I was on all fours in a circle of ~30 adults, staring into the eyes of my opponent. As the seconds in our stand-off slowly passed and the tension swiftly rose, I flipped on the purple string-lights wrapped around my glittery sweater, followed by an “uhhhhh” by the crowd surrounding us. (this was great!)
Last week I had my first formal playfight at burnhalla and it was really awesome – even though I’m still suffering from its consequences.
Once the fight began, we approached each other, crawling towards until we met. We tussled around until we eventually were enwrapped in a hug-of-war, each person trying their best to top the other. Occasionally, we broke apart, circled each other, only to end up in more rolling hugs of dominance.
The 90 seconds that we had gotten allotted stretched on for quite a while and I was exhausted by the end, but not before she accidentally squashed my right ribs through her struggles to stay on top of me, just as I struggled to throw her off.
This was incredibly fun!
Afterwards, she invited me to her regular playfight group. I definitely wanna go at some point but even one week later I still cannot get up without pain searing through half of my rib cage.
Around 10-15 minutes (and a fun moshpit) later I faced my second opponent. No string lights to please the crowd this time, for we were blindfolded and I didn’t want to mark my position to her. The objective: steal both socks of the opponent; no time limit.
This fight went very differently, not just bc the objective changed, but also bc each duo I’ve seen ended up fighting each other in their own way, and so it was w us. No hugging and lying on top of each other here; this was serious sock-stealing business! This fight involved much more limb action and wiggling around to avoid one’s own socks getting taken, whilst trying to reach out or hold down the other to get to their socks.
I lost 2 socks and only gained one, but it was so much fun!
I want more of this!
And I did get more-if-not-the-same: a round of eagles and turtles1 with the entire group of (now maybe only 20-25 ppl) got initiated by the hosts of the playfighting event. This was also very fun! Amongst us turtles, huddling behavior quickly emerged as our survival strategy; it was really fun to hold onto each other and feel more and more eagles descent onto us as more and more of my trusted friends and allies got dragged away and turned around to the other side (both literally and figuratively), making them into an increasing number of adversaries. I lasted until more or less the very end; was super fun; legs somehow burned like hell.
I imagine blacklight fights would also be pretty fun!
Maybe this can be arranged for at the next burn.
The past
Whilst trying to re-open this file in Obsidian I stumbled upon a daily note I had written many years ago, back when I first heard of playfights. The following was during the beginning of my depression, which drastically increased my discomfort around many things and spiralling easily occurred when even just thinking of certain concepts.
[Friend] just sent me an invitation and info about playfighting and MY GOD does it feel frightening/…!
I’ve just seen a few seconds of a video showcasing how adults play-fight with each other and I had to stop the video. It feels INCONCEIVABLE to do this! While I can imagine the physics of two bodies fighting w each other, I CANNOT put it into a social context. It feels utterly unimaginable to do this with and in view of strangers.
Even with friends it feels like a stretch and smth that’d have to develop and EVEN THEN it feels uncomfortable!
It seems so far off of what I’m allowed to do as an adult, so far off of who I am (peaceful person) and so far off of what I’m allowed to do as a man (wrangle and roll around on the floor with a non-partner in a playful yet sorta intimate way)!
(“as a man” bad ol’ times lol)
After having read more about it, I apparently had started to feel slightly less terrible, but I still felt “like this is smth I CANNOT do”.
How far I’ve come already
Footnotes
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in this game 1-2 ppl start out as eagles: they can stand and grab the turtles, who in turn make themselves small on the ground and have to avoid getting turned upside down and thereby turned into an eagle themselves ↩