Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: growth

FromSoft games–it’s been a journey

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I’m currently playing the OG Dark Souls (Remastered) for the first time since, ah, since I seriously tried to do a one-bro run. Months ago? Or a year? Probably months. Time has been really weird lately. So has my sleep. In part because of a personal crisis and in part because of Daylight Saving Time. I have no idea why this one has been so hard, but it really has been. For the first time since my medical crisis, my sleep has reverted to being all over the place. I still get seven to eight hours a night (mostly), but it’s interrupted and it takes me a while to actually fall asleep. Also, I snooze on and off for an hour before I finally fall asleep. I’m counting that in the seven to eight hours, by the way.

Back when I was in college, I slept four hours a night. I was so exhausted, I didn’t know which way was up. When I went home over the school breaks, I would sleep for fifteen hours the first night. And be sick, too. I was so sleep-deprived at the time. I could not sleep before midnight for anything, and I had a 7:45 class. I went to bed at three-thirty and got up at seven-thirty. I would race to class and barely made it. I drank 6 Diet Pepsis a day, starting with one as soon as I woke up.

Side note: I don’t understand why people disdain drinking a pop the first thing in the morning, but are fine with coffee. It’s the same thing you’re looking for–caffeine–juust in different forms.

I had a portable alarm clock and one morning, I woke up and could not find it. It was nowhere in sight, and I was so confused. I took about fifteen minutes trying to find it, but it wasn’t anywhere. I had a mini-fridge in my dorm room, and I kept my Diet Popsis in it. I finally gave up trying to find my alarm clock and opened theh fridge to grab a Diet Pepsi. There was my alarm clock, and I had no recollection of putting it in there.

Anyway! Back to Dark Souls Remastered. There is a game that just came out–Dragon’s Dogma II. It’s a reimaging of the first game, which came out 12 years ago. I played about ten hours of the first game and could not get into it. It has very sparse fast-travel, and the combat felt mean. Someone in the RKG Discord put it that way, and he was right. The combat was mean. FromSoft combat, for the most part, is difficult, but it’s not mean.

In fact, the main reasons I quit playing the first game was beacuse of the very sparse fast-travel points (and I cannot emphasize enough just how sparse they were. You can make your own, but those resources were even sparser) and the fact that you could not save upon quitting. Meaning, there were only save points and whenever the game deigned to save. Plus, just the sheer amount of enemies in a dense area made it a miserable experience for me. I don’t think the map was very useful, either.


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Intentional plateauing

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When I first started Taiji, my teacher talked about plateaus. Most Americans are not comfortable with no growth because we are very much a ‘do more’ society. You see it at work in that most places of employment push you to move upwards, whether you want to or not. I read about it at Ask A Manager on a regular basis; people who have no desire to move up are seen as no-getters. And, yes, I just made that up. There was a question  from someone who wanted to quit that life but was worried as to how she’d be viewed. And how she would view herself if she got a job that wasn’t high-pressured.

This leaks over into other activities, including exercise. Americans are very much no-pain, no-gain. I know people who go all out in their exercise and then get injured and cannot continue to exercise. They are forced to take time off to heal, then hop right back on that treadmill. Then, injury themselves again, rinse, lather, and repeat. By the way, I know it’s lather, rinse, and repeat, but I have bene saying/writing rinse, lather, and repeat for ages and will probably continue to do so because it’s funny.

I have never liked the ‘push yourself until it hurts’ mentality, even when I was participating in it. I knew that it wasn’t healthy to push myself to the extent I did when I was dealing with eating disorders, but that didn’t stop me from doing it. It just made me hate myself more.

When I started Taiji with this teacher, she said bluntly that Taiji was the antithesis of that. ‘No hurry, no worry’ was our motto, which was not easy to embrace. If I can do something at 6 strength, for example, wouldn’t it be better to do it at 10? Not necessarily, as it turned out.

Taiji is known as the lazy person’s martial arts because we believe in using the least amount of energy necessary for the biggest results. This was not an easy adjustment to make. I was down with it in theory because I am a lazy person by nature. Inertia is my friend, and I do not like to exert myself. However, when it comes to physical activity, I have still ingested many of the same messages that others have because they are so prevalent in our society.


