Breaking My Silence: A Mugger’s Point of View/ Introduction

How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point, I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action or creation…we have to know all we can about each other, and…we have to be willing to go naked.

— — from, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

Where to begin? This is an introduction to a series of pieces that I first wrote nearly 30 years ago. The impetus for writing was my experiences as a ‘mugger’…a padded assailant in a self-defense program known as Model Mugging. Model Mugging had been initially developed by Matt Thomas in the early ’80s; I think it started as a course at Radcliffe and by the time it had become known to me MM had evolved to the class format that I was trained to teach. That evolution had been the result of many others, too many to name, adding to and improving on what Matt originally created. The origin myth is already out there on the web and other sources so I’m not planning to talk about it again. At first, I just wanted to write about one thing, i.e. what…