Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Bagua

More about sleep, martial arts, and whatever else

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I’m back to talk more about just how fucking tired I am. Wait. That wasn’t the topic of yesterday’s post? Well, it might as well have been. I got a decent amount of sleep last night–oh, by the way. Last night is when I sleep regardless of the time. For instance, I went to bed around 7:30 in the morning and got up at two in the afternoon. The former was my night and the latter was my morning. This is my late evening, and I’m going to try to get to bed before the sun rises–you know what. Let me be real with myself. I cannot fix the problem if I lie to myself. Or not lie, really, because I know I’m not being real.

Here’s the thing. After my medical crisis, I was able to get to bed at a reasonable hour, get a tight eight hours, and then go about my day. This was four-and-a-half years ago. I maintained that for about a year, and then it slowly started reverting back to my norm. If it had been all at once, I might have had the wherewithal to make myself stop. I can deal with disasters well–it’s the slow creep that causes me trouble.

It’s something  that’s common for people who are neurodivergent, apparently. That we are really good in emergencies/crises. There are a few reasons for this. One, we tend to think outside the box. Which means that we can come up with solutions that other people may not think of. Two things that distress other people may not be as immediately distressing to us. Hm. I don’t feel comforable talking about the whole neurodivergent populace, so I’ll just speak about me. While I’m anxious in my day-to-day life and about really trivial things like ‘was my tone in that email too curt?’, I am, quite contrarily, really chill and cool whilst in the middle of a crisis.

Things that would hit other people hard do not do the same to me. Or rather, I can still keep my head in those moments. Probably because my brain quite simply does not think in the same way as other people’s brain. For example, after 9/11, I just could not understand why people kept saying, “How could this happen in the U.S.?” To me, my only surprise was that it didn’t happen earlier. In other words, with all the shit we were doing, why wouldn’t other countries want to attack us?

Please note that I am not making excuses or saying it was justified–I’m just saying I’m not surprised that we got attacked. It happens all around the world, and it’s grimly funny to hear so many people think American exceptionalism meant that there was a protecttive bubble around us that would deflect any negativity that came our way. Again, I’m not saying it was justified or that it wasn’t shocking. I’m saying it wasn’t a surprise, and I could not understand why other people thought it was. Or rather, I understood on an intellectual level, but emotionally, it baffled me.


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Radically rethinking my sleep–and martial arts

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I have two things I want to talk about, so because it’s my blog and I can do what I want to, I’m going to write about both. Or one until I run out of steam and decide to write about the other one tomorrow. They aren’t directly related, but there are tendrils that grow out of each that entwine and become merged together.

Let’s starct with sleep. It sucks. The end.

Of course, that’s not all I have to say about it; I’m just getting started.

I have written about sleep so often, I’m begin to bore myself. But it’s getting worse, so I’m going to keep writing about it. About twenty years ago, my therapist at the time told me of an experimental treatment that was getting some attention. It’s to stay awake for three days (and nights) straight–72 hours in order to jumpstart your brain. (That’s a very grossly simple explanation of what it was supopsed to do.) When I tried it at the time, I made it roughly 62 hours before my bestie called me to say she had her baby–prematurely.

Follishly, I went to the hospital to visit them. I was out of my mind as I talked to K. I don’t remember what I said or if I even saw the baby  through the glass. I think maybe not? As I was driving home, which was the same as if I was driving home from her house, I forgot how to get on the last freeway I needed to travel to get home. When I got home, I went to sleep immediately. (I really, really, REALLY should not have been driving).

Did it jumpstart my brain? Not really. Do I think it’ll do it this time? Not really. But! I think it might interrupt the slide I’m experiencing as far as my struggle to get to bed at a reasonable time.

Side note: I do think there’s too much pressure to go to bed at a ‘good’ hour (which means before midnight I guess?) and to say that anyone who goes to bed after that time has a mental health problem. Yes, there are studies that show that people who go to bed ‘late’ suffer more from depression, but correlation is not causation, and I would wager it’s the other way around. (People who cannot  go  to bed before midnight get depression from trying to force their natural biorhythms to fit those of the world around them.)

That said, I would like to go to bed before the sun rises. I want to aim for 3 a.m. I think that’s reasonable for me (but not tonight).

Side note deux: I was watching a show in which the participants were talking about when do you conside the next day to have begun. These were night owls, andthey did not think of a new day beginning at midnight. I was excited by this because I have long given up that metric as the start of a new day. For me, it’s when I wake up–that’s the new day. Anything before I go to sleep is the same day. In the show I was watching, one person answered that anything until the sun rose was one day. Another said that if he was called anytime before going to bed to set up a meeting at any time after he woke up, that would be the next day, regardless of what time it actually was.


