I am still working on finessing my Fan Form. At the same time, I was fucking up a few steps in the Cane Form, so I went back to watch the videos I had taken of my teacher doing the form. There is one simple movement that I forgot when I first learned the Cane Form, and while I focused on it in re-teaching myself, I forgot about it again soon after. And I’m practicing it every day! Right side one day, left side the next. I don’t know when I fogrot the movement, but now I’m committed to watching the video every day for at least a week in order to cement it in my mind.
It’s frustrating that’s it’s the easiest movement in the form, too. Well, in the top five, at any rate. I’ll see if I can describe it. Imagine facing forward with the cane held in the right hand, left hand lightly touching the right hand. I’m lunging forward with the cane pointing up in the air and to the left side of my face. It’s the next posture that I keep forgetting. In it, I step forward with my left foot and swing the cane to the right side and move it to a horizontal position.
Before I continue, here is the post from yesterday. In it, I mentioned finding the Double Fan Form, and I will include a video of one such form below.
It is so unbelievably easy, and that’s probably why I forget it. As I have established in prior posts, I tend to let my mind wander when something is easy. If it’s hard, I will focus and pay attention. But if it’s simple, then my brain tells me that I can learn it while only half paying attention.
Side note: I have recently fully realized that I am neurospicy. I have not been tested for it, but in talking with a friend about her neurospiciness, I’ve slowly come to realize that I am probably autistic. I used to suspect I had ADHD, but I had no clue about autism because I had bought into the stereotypes of what it looked like. Young white boys who stimmed, wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye, and had no capacity for empathy.
In the last year or so, I have researched it and talked about it endlessly with my friend. She sent me a few quizzes to take, and I score firmly in the autism camp. She explained to me that especially in non-men, the symptoms were very different. Also, it’s not that autistic people don’t have empathy, indeed, they can feel it more deeply than neurotypical people. It’s just that in our society with all the rules and regulations we have about social etiquette, many neuroatypical people don’t know the “appropriate” (in quotes because it’s all constructed) way to show those feelings in society.
The reason I stress the gender difference is because many women, AFAB people, and other non-male people have been pushed/nagged into/pressured to caretake when it comes to other people’s emotions. When I took the tests my friend sent me, she told me to try to take them without the mask of catering to other people’s emotions.
I tried, but I had a really difficult time doing it. It’s become so automatic for me to mask by this time that I can’t NOT do it in front of others. So questions like, “I don’t know how to react in social situations” get me. Because I do know how to react, but it’s not authentic. It’s because I paid a very heavy price for not reacting ‘properly’ when I was younger. I was not allowed to show any negative emotions without being shouted at for it.
In talking with my friend about it, I said that when I was a kid, I felt like an alien in a human body. I had to watch the other kids around me and mimic them as best I could, but I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing. It didn’t help that I was a second generation immigrant of very dysfunctional people who isolated themselves and my brother and me in their primary culture. Everything was about face–and not losing it. And because I was a girl, I had the double burden of having to be ‘nice’.
When I was seven or eight, I used to pray every night that God would turn me into a boy. Not because I thought I was one or felt like one, but because I hated being a girl with all the restrictions that were placed on me by my parents and the members of their very sexist, conservative, abusive Taiwanese church. I hated myself by the time I was seven and wanted to die. This is the background to me not realizing that I was neurospicy until I was in my thirties. Then, I thought that maybe I had ADHD, but I didn’t feel it was worth it to pursue a diagnosis.
Now, two decades later, I’m trying to wrap my brain around the idea that I may be autistic. And how to ever let that mask drop. I have learned how to accommodate it to the point that I can’t NOT do it. I have always thought that everything wrong in my relationship was because I was wrong and broken. This is very common with autistic people, by the way. They are so used to being misunderstood and people reacting with disgust/contempt or at the very best, nonunderstanding.
The reason I bring this up while talking about weapon forms is because one thing that is very typical for neuroatypical people is to have obsessive interests. Both autistic people and people with ADHD. With the latter, the stereotype is the person who’s attention is all over the map. In tandem with that, though, is that when a person with ADHD finds something they really like, they become hyperfocused on it. This is the part that is never talked about. And it’s why girls/non-boys are often overlooked when it comes to ADHD. Because of the aforementioned training, girls are molded into being more pliant, obedient, and still. Thus, they go under the radar when it comes to neurospiciness.
My love of the martial arts weapons is part of that umbrella of obsessiveness.
Ok. Something is up with Word Press I think. I pressed published, but now this is saying it’s not published. More on this in the next post.