Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Wellness

Less is (sometimes) more, part three

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I want to talk more about weapon forms because I can. Here was yesterday’s post on the same subject. When I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form, I naively thought that it wouldn’t be too difficult. After all, I taught the Fan Form to myself with relative ease.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. I did teach it to myself fairly effortlessly I thought. But then, a year or so later, I was going to teach myself the left side. I started running into places where I could not do it because I had been fudging it on the right side. This was roughly halfway through the form. I decided to go back to the video and refresh my memory.

Much to my surprise, I realized t hat I had forgotten whole chunks of the Fan Form. I remember teaching it to myself, but I had no memory of those missing postures themselves. There was a chunk in the middle of the  form and another chunk at the end. I took a deep breath and taught the whole form to myself again. I took extra pains to make sure that I had it in my body and was not just fudging postures when I didn’t get them.

It’s hard because my teacher believes in learning the whole form first and then refining it after. Which is great when there’s the opportunity to practice it in class every week. However, when I’m doing it on my own, it’s harder. Yes, I can watch the videos I have in a pinch, but I will say that it doesn’t completely replace in-person teaching.

Also, the obvious problem with teaching myself is that I can’t see what I can’t see. What I mean is that I can’t tell when I’m making mistakes or not doing a posture right. Of course, I could do the form for my teacher–if she knows it. She does not know the Double Fan Form, which I’m making my way towards in this post.

Once I had the Fan Form in my body, I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form. I also wanted to teach myself the Double Sword Form, but there’s no official form. I also wanted to finish teaching myself the Karambit Form, the Guandao Form, and I’m messing around with a Karambit/Fan Form.

That’s too much. While I can probably teach myself two forms at the same time, I don’t think I would do justice to either. Plus, it would probably take twice as long as it would to teach myself one. So, obviously, doing two back-to-back would take just as much time if not less than trying to teach myself two forms at once.

I’m so impatient, though. I’m like the kid in a candy store in that I want it all. Now! I have taught myself several different forms, or at least part of them. Wu-Li Dancing Sword, which is very short; halfish of the Karambit Form (I thought I had taught myself all but the very end); Fan Form; Cane Form (with the saber, so technically Saber Form); and the second half of the Double Saber Form. Oh, and I’ve taught myself the left side of the Sword Form, Saber Form, Cane Form, and Cane Form with the saber. Oh, and the last third or so of the Swimming Dragon Form, hands only, Bagua.


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Less is (sometimes) more, part two

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A few days ago, I wrote a post about how I’ve pared down my daily Taiji/Bagua routine. For the past year or so, I had been feeling a bit of a slight drag when I did my morning routine. Instead of looking forward to and being eager to do it every morning (well, really afternoon, so it’s morning only colloquially), I did it with a sigh and a heavy heart.

I still wanted to do it, mind. I was just burned out.

Here goes the backstory.

I have OCD tendencies. It’s not full-blown OCD, and it’s probably not diagnosable. When I mentioned it to my therapist a few decades ago (then-therapist), she said to me in a stern tone, “You know you don’t actually have OCD, right?”

Yes, I know that. But I have OCD tendencies, and I am internally obsessed with many things. I have learned to keep it mostly to myself and to gauge how much to let out without seeming ‘weird’. Also, probably autistic, but that’s more likely to be diagnosable.

I could talk about my martial arts weapons all day long. Not the technical aspects, but the beauty of them and what they mean to me. I like to joke that they’re my romantic relationships, but it’s not far from the truth. What I mean is that each weapon stirs something in me that I could conceivably slap a romantic label on it.

The Sword Form is my first love. I have such warm feelings for it. No, it’s not the most exciting form any longer, but it’s the weapon form that started my love for the weapons. I have told this story a million times, but I’ll tell it once again.

A year or two after I started Taiji, I graduated from the Solo Long Form. All that means is that I learned the sequence–not that I was any good at it. Soon after, my teacher mentioned it was time to learn the Sword Form. I resisted. While I had started studying Taiji because I wanted to be able to defend myself and really liked the idea of learning the combat applications, I recoiled from the very idea of doing weapons.

