Underneath my yellow skin

Taiji, me, and mental health (part nine)

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Yes, I am still going to talk about mental health and Taiji. Family dysfunction as well, and perhaps therapy.This is continuing my week(s) of musings about the topics, and here is the last post in which I discussed lots of things.

I must say, therapy has been more miss than hit for me. I went to my first counselor when I was fourteen and profoundly depressed. I will give my mother credit that she got me into therapy. Hoqwever, unfortunately, she chose a therapist at a very conservative Christian college, and a man to boot. Who was white. He was not in any way equipped to deal with someone like me. Especially as I had a broken brain in so many ways.

I will say, though, that he was a very nice guy who tried his best. I do not hold it against him that he didn’t know what to do with me.

After that, I had a series of therapists/counselors who just sucked. Here’s the problem. I have a psych background. I know a lot about psychology. I am very smart. I know how to think on different levels. Which means I am a terror for some therapists. If I can run rings around someone, I will not respect them. Unfortunately, this was the case with many of the therapists/counselors I had. To be honest, it’s one reason I stopped going to non-psychologist therapists. Social workers just didn’t do it for me.

It took me forever to find a therapist who worked for me, and then I saw her for a decade or so. What I liked about her was that would suggest things that weren’t considered traditional. This included body work, tarot card readers, EFT, EMDR (before it hit mainstream), electroshock therapy, meds, and more. In her opinion, anything that worked was fine with her. She also discussed CBT and introduced DBT to me as well.


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Taiji, mental health, and me (part eight)

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I’m contiuning my week-long posts about Taiji and how it’s benefited me. In the last post, however, I veered into talking about my mental health. Let me be clear. Taiji has helped my mental health tremendously. I would say it’s probably the thing that has helped the most. Therapy helped the last time I did it (which was over a decade ago), but my time with that therapist came to a natural conclusion.

I have been thinking of finding a therapist ever since my medical crisis. not to deal with the medical crisis, ironically, but to deal with the family dysfunction that burst forward during it. It was always there, mind, but since my parents live in Taiwan, I did not have to deal with it on a daily basis–or even monthly. I mean, I had to talk to them on the phone once every three weeks or so, but that was all.

I have always had difficulty with my parents, but this showed a very ugly side to my mother that I had not seen before.

Side note: It’s really strange. I have had issues with my father all my life, but I’m actually less upset in dealing with him now than I am with my mother. There are a few reasons for it. One, my father’s pronounced dementia now makes it easier to say that he doesn’t know what he’s saying (because he doesn’t). Two, I talk to him for two or three minutes, up to five minutes once a month or so. Three, I have compassion for him that I didn’t have thirty years ago.

Dementia SUCKS. It’s terrible, and I would not wish it on anybody. I am watching it make a zombie of my father and tearing my mother from the inside out. So why is it harder for me to have compassion for my mother?

Let me say that I do have basic compassion for her. Again, it’s a terrible situation to be in.She is 81 years old and does the bulk of the caretaking. The vast majority. She has a helper, but from what my mother says, the helper does the bare minimum. I don’t know what that entails, exactly, because my mother is not the most reliable of narrators.

There are three options that are equally possible. 1. My mother is holding the helper to too high a standard so the worker has ‘quiet quit’ in trying to help. 2. The worker is doing the bare minimum and knows that it’s hard to replace her. 3. The helper is doing amazing and my mother is not happy about it.

My guess would be that the helper has given up trying to do things to my mother’s standards and is doing the bare minimum. My mother is never happy with anything–that it her whole M.O. She will always find the cloud surrounding the silver lining, and she will always question whatever decision she makes.


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Taiji and me, part seven

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This is post seven of my weekly musings on Taiji and how it’s helped me with life. Yes, that’s it. That’s all I’m doing. Just kidding. In the last post, I was talking about life in general and how messed up I was before I started studying Taiji. I mean, more messed up than I am now. Yes, I’m still messed up, but not as much as I used to be.

