Tag: reflexes | A Banana Peeled

In yesterday’s post, I was going to try to pair weapons with From games. I did not get there because I meandered all over the place as is my wont. In addition, there really isn’t a one-to-one comparison. Dark Souls III is my favorite From game, and the Double Saber Form is my favorite weapons form (sorry, Sword Form!). Could I make a tortured analogy between the two? Proboably. Am I going to? Probably. Does it make it right? Nope.

Here’s the thing. I have terrible reflexes and spatial issues. Both these things cause me problems in From games. They insist on putting platforming in their games, which makes me deeply unhappy. I haev banged that drum for a long time, but I’ll do it again. If you are not making a platforming game, for the love of all that is beautiful and holy, please do not put platforming in your game. Yes, I am a huge From fan, but this enrages me every time. Platforming is a precise thing that takes very talented people to do correctly. From is good at a lot of things, but platforming is not one of them. And yet. They put platforming in every fucking game. Like poison swamps, but that’s another subject for another day.

The thing is that I simply do not have the reflexes to do the perfect deflect in Sekiro, for example. I tried for hours after my medical crisis, and I could not do it. It’s not a question of try harder or better. I. Cannot. Do. It. Despite what Westerners have been told, you cannot do anything you set your mind to. Nobody can! It makes sense when you exaggerate it. I will never bin in the WNBA. I will never be a rocket scientist. These are things I cannot do because of the capped nature of my abilities. At this point of my life, I could not be a gold-winning medalist in gymnastics. I could not be a supermodel. I’m using extreme examples to just prove my general point–I literally cannot be anything I want to be. (No, I don’t want to be any of those things, but you get my main point.)

Now. In real life, reflexes don’t mean lightning-quick. When I was in a minor car crash, I saw the car coming at me at a high speed. I realized I was going to get hit. I even said it in my head–I’m going to gct hit. I instantly relaxed, and walked away with nothing but a huge bruise on my stomach. That was a real life instance in which my reflexes served me well. There was no way I could have avoided the crash, so I did the next best thing–came out of it unscathed.

where did my head go? — I’ve lost my head over this.

I’m going to start out this post talking about Dark Souls because one, I love the series and will talk about it whenever I can. Two, I had a realization today about why I’m shit at parrying (in Dark Souls), and I wanted to muse on it a bit. Yes, it falls into the Wellness category because it’s about mental health manifesting in a physical way.

Brief primer: Due to a traumatic childhood, I have an extremely high pain tolerance. I’ve mentioned this in the past that when we do chin na (joint lock) techniques on each other in taiji class, I have to be very conscious about when it’s reasonable to tap out rather than do it when I actually feel pain. In the beginning, I could only practice with my teacher because she didn’t trust that I wouldn’t get hurt else-wise. Part of that is natural flexibility in certain ways, like I can yank my thumb towards my wrist without even flinching when others jump after a little tweak. Most of it, however, was me training myself not to react to anything because I would get yelled at as a kid if I let one iota of a negative emotion show.

Come to think of it, that’s probably why I don’t talk about my depression much with anyone or I downplay it. I was either told I wasn’t feeling it when I was a kid, ignored, or scolded about it. When my mother actually did something about it, dragging me to a therapist when I was fourteen, it was at a local very religious school, and he had nothing for me. Yeah, it was a man, which only added to the problem.

I was also heavily bullied in school, and my mother gave me the age-old useless advice of ignoring it because that always works so well. The only two times I got a bully to back off (and both girls for what it’s worth) was the time I cried when a much older girl was bullying me. Her face immediately changed, and she complimented my hair and never bothered me again. This was when I was six, and the only thing I took away from that experience was that it was so embarrassing to cry in front of someone else. Much later, I realized she was probably in a not-great home situation herself, but six-year-old me couldn’t understand why a teenager would want to be so mean to her.

The second incident was in high school. There was a girl (and I still remember her name) who used to pick on me every day in science class. I want to say physics, but that detail is fuzzy. My stomach would twist in knots every time I walked into the classroom because I knew the second I stepped into the room, she would be on me. Why? Who knows? Probably because I was easy to target as an outsider (fat, Asian, smart, and not knowledgeable about American culture at all). Remember, I was also deeply depressed at this time and probably had anxiety, although I didn’t realize that I had anxiety until much later, and the last thing I needed was some bitch picking on me in class.

I snapped. One day, she started in on her usual bullshit. I grabbed her hair, yanked it back, and told her if she ever bothered me again, I would fucking kill her. She blustered something about me thinking I was so big, but I didn’t. I was just fucking tired of her picking on me every goddamn day and no one doing anything about it. She never bothered me after that, and you would think the lesson I learned from that incident was that a bully doesn’t like to be bullied, but no. I was mortified at how I acted, even though I was pushed into it.

That’s part of the problem of constantly put down–you believe it’s what you deserve, and if you stand up for yourself (the general you), it feels wrong, even if the result is positive. It’s a vicious cycle, and it keeps someone who is downtrodden firmly under other people’s feet.

Tag Archives: reflexes

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