, ask, why? Based on what? How does this apply to me?
Each time you do this you erase a small but important line in the sand that defines your outer boundary. The more you do it, the easier it gets. You most assuredly don’t have to learn how to skydive (in all fairness, that’s precisely what I did in my twenties. It does have a way of changing the internal conversation).
What will boxing above your weight class get you?
It might just deliver the life you want, rather than the one you’ve been settling for. It might just get you surrounded by other champions, people living life out loud, on their own terms.
When will you begin boxing above your weight class?
How about right now?
The six am sun has just broken the horizon here in Denver. I am off to train in the cool dawn. Every day is a boxing match. I’m in training to be my best self.
Ready to start training?
Let’s go.