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Patting myself on the back, part three

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When I look back on the person I was in my twenties, I want to give that person a hug. That person was so emotionally fragile that a single negative word could crush that person into a (not-so-fine) dust. To be fair to that person, the home life was very rough. I don’t like thinking about it because it still hurts. I think about how lost and utterly miserable I was. I felt like an alien, like I didn’t belong in this world–and what’s more, the world would be better without me. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday.

When I was in my early twenties, I had a break from reality. I was very lucky to make my way back without any mental health support, but I never came all the way back. Someone once said that you when you broke something, yes, you could put it back together, but it would never be as good as new again. They were using the metaphor as a way to explain how difficult it was to deal with mental health issues, and I had never felt more seen.

Yes, I have spent decades trying to fix the cracks and breaks in me. I’ve gotten good at plastering over them, but I have yet to truly fix them. And while I am much easier on myself than I was back then, I still have lingering thoughts of self-hatred that flair up now and again. While I can talk myself down most of the times, once in a while, it just runs all the way through me. And if it reaches that point, I have a hard time getting out of that dark place.

All my life, I’ve been fighting (or not) the feeling of ‘why bother?’. Why should I try when life is, in the end, worthless? Eh. That’s not the right word for it. It’s nothing like pointless or meaningless. I guess it’s more that the world is so grim, I do not know what to with it. Every time I check the news, this president is doing something else that is so terribly bad. Just awful. It was bad during his last terms, and yet, he managed to make things even worst.

Wait. Why the hell am I going down that path?

Oh, I know why. Because I have a hard time thinking that anything matters. Or more specifically that I don’t matter. And again, I don’t mean that in a negative way (this time). I really don’t matter as a person.  Believe me that this is a better mentality than thinking I was the absolute worst as a person (that I made the world a worser place just by existing). I still cringe at things I say and do on the daily, but I can get over it more easily.

I give much thanks to Taiji (and now Bagua) for helping me become mentally stronger. I once told my teacher that while I  wasrn’t expecting to get into a fight nor did I want to, I did want to be able to use Taiji to help with relationships on an emotional level.

Since I’m terrible with boundaries, that was what I was mostly hoping for–that Taiji would help me set them. Has it? Yeah. I’m still prone to being a people-pleaser and am pretty easy to push, but when it matters, I can stiffen my spine and not give in.


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Feeling pleased with myself, part two

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I grew up in a Taiwanese household (though in America), which means that I was told repeatedly that everything I did/thought/was was wrong. I know that my family was particularly dysfunctional in addition to being extremely East Asian. (The latter at that time meant never saying anything positive about your child to your child.)

“You’re too loud.” “Don’t run.” “Sit with your legs crossed.”

My mom likes to recount a story of how when I was two, I chased my brother’s bullies away (he’s three years older). By the time I was seven, I consciously wanted to die. I had lost any spark I had for life–and I was but a pale copy of myself.

I spent the next thirty years absolutely hating myself. I wanted to die–or rather, I did not want to be alive. There’s a slight, but distinctive difference between the two. I was not suicidal*, but I would not have minded if I got, say, hit by a bus. I aws fast and loose with my life, which changed when I had my medical crisis.**

For a year or two after my medical crisis, I was simply grateful to be alive. It was a miracle (as I was told over and over again), and I felt it in my heart.

But, as you know, any kind of big feeling cannot last forever. It’s inevitable that it’s going to fade over time. How do I feel now? I’m not feeling life at the moment. Partly for personal reasons, but more so because of the state of the world. Many times, I’ve felt like, “I came back for this?!!” It’s been really difficult, especially this past year, and I am just not sure I’m up for it.

I don’t want to live in this world. I know we all have to work to make it better, but I feel beaten down and why bother? Look. I’ve been a lefty since I was born, basically. In ideology, I am about as far left as you can get. I’m more pragmatic in real life, but in my dream world, I’m almost a communist. I’m definitely an anarchist at heart, if not in practice.

Well. That was not what I was going to write about.

So let me switch over with no segue because that is how I fucking roll.

I was writing yesterday about how hard it was to gauge how well I was doing with my Taiji and Bagua because I have nothing to judge it against. My teacher’s classmates have all been studying songer than I have (though maybe not by much), so it’s not really fair to me to judge by them. On the other hand, none of my classmates do weapons. Wait. There’s one person, but he’s just started, so it wouldn’t be fair to him to compare myself to him.