I was a pacifist at the time, and weapons seemed too violent to me. It was only when I was walknig the circle with the deerhorn knives (Bagua, not the point of this post) as my meditation that I had an ideology-changing moment. I was focusing on the ‘opponent’ in the middle of the circle as I walked. In a second, I thought, “If it’s you or me–it’s going to be me.” Meaning, if it was the opponent’s life or mine, mine was going to win.


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Less is (sometimes) more

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I have been doing my Taiji/Bagua routine every morning (well, early afternoon because I don’t get up in the morning), and I have slowly been adding to it in the last decade.

It’s amusing to me that I couldn’t force myself to do five minutes of practice when I first started studying Taiji. For whatever reason, my brain just rejected any thought of practicing at home. Because of that, I added another class per week to attend, and then one more. Then, pandemic and everything went online.

That was when I got serieous about my weapons. Before that, I loved them, yes, but I wasn’t intense about it. Scratch that. I was intense about it, but I wasn’t yet obsessed. During the lockdown, however, I got very into the Double Saber Form–which was what my teacher had been teaching me when we went into lockdown.

I still had my private lessons with her, but they were online rather than in person. Plus, her Double Saber Form was not the best as she does not care as much for the weapons. It took me a long time to realize that because she was careful to be enthusiastic about them when I gushed over my love for them.

About halfway through the form, my teacher just stopped teaching it to me. It took me a while to realize that it was because we had hit the limit of what she knew of the form. Her classmate had done the Double Saber Form at their school’s demonstration a few months before the world shut down. I had fallen instantly in lust, and I knew I had to have that in my life.

I bugged my teacher to teach it to me until she gave in. When we reached the point where she was no longer comfortable teaching me the form, I starting it to myself. I asked my teacher if she was ok with it, and she was. I don’t know why I asked her, but the best I can come up with was that I felt it was the respectful way to deal with it.

I have continued to ask her before teaching myself a form. Again, I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s out of respect. And  I have acknowledged to myself that not only am I more interested in weapons than she is, but…I have a hard time writing it or speaking it into existence, but it’s true: some of my weapon forms are better than hers.

It sounds like heresy to me because she’s my teacher.  She’s been studying Taiji for over thirty years (I think). How dare I say that any of my Taiji is better than hers? Here’s the thing, though. I have put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into my weapon forms, and I know that she pays more attention to her hands-only forms. It’s just a case of difference preferences.


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Figuring out I was neurodivergent

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I’m in my mid-fifties and just coming to grips with me being neurodivergent. I spent most of my early days thinking there was something seriously wrong with me, which I touched on in past posts. In the last one, I talked about how my mother’s very old-fashioned Taiwanese expectations of gender really messed me up. Add to that the fact that I was a weirdo to begin with, and my childhood was miserable.

I remember when I was six or seven, I was on the playground at school during recess. I looked around me and realized that I felt like an alien amongst the humans. Everyone else seemed like they knew what they were supposed to do whereas I was floundering at everything. My parents had no interest in American culture, which meant I was clueless about it as well.

I was also whip smart, which was not a good thing when I was trying to fit in.
I may have been book smart, but I was very people ignorant. I did not know what to say to the other kids, and I was miserable all the time. I had two teachers, one in the fifth grade and one in the sixth, who were really kind to me. I didn’t like the attention at the time, but in retrospect, they were examples of good men.

I had no friends as a kid. I didn’t know how to talk to American kids, and they did not know what to do with me. I got teased for being Asian, and when I brought food to school, I got made fun of for that as well. I was one of maybe three Asian kids in my grade, and that did nothing to help my low self-esteem.

I was good at school, and I was beaten down emotionally by the time I was in school, so most teachers just ignored me. Except the two I mentioned above. I was also bored because I learned very quickly, and back in those days, no one paid much attention to the smart kids.

I did have a reading class in the first grade that was just me and another kid–a boy who was also very smart. We read books that were way above our grade level, and that was my one refuge during the day. I was a voracious reader and tackled War and Peace in the sixth grade because it was the biggest book I knew of. I made it halfway through before realizing I had no clue what was going on because everyone had so many nicknames, so I gave up.