I was also mentioning how my teacher has earned my trust because she has been transparent, honest, and open about what she does and doesn’t know. We’ve reached the point that if she suggests something for me to try, I will immediately try it.

Here’s another reason why: She makes sure that anything she suggests will not hurt me. It may not help, but it’s not going to hurt. The most recent example surronds my difficulty with periphery. I’ve always had an issue with it (along with spatial issues, reflex issues, and more), and it’s only gotten worse since my medical crisis. I don’t like to drive on the freeway because of this, and I restrict my driving to local roads whenever possible.

This means that I have stayed with online classes rather than driving to them because I live north and she teaches in south. Before the pandemic, I would go to class in person and had to take two (or three? I don’t quite remember) freeways during rush hour in order to do so.

I never liked driving. I want to make that clear. I am bad at it, and I do it as little as possible. I failed the driving test three times and would have not taken the test at all if my mother hadn’t pushed me to do so. It’s good that I can drive, but it’s something I will avoid doing when at all possible.

I have been in all kind of scrapes with a car. As a driver, I mean. In part beacuse being a nervous driver was not good, but it also occurred to me MUCH later that I had periphery issues. I can’t see things to the side of me then I’m driving. Is this because of something physical? Or is it psychological? I don’t know, but it kept happening. And by ‘kept’, I mean once every few years, I would hit something with my car. Not at high speeds and not with much damage, but it wasn’t great. Obviously.I thought it was just me being a terrible driver. Which, let me hasten to add–I am. But there may actually be reasons for it other than just I’m a terrible driver.


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Taiji and how it’s changed my life, part six

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I’m continuing to muse about Taiji and me for the sixth post. In the last post, I talked about how I learned to trust my Taiji teacher over time beacuse she was consistent, transparent, and steady in her response to my barrage of questions. It’s one of her best qualities in my eyes. I could expect honesty from her no matter what question I asked her, so now, a decade-and-a-half later, I don’t even queestion it when she tells me something about Taiji. She has earned that trust.

Then, six months ago or so, I wanted to learn the Swimming Dragon Form with the deerhorn knives in Bagua, a different martial art. I love the deerhorn knives. They are probably my favorite weapons overall (double sabers are myi favorite taiji weapons) beacuse they are so vicious. Did I say that out loud?

Many many moons ago, I was having difficulty with meditation. I kept having flashbacks, which was highly unpleasant. My teacher brought in a pair of her pratice deerhorn knives and handed them to me. She taught me how to walk the circle with them, and that wsa what I did in the corner while the rest of the class was doing meditation.

It was during this time and while I was walknig the circle that I had a life-changing realization. I used to proclaim that I was a pacifist and  that if someone tried to kill me, I would let them. This was married with my belief that my life didn’t matter in and of itself. That wasn’t something I just thought up myself, by the way. My mother drummed it into my head ever since I could remember, and when I was eleven, she started pouring out all her problems (especially with her marriage) to me.

I got to hear about how unhappy she was and how depressed. She comlained about my father incessantly and how he had done her wrong. Which, she wasn’t lying, but it wasn’t something you should be telling your eleven-year-old child. She did not do this to my brother, by the way, in case you were wondering. There are a few reasons for this. One, I was AFAB, and my mother has very rigid ideas about gender. Women were for nurturing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, and birthing babies–not necessarily in that order. Funnily, though, even though she liked to say that being a parent was the most important thing to her (and she said it all the time), she focused all her attention on my father.

It makes sense now because he has dementia that is getting worse and worse. It started when he was in his sixties, and he’s mid-eighties now.

When my mother complained about my father, I just shut down. There was nothing I could do about it, and she would have not handled it well if I walked away. I was a hostage to her complaints, though there were no physical chains restraining me.


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More about Taiji, part five

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This is part five about my discourse on Taiji (and how it’s been a boon for me). In the last post, I talked about….well, lots of stuff. I wanted to talk about trust and my teacher, but then wandered into my past and why my family dysfunction made me unlikely to trust.