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Feeling pleased with myself

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Today, I had a private lesson. My goal was to focus on the Solo Long Form, but when my teacher came over, we started talking about other things as was our wont. One thing I mentioned was how much trouble I was having with my sleep. That’s not ususual for me in general, but it’s been really bad for me. My teacher suggested that when I could not sleep, I do a portion of the Solo (Long) Form until I got bored and ready to fall asleep.

One of her teacher’s teacher firmly believes that there is no style of martial art beyond human style. He also does his Taiji with his weight fully forward rather than 70% forward. That’s for combat rather than health, and I much prefer that. My teacher’s teacher has been teaching his students to practice by taking the first section of the form and taking five minutes to do it. That’s a really long time. A REALLY long time. I did it today with my teacher after she did it, and it was so hard. I spent over a minute on the preparation and beginning combined, and then I rushed the rest of the first half of the form.

This was an exercise to be aware of what you were doing while practicing and to really sharpen your focus. I was able to do the first section with seventeen seconds to spare. Not bad, but I really struggled to even do that well. I tend to go really fast, and if I do slow down, then I go waaaaaay too slow. To do it slow enough but not too slow is a struggle.

I also talked to my teacher about how difficult it was to not fall into the American trap of pushing yourself too hard at all times. Since I’d been writing about it for the past few days, it was at the top of my mind. I’m a bit frustrated that I forgot an easy move while teaching myself the Bagua Knives Form, and I vented a bit about it to her. She said that it was good that I had caught it at all and that it wasn’t any big deal. Intellectually, I knew she was right, but it still bothered me.

I also said that I felt envious of her two classmates, let’s call them Jim and Nicole, because they were both so dedicated to their weapons and so much further along than I was. The latter is the reason I really wanted to teach myself the Double Saber Forms because I saw her do it at the demo (right before the pandemic locked everything down). I was so impressed by it and by her every time she did a weapon form.

As for the former, I was blown away by him at every demo. The one time he subbed for my teacher, I was so intimidated by him. He worked on the Sword Form with us and asked to see me do something. i was so wowed by him, I made a mistake. He was so dedicated to the weapons, he invented a weapon form that was only him unsheathing weapons (and then ‘using’ one on a classmate before resheathing it). I was so awed by it, even if it’s not my thing. In addition, he made weapon bags, and the one I use was made by him.

When I told my teacher how I felt about her classmates, she interrupted me and said that she put me on the same level as Jim. I was gobsmacked because it’s most certainly not true. She added in terms of dedication to the weapon and my abilities. I think what she meant is that I had the same ability to learn them than he does, not that my current abilities are equal to his.

I was so flattered because I don’t think of it that way at all. It’s only within the last year or two that I’ve even had the courage to call myself an advanced student. Yes, sure, I am teaching myself weapons, but…well, I do’nt know where I’m going with that but.


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Not knowing where and when to draw the line, part five

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This is yet another post about limits, boundaries, and when to push it and when to rest. In the last post, I touched on not knowing when to do the former and when to do the latter. I will delve further into that concept in this post. Let’s start with Bagua. I’m much more comfortable with keeping my weight back, but it still catches me off-guard from time to time. Early on, I asked my teacher how she remembered what she was doing when (Taiji versus Bagua). She said that she just got used to it and kept them separated in her mind. At the time, I didn’t understand, but now I do.

If I’m doing Taiji, then I’m doing Taiji. I’m primarily forward (meaning my weight is forward), and I’m being receptive of energy. I’m not trying to go hard or be in your face. In fact, I’m just chill and letting the energy flow through me. It’s very much vibes based and not doing too much. Most people can do Taiji (Yang-style, not Chen-style. The latter is really bad for your knees) as long as they just take it slowly and do not try to push themselves hard.

Bagua, on the other hand, I would not recommend to just anyone. If we’re just going by feel, Bagua feels dangerous. In fact, my teacher says that in CHina, people are wary of people who study Bagua. I don’t know how true that is, but I could see it being very true. There’s an aggression to Bagua that is completely absent in Taiji.

When I first started studying Bagua, I wondered how I would be able to make peace with how different they were. I had been studying Taiji up to that point, and the whole vibe of Taiji is to just be chill and not exert yourself too much. Empty step and never be double-weighted.

Bagua doesn’t care about any of that. The motto and mentality of Bagua are to do what it takes to ‘win’. Double-weighted? No matter. No empty stepping? Not a big deal! Take the aggression and run with it. In fact, start the aggression yourself. It’s explosive and a great way to rid myself of any anger I’m feeling (even if it’s only for a few seconds).