I also read The Scarlet Letter around that time, and even though I did not know much about sex and gender, I was appalled that Hester Prynne took the brunt of the blame. That never made sense to me, and it makes even less sense to me now.

I wasted so much time as a child and teen filing off all my rough edges, watching the others around me, and trying desperately to fit in. I didn’t realize that it was a fool’s errand because no matter how blunted I made myself, it was not going to matter in the long run. I could not twist myself into a tight enough pretzel to fool the normies.


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Thinking more about love, part two

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Yesterday, I wrote about love in the context of family. Here is the post in which I mused about how complicated it can get and how we don’t talk about the fact that some parents don’t love their children. When I state plainly that my parents don’t love me, even my closest friends have a hard time not rushing in to assure me it’s not the case.

Here’s the thing. I don’t say it to get pity or in an emo way. I’m saying it as factual. My parents don’t love me because they don’t know me. What’s more, they never wanted to know the true me, and at this point in my life, there is no positive to trying to share anything of importance with them.

As I mentioned in the last post, my mother became a mother because it was what was expected of her. Also, she never felt loved in her family, and I think she believed this was the way to earn that love. It didn’t work. My grandmother was also a self-centered, unloving person who bought into the sexist bullshit that boy children were more important/valuable than girl children. She had no interest in me at all. The three or four times I saw her, I don’t think she said one single word to me.

My mother never felt loved by her mother, and I think part of her rabid obsession with being a mother was to create a bond with her mother. The day I turned 26, my mother commented that she had my brother at that age. Which, fine. Whatever. I tucked it away as a fun little fact, but little did I know that was going to be my mother’s mantra for the next fifteen years–trying to get me pregnant, I mean.

By this time, she had moved back to Taiwan. Almost every time we talked, she brought up me having children. When my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, my mother commented that she (my grandmother) would love to be a great-grandmother before she died. She heavily implied that I, as the oldest granddaughter, should be the one to have the child. I jokingly said that it would take too long for me to get married and have a child, but I could do it on my own if she liked.

I was only joking because my family on my mother’s side is deeply evangelical/conservative Christian. The idea of having children outside of marriage (to a person of the opposite gender) was unthinkable. Much to my shock, my mother said she thought her mother would be fine with that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “Wow, nice to know her morals are so easily discarded.”


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Thinking about love again

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I was reading random Ask A Manager posts as is my wont. One was from a woman whose mother was telling her that the reason she could not get hired is because she (the writer) was fat. The writer was also multiracial (black and white) and gay. So, of course, I instantly felt a kinship. People were rightly indignant on her behalf, and it got me thinking about my relationship with my mother (again). I had read the post before and usually ignored it when it came up again (when I hit the random post button) because it really touched a nerve. For whatever reason, I read it this time, and I am musing about my relationship with my mother.

That’s not unusual–me thinking about my relationship with my mother, I mean. It’s been tumultuous (at best) for my entire life. She called me a few hours ago atnd is her wont, dumped all her big feelings on me. She does this every time we talk. In fact, that’s the reason she calls me. I know it; she knows it; and it’s worse when she tries to pretend it’s not true.

The reason I was thinking about this post was because of one particular comment. This comment about how the commenter’s mother would have said something similar, but it would have come from a place of love. The commenter mentioned how she would deal with it, then acknowledged it would be harder if someone’s mom was deeply insecure or did not have the OP’s best interest at heart (paraphrased).

She could not bring herself to write down the obvious (or didn’t even think of it): maybe the mother does not love the writer. Now, in that particular case, I don’t think it’s necessarily true. However, there are plenty of mothers who do not love their children. And fathers. I am ‘lucky’ in that I have both a father and mother who do not love me as a person.

In ome ways, it’s easier to deal with my father. He has always been a deeply self-centered person who did not give two figs about anyone else. He was dependent upon my mother to make his life run smoothly (and his secretary when he was the president of an ecoonomic research center), but he did not love her as a person. In fact, his only use for people is what they can do for him.