It turns out thaht I can trust–when someone is worthy of that trust. And, yes, it did not happen immediately, but took quite some time. It’s good not to be too trusting, but I think I took it to the extreme. Hell, I kow I took it to extreme, and I would say I still have a hard time calibrating my ability to trust (especially in my romantic life). It’s either too much or too little, but rarely just enough.

In the case of my Taiji teacher, she earned it by being transparent, honest, and open about what she knows and doesn’t about Taiji. It’s the last one especially that really made me trust her.

Side note: I have a hard time admitting when I don’t know something, especially if it’s an area that I consider myself an expert. The fact that my teacher can do it with ease is a plus in my book. She doesn’t seem worried about undermining herself by doing so, which I admire.

Anyway, I learned over time that she would be honest with me no matter what. She accepted me where I was and did not push me–wait. That’s not what I want to say. Because she absolutely did push me, but in a way that was positive. I think it’s better to say that she encouraged me to go outside my comfort zone.

I’m stubborn, though, so I would often push back. That’s my nature. I’m not proud of it, but I have to be real. It’s a fear response, but it’s also a way for me to guard my boundaries. That was necessary in my family, but it was not as necessary in Taiji with my teacher.

What helped me with that? Sit back and listen to a little story I have for you. I started learning Taiji beacuse I wanted to be able to defend myself, but I was rabidly anti-violence. In other words, I was a pacifist. About a year or two after I started studying with my teacher, she wanted me to start studying the Sword Form. I reacted strongly against it because I did not want to do weapons. That was violent! Not like the Solo Form, which was without weapons and so gentle.

My teacher brought it up every few months, and I  was adamant that I would never, ever do the weapons. After a year or so of this, she pressed a wooden practice sword into my hand and told me to just hold it. I tried to pull my hand back, but she would not let me. She wasn’t mean about it, but she made sure I closed my hand on the hilt of the sword.


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Taiji and me, part four

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This is part four of my weeklong treatise on the unexpected benefits of Taiji and other things related. In the last post, I meandered here and there, but was ostensibly talking about my teacher and how I grew to trust her. Because it’s me, I had to give background as to why I have a hard time trusting people.

In addition, my prior Taiji teacher was terrible and did not engender trust. He was skanky, sleazy, and a bad teacher. He was way up his own ass and thought much too highly of himself.

Side note: I find this to be a problem with cis white dudes who position themselves as gurus, whether consciously or unconsciously. They already have an unearned authority about them just because they are cis white dudes, and then they surround themselves with people who agree with their assessment, which means they usually don’t get told off when they are crossing the line. In other words, it becomes like a cult.

One of the first things I did when I was looking for a new teacher was look for women (now, I would expand that non-men). That meant drastically reducing the number of studios available to me, but I was fine with that. It was that important to me, and I stand by that.

It took time for my teacher to earn my trust, which is as how it should be. Just because someone is an expert in something, it doesn’t mean they are immediately trustworthy. Also, someone can be an expert in something and still a lousy teacher.

One thing my teacher excels at is teaching each student in the way they will best learn. With me, it’s giving explanations for things until I have reached the point where explanations are not necsessary any longer. With a classmate of mine, it’s scolding her lightly. Another ex-classmate of mine had MS and with her, it was adapting to doing the forms in a wheelchair.

I have reached the point where I don’t need the explanations any longer, but I do appreciate when she tells me what the applications for the movements are for. She knows what I need in order to accept what she’s saying, and she has no problems providing that. It’s what makes her a good teacher, and I have heard it from other students as well.


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Taiji and me, part three

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I have written two posts about the unexpected long-term (and slow-to-realize) benefits of Taiji. I was going to write a third (this post), and while that is still the nominal plan, I want to focus moe on my teacher in this post. Or rather, how  I got to the point where I trust her implicitly when it comes to Taiji.

