I’m tired. That’s not what this post is about, but it’s very true. I got a decent amount of sleep last night, and I’m feeling better than I have in the past few days. Sleep really does make a difference–who knew? (Once again, everyfuckingbody!) I have never felt better in my life than the few months after my medical crisis because of the eight hours ofsleep I got a night for months after. It was terrific, I’ll be honest. Yes, my body was beat up and broken from what it went through, but my god. Going to bed at ten p.m. and getting up at six a.m. for several months was glorious.
Ahem.
Back to the point of my post. I want to talk about how easy it is to go down a rabbit hole when it comes to surfing the net. Let’s take YouTube. The way the home page is laid out, there are dozens of videos visible. And, you can scroll down to infinity if you want. Of course, the algorithms will show you videos based on what you’ve watched, so you can have interesting content for dozens of hours. If you say no to certain videos, you just hone your algorithm to give you more of what you want.
Which is not a bad thing, per se, but it means that for those of us who can get hyperfocused on things, it’s not great. By the way, I just learned that in the aautism/ADHD community, there’s a difference between hyperfixations and special interests. The former are obsessions that last from a few weeks to a month or two. The latter is a hobby that consumes you for years. It explained so much for me personally.
Some hyperfixations I’ve had in the past: black diamond rings (not real diamonds, obviously); jigsaw puzzles; cute boxers; stuffed pigs. The last might have been more of a special interest because it lasted quite some itme, but I wasn’t constantly obsessed with it. It’s just that I was born in the year of the pig, and I felt an affinity to them. I also had a hyperfixation with kids books, mainly ones I read when I was a kid.
On the other hand, my special interests have lasted for years. At least two of them. Those would be video games (mostly FromSoft games and indie games) and Taiji weapons. That’s a subset of my interest in Taiji in general, but I’m all about the weapons. I don’t know if I would lump in my interest in Bagua in with my interest in Taiji, but they are at least adjacent to each other.
I probably would put them together in the category of internal martial arts because they are in the same category. However, they are very different to each other. On the third hard, my interest in the weapons for each is similar. Since I’m done teaching myself the Bagua Knives Form, I have my eye on a Double-Headed Spear Form (Bagua) to teach to myself next. But not until next year. I’m being very conservative about how often I teach myself new weapon forms because my teacher warned me not to just add them thoughtlessly. Her point was that it was better to learn one slowly and well before moving onto the next than to just learn them as quickly as possible.
I’m weird in that I don’t necessarily bury myself in my obessesions. Meaning, I practice every day, and it was getting to be too much for me (doing four or five weapon forms a day), so I pared it down two or three a day. That’s much more manageable, and it made me fall in love with the weapons again. I also do forty-five minutes of warmups/stretches and solo forms. This means a total of about an hour and fifteen minutes–which is much better.