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I am definitely not flawless

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For most of my life, I have been focused on all my flaws. I could barely see any of my positives and I was unhappy with myself in general. The psychologist Carl Jung talks about the shadow as the dark, negative side of a person that they either are unaware exists or actively try to deny. Usually, it’s the negative behaviors and ideas that a person does and has, including their flaws.

For me, my shadow has been my positive side. I have no problem listening my flaws and my negative attributes. I would do them at the drop of a hat and at length. I was comfortable with my negative side because I felt like I was worthy. It was drilled in my head that it was wrong to show pride in yourself. You were supposed to be humble and never brag, which morphed into the need to debase yourself in front of others lest they get the wrong idea.

Taiji helped me with that. I went from thinking that I didn’t deserve to live and that I would let someone kill me rather than fight to not wanting to fight someone, but willing to do it if necessary. I was walking the circle with DeerHorn Knives (Bagua, not Taiji) as a substitute for meditation when I couldn’t do the latter because of flashbacks. I loved the DeerHorn Knives (and I would love to have real ones, not practice ones) and walking the circle was very meditative. I focused on the middle of the circle which was where your opponent would be. I had a flash of “It’s either him or me” and  choosing me before it disappeared.

I talked about it with my teacher afterwards because it shook me up. I had been a pacifist up until that moment, so the idea that I would actually deliberately choose to kill someone rattled me. Granted, it was because he was going to kill me, but still. She said that it was common for women to be raised to be nice and to be averse to violence of any kind. It was how they were kept in place and it was based in sexism and the patriarchy. She said that she had to teach men how to CTFO and not take everything as a challenge, but she had to teach women how to be more assertive and not shy away from confrontation. Or rather, run away as the first option, but be ready to fight if need be. When she said that, it made sense. I was raised to believe that as a female-shaped person, my greatest value was in what I could do for others. I didn’t have any intrinsic value in and of myself, and I must never forget that. From the time when I was eleven and my mother made me her confidante, I was imbued with the belief that I had to do for others to be worth anything.


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The more things change

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Dying changed my life. And it didn’t. On the regular, I’m doing pretty much the same things I used to do. Writing a shit-ton of words on my computer, playing FromSoft games, cuddling with my cat, Shadow, from time to time, and nattering in the internet. Doing my hour-long Taiji routine every morning as I wake up. I eat the same thing almost every day, and I rarely go anywhere. That’s my life before I went to the hospital, and that’s mostly  my life now. I’ve added to my Taiji routine and I’m thinking of adding even more.

Right now, I’m obsessed with Chun-Li. I’ve never played a Street Fighter, but I’ve always loved her because she’s Asian and has dem thicc thighs. I also have muscular thighs, but nowhere near as thiccccc as hers. I seem to remember some fanboi angst at them slimming her thighs a bit or putting her in less revealing clothes. I don’t want to Google it, but I did. i can’t find the specific thing I was looking for, but there was the usual muttering about how she’s fat, not muscular, blah blah blah.

What the fuck ever. She’s my girl and I will not hear a word against her. I have never played any of the games, but that doesn’t matter! I wear my hair in the two buns and I have the thick thighs, plus I’m East Asian. And the boobs. How could I not be her? So I want to be known as Chunky Chun-Li.

I am so into my body right now. I don’t give a fuck if it seems like I’m arrogant. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I spent decades hating my body. I thought I was gross and disgusting, that I wasn’t fit to live. I felt like I had to apologize for taking up space. So, pardon me if I’m showing a bit of self-love.

When I realized I didn’t want to have kids, I felt a huge sense of relief. I cannot tell you how amazing it made me feel. I felt light and airy, and I had never felt better than I did in that moment. Man, did I get shot down repeatedly for responding that I didn’t want kids when asked. I tried to find other women who felt the way I did, but I could not. All the articles I read about it were of women who shamefully said  they weren’t going to have them, then provided a zillion reasons why not. I don’t blame them. It’s such a strong societal stricture: thou art destined to procreate if thou art deemed a female human.


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