When I was in my twenties, I was a hot mess. I make no bones about it or try to hide it in any way. Nor do I sugarcoat it. I was deeply depressed by the time I was seven, and I didn’t see the point in living. College was a pivotal time for me in many ways, both bad and good. That’s when I realized that I had several isms to deal with (racism ‘coz Taiwanese, sexism ‘coz woman, and homophobia ‘coz I was bi, but that was after I realized I was bi–which took some time in and of itself), not to mention family dysfunction.

It’s the latter along with undiagnosed mential health issues that really fucked with my head. I was disassociative when I was in my early twenties, but didn’t realize what was happening. I’m pretty damn lucky I didn’t seriously hurt myself or anyone else during that time because it happened as I drove on the freeway, too, which was the worst.

I had many arguments with my mother because I stubbornly insisted on actually telling her important things to me while I was in my twenties. I believed the trope that mothers were all-loving and cared deeply about their children. It took me many decades to deprogram myself, and I’m not quite there yet.

I’m telling you all this because it was Taiji that helped me with the family dysfunction. My teacher has said more than once that she hopes that we never get into a fight. I do, too. But she always added that it’s beneficial for real life, too. She said that while we may neve have to fight off an enemy, we probably will have to fight through a crowd.

I have difficulty with my temper. I can keep it under control for the most part, which is better than me not realizing I had a temper in my youth. Because I had it drummed into me that I was not allowed to show any negative emotions as a kid, I stuffed my anger waaaaaaay down deep inside.


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The unexpected (long-term) benefits of Taiji, part two

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Yesterday, I wrote part one of the unexpected long-term benefits of Taiji with a fair bit of meandering in between actual points. That’s how my brain works, and it’s not something I care to change. Things are connected, man. That’s just the way it is.

I mentioned that I fell the other day. This is not unusual for me–or rather, it was not unusual for me back in the day. Now, I don’t fall nearly as much as I used to (or bump into things), and when I do, I don’t take as much damage. I will say, though, that yesterday, as I was eating, it hurt. I could not figure out why until I realized that I probably bit hard as I fell, which made my teeth hurt. Weirdly, though, it was on the left side, not the right. I say weirdly because the scrapes I have are on the right side. But it’s possible that I just bite more heavily on my left side than right side in general.

Here is another unexpected benefit: I have an ass now. Not a big one, mind you, but a noticeable one. I’m excited because I had no junk in the trunk prior to practicing Taiji. Hey, I’m Asian. We’re not usually gifted with big, juicy asses. Then again, we usually don’t have big honkers, either, and mine are huge. When I complained about it to my mother, she said that her grandmother had had big boobs–liek Double Ds. Which, for Taiwanese women thirty years ago, would be huge.

I mourned my lack of ass, to be honest. I would look at J-Lo and be consumed by lust. Er, envy. Also lust, but in this case, envy is more pertinent. I had no cheeks to clap, much to my dismay. After many years of Taiji practice, I noticed as I looked in the mirror that I actually had an ass! Not a full one as I said above, but an actual ass! I mentioned it excitedly to Ian and he said very diffidently that he had noticed it the last time we had seen each other.

I also was giddy when I told my teacher about it, and she laughed heartily. She thought it was hilarious, and I told her that she should advertise it as one of the benefits of Taiji. She thought it was probably the Golden Roosters (basically, marching in place, but in a Taiji kind of way and stepping backwards as you do), which I do every day. It’s high and tight (my ass, I mean), and I’m irdordinately proud of it.


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The unexpected (long-term) benefits of Taiji

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When people talk about the benefits of Taiji, often they mean the health benefits–both physical and mental. Sometimes, there’s the added talk of how it helps shift your mindest becaause  the basic tenet of Taiji is that you take is what is given to you and return it. It’s also known as the lazy person’s martial art beacuse you want to put out as little energy as possible in order to get the biggest result.