Right now, deep in his dementia, he is fixated with me going to visit them. It’s not because he misses me as a person, though, but because as an insatiable extrovert, he’s desperately lonely. And one thing a child should be doing for him is paying him undivided attention. He has no inteerst in me as a person; he never has. He could not name five facts about me–even before he got dementia.


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Double Fan Form humbles me, part two

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Back to write more about the Double Fan Form. Here is my post from yesterday in which I wander all over the place, but my main point was how I’m still struggling. A lot. I had to go back and rework a couple postures because I had learned them incorrectly. It’s not unusual to have to do some refinements, but I’m learning it wrong more than I have any other form.

In the past, I have taught myself new postures in a form on a daily basis. Unless I’m retconning my memories (which is very possible). As I mentioned yesterday, I inhaled the Sword Form (my first form) from the second my teacher put a wooden sword in my hand. I could not get enough of it, and I knew I wanted more of that in my life. I learned it in a very short amount of time.

Then, I taught myself the left side in a similarly short amount of time. In fact, the only time I got stuck was with the easiest posture in the form. That’s because I probably didn’t pay enough attention while learning it on the right side. It was easy! Why would I need to concentrate on learning it? Because it wasn’t as easy as I thought it was. Or rather, reversing it wasn’t that easy.

Besides that hiccup (which took me twenty minutes to get over), I had no problem teaching myself the left side of the Sword Form. I don’t want to guess how long it took me to teach myself the Sword Form on both sides, but in retrospect, it feels like it was a breeze.

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that even with the dreaded Saber Form, the form that I struggled with the most as I was learning it, I did not have trouble learning the form itself. It was more that I did not feel comfortable doing it, but I learned the postures fairly easily.

In the case of the Double Fan Form, I am making slow and steady process, yes, but it’s so very slow. And it’s not always progress. I’m frustrated, which is not something I usually feel whilst teaching myself a new form. Or learning a new form.

When my teacher said (wrote) spontaneously, “Wow, this is really hard!”, I felt a sudden burst of relief. I had been struggling with it for a month, and I was feeling downtrodden. This is one of the difficulties with learning things easily, I sometimes lack the grit to buckle down when things aren’t breezy from the get-go.


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Double Fan Form is double hard for me

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I am still pushing forward with the Double Fan Form, and it is still kicking my ass. I wrote about it a few days ago in this post. I mean, I’ve written about it before, but that was the latest time I’ve written about it.

I was naive and a bit cocky when I started teaching myself the form. As I said in yesterday’s post, I’m used to learning forms at a fast pace. Even the Saber Form, which I did not get at all, I was at least learning the postures pretty easily–until the end of the fourth (of six) rows. That’s where there is the most difficult movement, and my teacher quit teaching the form to me at that point. In part because I got into a minor car accident and needed to take a break from it, but moreso because she did not feel comfortable with that posture/movement. She didn’t tell me that until much later.

My teacher does not like the weapons. I didn’t realize that until much later because, of course, she isn’t going to tell me that. I found out when she was teaching me the Double Saber Form. We made it roughly halfway through and then the pandemic hit (I think that’s the timeline). She sent out a video of her teacher doing the Double Saber Form. I asked if I could teach myself the rest, and she immediately said I could.

I ask her because I feel it’s respectful to her as my teacher. We are also friends, but it just feels right to me. She always says yes and is happy that I am expanding my knowledge on my own. She’s thrilled that I am getting even more into weapons, though it’s not her first love. Or her tenth, I think. I get the feeling that she only does them because her teacher insists on it. And maybe because she realized that it’s a part of the martial art(s).

I know she really respects her teacher, so it’s probably in large  part because he wants her to learn the weapons. She’s talked to him about me teaching myself various weapons, and he told her that if I ever wanted to go to his classes, he would be more than happy to have me. He’s a huge weapon freak, too. And he’s very excited that I’m teaching myself the Double Fan Form.

I have to say, when I look back at my bumpy road to where I am now, I would never have dreamed that I would fall in love with the weapons like that. And after my struggles with the saber (my second weapon form learned), I was humbled.


