One thing I need to remind myself is that I can’t learn it all at one time. Martial art weapon forms, I mean. There are so many I want to learn, and it’s sometimes dauntting/discouraging to realize that I probably won’t learn them all in my lifetime.
Something I want to talk about first, though. It was what I brought up previously about taking this long to feel like I’m actually not a newbie/novice with the weapons. I talked about why that might be, but one thing I did not bring up was my suspected neurodivergence.
I knew from a pretty young age that there was something wrong with me. Or rather, that I didn’t fit in with society around me. There are several reasons for it–notably, being 2nd generation Taiwanese American in a VERY white suburb in Minnesota–but one I did not figure out until relatively recently is that my brain doesn’t work the way other people’s do. I mean, I knew at a young age that I thought differently than other people, but my conclusion was that my brain was broken or that I was wrong.
As a result, I studied people around me and started mimicking them. This wasn’t a conscious decision at the time, but a way to survive in a world that was very much not made for someone like me. It’s called masking, a term I learned in the last few years as I’ve researched neurodivergency.
There are many ways that I mask because I belong in several different minority categories, plus the way I think is weird in general. I don’t see societal norms as a positive, but I have learned to keep that to myself. What do I mean by that? I mean that I never wanted to get married and have children as an example. This is something that is venerated in both of my cultures (Taiwanese and American) to a ridiculous degree. My mother drummed it into my head at a very early age that my only value as a (perceived) woman was to get married and procreate. Oh, I had to go to college and get educated, but that was as a backdrop to me meeting the man (had to abe a man, of course) of my dreams and popping out the children soon thereafter.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. My mother mentioned that she had my brother at my age when I turned twenty-six and then would not stop pushing me to have children for the next fifteen years. Almost every time we talked on the phone, she would somehow push her agenda. One time when I had a serious boyfriend (and I had been very vocal about not wanting children) who said that maybe he wanted to have children (after initially saying he didn’t want them), my mother said that maybe we could compromise and have one child.