Like the yin-yang, Taiji and Bagua are polar opposites that complement each other. One is hot and one is cold. One is light and one is dark. One is day and one is night. They could not be more different from each other, and yet, tthey work really well together.


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When do you know you’ve reached your limits, part three

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I have one more post in me to talk about limits, sunken cost fallacy, and American toxic exceptionalism. Yes, I know it’s American exceptionalism and toxic positivity, but they are one and the same to me. It’s not that I don’t think you shouldn’t strive to do well–wait. Let’s stop there a second. I have to qualify it by saying that it’s good to try to improve yourself. That’s what I’m doing with the different weapon forms. But, in other ways, I have no desire. Like jobwise, I just don’t care. Then, there’s my personal flaws. I want to improve some of them, but others, I have just accepted. I know I’m not changing them, and that is perfectly fine.

The problem is when people feel like everything you do has to somehow work as an improvement factor. Like taking your kids to the park, you should walk briskly so you get in some exercise. It’s beacuse in America, most people are so busy. They need to squeeze in exercise whenever and wherever they can. So many Mom magazines includes ways to use your baby in your exercising.

Which, I mean. I’m sure it’s practical, but not every moment has to be a learning/teaching/exercise moment. This is something I have learned with Taiji. (And now, to a lesser extent, Bagua.) I chose it because it was the lazy person’s martial art. My teacher expressly tells us that the purpose is to exert as little energy as possible in order to have as maximum an output of energy as possible. She talked at length about how bad the American ‘give 110%’ mentality was, and I slowly came to agree with her.

I had a classmate back when I first started who told me an aggravating story. He said that every spring, he would feel inspired to run. Now, mind, he did nothing to prepare for that throughout the year. He would just go out and run like ten miles on the first day of spring that he felt was warm enough to run outside. Inevitably, he would pull a muscle and then not be able to run for the rest of the spring. He did this year after year, and then was always surprised when he injured himself on his first day out.

It’s so American, though. The belief that you have to hurt yourself when you exercise, otherwise you’re not exercising hard enough. “No pain, no gain” is one credo. So is, “Give 110%.” The latter really annoyed me beceause you literally cannot give 110%. I know it’s just a saying , but it’s always bothered me, anyway. It’s been known for quite some time that you cannot give your all at all times. Not just that–it’s not optimal to always push to do your best. Let me draaaaaag out another hoary chestnut–“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.”


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When something is truly too hard, part two

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I want to talk more about where is the line between giving it your all and sunken cost fallacy. Here is my post from yesterday in which I was talking about my struggles with the Double Fan Form. I think back to when I laughingly assumed it would take me three months, tops, to teach it to myself.

Remember when I said yesterday that there were two results from the Dunning-Kruger study? One is so well-known, it’s called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In a nutshell, that posited that people who were really bad at something vastly overestimated their skill and didn’t understand how much worse they were at it than other people. People basically boil it down to people who are bad at something think they’re great, which, of course, is heavily dependent upon different demographics.

The second result they found is the other side of the same coin–that peoaple who are really good at something underestimate how much better they are at it than other people are. Again, that’s vastly simplified, but it’ll do for my  purpose. Which is, most of the time, I am the latter. I always think I suck at something, no matter what. If I can do it, anyone can. Or rather, that’s for things I know I’m no better than mediocre at.

That would include FromSoft games. I am horrible at them, and I think  that if I can finish them, anyone can (within reason, of course). It takes me twice as long to finish one for the first time as it does the most pedestrian of players. That would also include drawing, sadly. I tried to do it when I was a teenager/in my twenties, and I was very bad at it.  I saw no reason to keep trying because I suuuuuuucked at it. Could I have gotten better? Oh, yes. Did I want to put in the effort? Oh, no.

See, this is where it gets fuzzy. My brother and I have argued over the years about nature versus nurture when it comes to the creative arts. Thirty years ago, he was on the side of nurture while I was on the side of nature. That’s too simplified, though.

My brother is extremely talented in photography. I have long maintained that he could do it professionally (and he has done some side hustles as a photog). I, on the other hand, am a person of words. Writing is my thing–or at least it was. Not as sure any longer. I’m trying, and I’m hoping to find a way to break through whatever is blocking me (not a writer’s block, sadly. I would at least know how to deal with that. Even though I’ve only had it two or three times).


