I am continuing on my martial arts journey. I’m still working on both the Cane Form and the Fan Form. I have to stop myself from rushing onto the next weapon form because I still have spots in this form that are giving me trouble. Again, I need to make sure the corrections stick in my brain and not just blithely assume that I’ll remember them by omosis.
Side note: When I was a kid, my mother was very pushy about me doing things perfectly. An A- was as bad as an F, but only for me. My brother had obvious learning disaibilities (unlike my hidden neuroatypical traits) as well as being on the spectrum, so my mother focused on him rather than me. I was just quietly deeply depressed and anxious, and I hated waking up every day of my life.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about the connection between my neurospiciness and my obsession with the weapon forms. In retrospect, it’s hard to accept that I had overlooked something so obvious about myself. To be fair to me, though, neurodiversity was not something that was talked about at all when I was a kid. In fact, I would say most people didn’t know it existed. I certainly didn’t.
Side note: I got my flu shot yesterday and was wiped out from it. I do really badly with shot, and this was no exception. I was exhausted from it and still am. This is my way of saying why I did not finish this post yesterday. Well, at least part of the reason. I’m still tired AF, but I’m going to try to write a post today.
I have felt like a dilettante for so long. I mean, I practice every day, but not super-seriously like some people. I know there are people who have made their whole life the weapons (like my teacher’s classmate), and I wish I could emulate them. That’s not the way I roll, though. I can’t put in several hours every day constantly refining my skills. I mean, I think I could, but then I would just get lost in it to a negative degree.
Obsession is a double-edged sword, pardon the pun. I have to be very careful how much I put into it because I can get drawn into it way too deep.
Side note II: When I was in my twenties, I would become obsessed with something for a short period of time and throw myself into it. One was jigsaw puzzles. Not just doing them, but collecting them. So I would get dozens on eBay and just stash them away. Another was black…ah…fake diamond?? rings. Some kind of manmade ‘gem’. Black is my favorite color and diamond is my birth gem.
No matter what the obsession was, it wasn’t the object itself that I lusted after–it was just me trying to fill the hole in my heart. Intellectually, I knew that nothing material could make me happy, but it didn’t stop me from trying.
I used to be anorexic/bulimic, too. And the obsession took me over in much the same way. When I wasn’t obsessing over the food I was (or wasn’t) eating or exercising fervently, I was spending hours looking up picttures of trifle. Yes, this sounds weird, but it’s not once you think about it. If you severely restrict something for a person, they are going to hyperfocus on it. In this case, food. It’s now common knowledge that anorectic people can get very obsessed with food. Many like to cook food and watch other people eat food.
Again, it makes sense. The more time you think about something, especially restricting something, the more time your brain is stuck on the very thing you’re trying to expunge from it. It’s the same with people who think sex is terrible–and can’t stop going on and on about it at length. I remember there was a right-wing Republican a few decades ago had a talk show in which he ranted for hours every day about what gay men did. At length. In vivid detail.
I made a quip to a friend at the time that gay men didn’t think as much about gay sex that this man did. Not to say he was gay himself because I didn’t believe that was necessarily true, but because he was so terrified about gay sex existing. Or probably sex in general if he was a Christian. So any time sexy thoughts came to his mind, he had to stuff them to the back of his mind. And the more he stuffed them back there, the more he thought about it.
Back to my weapon forms. I think about them a lot, obviously. I get sucked into one particular form. Right now, it’s the Double Fan Form, and I have included a video of one such Double Fan Form above. In this case, though, I’m not trying to fill a hole in my heart. This is not beacuse I’m missing something or lacking of something. Well, I mean, I am. I am lacking a nice fan, for instance, but not somethnig material. Yes, a nice fan is material (and made of material), but the reason I want a nice one is not because it’s nice. It’s because well-made weapons feel better in my hands. They move better, and they last longer. I have several cheap fans that are in various amounts of decay/dishevelement because I’m hard on my weapons. And, to be quite frank, from ordinary wear and tear.
I will admit there are some fans made of titanium that are more flash than substance–well, they’re probably very sturdy, but they are pricy AF. I did not balk at paying a decent amount for my sword or saber, but that feels different for some reason. I did just buy an aluminium alloy fan for a mid-price, and we’ll see what I think of it. It’s not like my cheapo fans, but it’s not expensive enough for me to be distraught if it turns out to be shitty.
I feel like in the last two or three months, I have gone from being interested in weapons to being INTERESTED in weapons. I can’t quite quantify what that means, but I have to take some time to get used to it. I am trynig not to gush about it too much or be too tedious about it, but it’s almost always on my mind. I am in the infatuation stage (again), and I’m fine with that.