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My memory is Swiss cheese (with reason)

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I have been trying to find my passport because–well, reasons. I had a dim memory of it being in my underwear drawer and thoroughly dug through it. It was not there. Then, I thought, maybe I put it in a different drawer? I checked all of them. Not there. Hm. Maybe my desk? I had a hazy memory of putting it in my desk drawer, ‘hidden’ in something. Nope. Not there, either. I checked all the drawers several times.

I thought about it for the next few days, and then it hit me. It was probably downstairs in the safe! I went downstairs, but the safe was not where it usually was. I was so puzzled until I remembered that my brother and I had put it in one of the many boxes on the floor (mostly filled with books). I opened all the boxes, rummaging through them. I could not find the safe. I went through all of them again, and I still could not find the safe.

I called my brother to ask him if he remembered putting the safe into one of the boxes. He said yes. He said we did not bury it in anything, either. I went back down to look yet again, but I could not find it.

I was so frustrated and mad as hell. Mostly at myself! I know that my memory is shit since my medical crisis. I’m not mad at losing my memory because it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make for regaining my life. Easy choice, right?

I compensate by writing shit down if I need to do something or be somewhere at some point in time. However, I have not trained my brain yet that I also need to write down shit like this. Though, to be fair to me, I hid my passport before the medical crisis.

I did know that I had a valid passport in 2018 when I went to Malta. I vaguely remembered that it was new, but I wasn’t sure about that. I hadn’t used it for several years before that, and it’s not something I have to think about in my day-to-day.

I was frustrated, but I didn’t think anything would be helped by me going through the boxes for a fourth time.

My brother was in the neighborhood tonight (kind of ), so he stopped by. I haven’t seen him in a hot sec because he’s been busy, busy, busy–which is his standard MO. We got to talking aabout my passport and my frustrations with not being able to find it. My brother being who he is said immediately, “Want to go look for it?”


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Double Fan Form is still kicking my ass

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I am still working on the Double Fan Form, albeit very slowly. I have taught myself 18 out of 48 postures, so I’m over a third of the way through. That’s being very generous to myself, though, because I have had to go over several postures several times.

Here’s the thing.

*Looks both ways before whispering*

Most of the forms have been easy for me to learn. Long Solo Form? Fairly easy. Sword Form? Really easy. Saber Form was frustrating as fuck because I did not get it and did not like the way it felt, but it wasn’t hard to learn the postures themselves.

When I decided to learn Bagua in addition to Taiji, that was definitely a mind shift. It’s a very diffeernt martial art (much more aassertive whereas Taiji is, well, not passive, but receptive), and I had to adjust to that (not to mention different weighting of the feet. In Taiji, it’s usually 70/30 front/back. In Bagua, on the other hand, it’s 40/60 front/back. Which is a massive adjustment.

Once I got more used to it, though, I found learning the Swimming Dragon Form to be pretty smooth and intuitive. There are a few postures that messed with my mind, but for the most part, I didn’t have too much trouble learning the postures/movements.

Side note: I have to take a minute to explain that my teacher considers being taught each posture to having learned the form. She will say you’ve graduated once she teaches you the last posture. That doesn’t mean you know the form, obviously, but it’s still a good feeling.

The Fan Form was the first form I taught myself after my medical crisis. I taught it to myself in roughly thrree months, but then forgot chunks of it over time. Recently, I was teaching myself the left side when I realized that I had started fudging some of the right side. So I taught it to myself over again. I had to clear up a lot, but it’s much stronger now. I’ve been teaching myself the Double Fan Form since at least my birthday (a little before that, I think), which is a month-and-a-half ago. If I continue apace, then it’ll be four-and-a-half months total.Maybe it’ll get easier the longer I learn it; I can dream, right?

It’s completely possible, however, that it’ll get harder later on because that’s how the forms usually go. It makes sense, really. The first third or so of the form is the tutorial, to use game-speak. It’s to ease you into the form so you don’t feel overwhelmed. This is the case especially for the Solo Form. That’s the first form you learn in Taiji, and it’s the basis for all the other forms. It has three sections. The first is very basic and so gently eases you into it. Most people* can do Taiji in one way or another. My teacher was willing and eager to adapt the form to her students (concerning disabilities), which I really appreciated.


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