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Me and my temper, part seven

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I’m back to talk more about anger and my difficulty in controlling it since my medical crisis. I do have to consider that some of it is purely biological. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve found out that it’s a common side effect of having as stroke. And the war I had in my brain and body the last time I was arguing with my mother felt almost physically impossible to stop. I wrote about it at length in my last post, but I want to talk more about it in this one.

When you’re a weirdo as I am (neurodivergent), it’s difficult to know what is a flaw and what is just partof my personality and does not need to be changed.

For example. When I was younger, I had a really hard time going anywhere because I felt like all my senses were being assaulted all the time. Smells, sounds, and sights that I couldn’t just mute. If someone had told me that I wasn’t being oversensitive or too fussy, but that my brain was just wired differently, that would have helped a great deal. I got scolded often by my mother when I would protest about my environment.

She told me a story about how when I was two or three and my brother was five or six and upwards, she would take us to the State Fair every year. She told me I would be crying and screaming, and I asked why she continued to do it. She said because my brother loved it, and she could not afford a babysitter.

That was my standing in the family in a nutshell.  My brother was always more important than I was for several reasons. The first and biggest reason is beacuse he’s the son. Boys were much better than girls. girls were less than useless, and their only worth was to be married off to procreate. Oh, and in my case, to be my mother’s therapist. That’s it. I had no use as a person in and of myself, and I was treated accordingly.

Two. My brother was/is on the spectrum. He was never diagnosed with it (hell, it was barely acknowledged back in the eighties), but he has the classic symptoms. I was the one who clued him into the fact that he was on the spectrum, and this was a few months before I had my medical crisis. He said it changed his life, and it made so many things make sense. My only regret was that I didn’t tell him earlier because I knew decades earlier. It’s just that he displayed such stereotypical behavior for an autistic person, and he knew his son was autistic that I assumed he knew it about himself.

One of the most strenuous arguments K and I have ever (and it was really mild, but we don’t argue0 was about how talking about mental health was so much more open now than when we were younger. Neither of us was saying we should go back to the old days of not talking about it at all, but she was concerned that there was too heavy a reliance on medication. But, also, was there a need to label everything? Both she and her husband deal/have dealt with mental health issues. She pointed out that they got through it with some therapy, yes (on her part), but that was it.


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The upside to anger, part six

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I thought I was done with the topic of anger, but it seems I have one more post within me. Here’s my post from yesterday. I know that many people say that anger is bad, blah, blah, blah. And, yes, you don’t want it to explode all over the place, but as I said, I think in measured and controlled doses, it can be helpful. That and its relative, spite. Maybe the latter even more than the former. And I find that a general spite is more fortifying than one that is pointed at a specific person. Or at society at large–that’s really motivating as well.

I have said that I don’t think I’m contrarian in that I don’t think/say/do the opposing thing just to be a jerk. I do it because it’s how I truly feel. I can lie and give in on certain things like small talk. Do not care in the least about that. I do struggle with when someone is trying to move out of small talk or not, but if I know that we’re firmly in small talk territory, then, yeah. I can do that fairly easily (though I tend to ramble when I’m tense or uptight).

The thing is, my brain is so weird and fucked. It’s not me putting on an act. In fact, I do whatever I can to shave off the sharp edges except with my close friends because I just don’t need the aggro that comes when I let the real me out in gen pub. It’s funny because in America, there are two contrasting messages that get pushed simultaneously. One is individualism. We’re a country of individuals! Do what you want and fuck society! Yeah, no. That’s a complete lie, especially now.

There’s a stronger message of follow the crowd, don’t stick up, and don’t you dare be any kind of minority in public. I spent almost two months in an occupied city where I had to seriously  ask myself if I needed my passport when I left my neighborhood. In America. As a citizen of said country. We had to brush up on our civil rights while realizing that they didn’t really matter because the current administration was going to do what it wanted to do, anyway.

It’s really sobering to realize that your home country wanted you dead or at least shipped out of the country. I mean, I’ve known it for most of my life that I’ve been barely tolerated as a “deviant” in so many ways, but to have it brutally pushed into my face the way it has been since this current administration has taken over can really fuck with your mind.

Ok. I take it back. During that occupation, I had spite towards one specific person, even though he wasn’t the one doing the most damage by far. And when he was demoted and kicked out of the state, not to mention he had his social media access taken away. I’m pretty sure it was the last that really hurt him. I can’t tell you how gleeful I was when I read/heard that; it made my day. As did when whassernamewhowashavingtheaffairwithwhashisname was fired. That was delicious, too, indeed. In fact, I’m going to be so damn spiteful any time something bad happens to one of the main players of this debacle, I’m spitefully glad.


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