I’m an American (with a Taiwanese background). Both my cultures are very driven and believe in given “110%”, “no pain, no gain”, and “do it until you can’t do it any more–and then do it for five minutes longer”. My Taiwanese parents were perennially disappointed in me beacuse I was not (and am still not) perfect. My mother made my brother and I do a million things when we weren’t in school, including (for me), piano, cello, dance (ballet, jazz, tap), volleyball, softball, tennis, ping-pong, church every Sunday, and summer school every year. Not all of these were formal things or all at the same time, but it was a lot for a dreamy kid who just wanted to read and write.

It was never enough. And, of course, American culture is like that as well. You’re supposed to work fifty-plus hours a week, want to be promoted every few years, and what work-life balance? Not to mention that there are so few worker protections in America, and it’s a recipe for disaster. Oh, and let’s not forget that healthcare is tied to insurance, too.

When I first started Taiji (fourteen years ago!), I was so tense. Most Americans are. My teacher explained to me that Taiji was about relaxing. Not collapsing; you did not want to be totally floppy, but relaxing. She said that most Americans are in the 7-10 range (on a scale of 0-10) when it came to tension. 0 was collapsed, and you wanted to avoid that, too. 1-3 is ideal, depending on what you’re doing at the itme.

I also had crippling back pain. I mentioned it to my teacher, and she told me to do the one stretch we do in which you lie on the floor and let your knees gently fall to one side and then pull your knees to your chest, one, then the other, then both. She told me to do this on each side, three times each. I was so skeptical beacuse it seemed too simple to take care of the excruciating pain.

Within three months, there was a noticeable reduction in the pain. I was astounded that I was no longer wincing in pain every time I moved. Then, after a year, the back pain was completely gone. And  I mean totally. It was incredible, and I excitedly shared it with my teacher. She wsa so enthused to hear it as well, but not surprised, obviously.

That was what made me trust her wholeheartedly when it came to Taiji. She was honest with me; she would look up answers if she didn’t know them; and, she alawys encouraged me to ask questions and have a bad attitude. One of the things that makes her a great teacher is that she takes each student as they come. She knows that people learn in different ways, and she tries to accommodate that as best she can. In my case, I learn by questioning the hell out of everything. And being cranky when I didn’t get something right away.


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Have a Nice Death–A Quick Look, part two

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Hi. This is part two on my quick look at Have a Nice Death (Magic Design Studios). Will there be more? Maybe. Here is post one in which I talk about the basics and then wander off as I tend to do.   I just played a few rounds, and–well, let me put it this way. Hades II (Supergiant Games) just came out in Early Access–a shadow drop (on PC), that has me immensely excited. The original game also had an Early Acecss period that lasted nearly two years. I did not jump into the game until it was released from Early Access.

I must admit, I was not instantly enamored with the game. I could see it was well done and nicely crafted. It had great graphics, and I love Greek mythology. But, something about the gameplay wasn’t quite clicking. Again, it wasn’t the game as it was very well made. It was me. Do you want to know why I kept playing? Because of the interactions with the NPCs in the House of Hades and throughout the games. And the relationships between Zagreus (the protagonist) and various NPCs.

There are roughly 300,000 lines of dialogue in the game. I was seeing new dialogue even as I hundo chievo’ed the game. I found things that none of the reviewers mentioned beacuse they did not get that far into the game before reviewing. You have to beat the game something like 10 times to get the true ending.

I nearly didn’t make it to the first time I beat it beacuse the last boss was so hard. I could have used God Mode (makes game easier with each death), but I was too stubborn for that. When I finally beat the last boss for the first time, it felt like beating a FromSoft boss, almost.

Here’s my point. That game grew on me, obviously. The unlocks were meaningful and even though there were only four weapons, each one played significantly different. Especially as the unlocks made each weapon markedly different. The game was very elegantly designed, and one of the few knocks I had about it was that the combat got too hectic at some points. Which is something that many of these games do, including Have a Nice Death. There are so many things flashing on the screen that it’s sometimes impossible to actually focus on the enemy you’re trying to attack.


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