In yesterday’s post, I was talking about how much martial arts mean to me. I most certainly would not be here without Taiji. I believe this to be true with 100% of my heart.
When I was in the hospital, every medical person I talked to could not believe that I had woken up from my coma. Almost everyone said that it was a miracle, and they marveled over me whenever they came tho check in on me.
I was drugged to the gills, rememmber, so I didn’t pay much attention to what they said to me. However, one thing that stuck in my brain was the survival rate of people who go into cardiac arrest. It’s 10%. Later, when I looked it up, I learned it’s not quite as dire as that. It’s 10% if no one is around. It’s 20% if it happens in a hospital (with medical personnel nearby). It’s 30% if someone applies CPR to the patient in time.
I had all that happen to me. There were cops around and I think the EMT when I had my first cardiac arrest. They applied CRP and defibbed me. I had two cardiac arrests, and they used the paddles once on me and jabbed me with an EpiPen as well. I don’t know if that was on the same cardiac arrest or on different ones, but it was a dire situation.
I know I should not be alive. I’m lucky to be alive. And yet, I’m tired.
To that end, I want to beef up my martial arts practice because it’s one of the few things that brings me joy. Or rather, not joy exactly, but peace and strength. I feel more focused and centered after my morning routine, and I am able to carry that with me throughout the day.
I do want to work on my eating habits, but I’ll get to that in a future post. This one is solely about my love for martial arts and how I want to do even more in the next year.
Before my medical crisis, I attended three classes a week. For the first several years, I only did one class a week. I added a second and then a third because I could not make myself practice at home for the life of me. I rationalized that if I went to more classes, it didn’t matter sa much if I did not practice at home.
I really wanted to do so, though. Practice at home, I mean. I knew I would benefit from it, and I could not understand why I could not make myself do it. Do you want to know how I finally did it? I told myself that I would stretch for five minutes. That’s how low a bar I set, and I still struggled to meet it.
My brain is weird in that I cannot make it do what it does not want to do. I know that makes me sound bonkers, but I have since realized that it’s common for neuroatypical people to struggle with this. It’s probably why I don’t feel like I’m creating the books/novels I write rather than I’m just the scribe, and the words flow through me.
I have to find the way to make my brain accept what I want it to do, which usually involves trickery and, indeed, pokery. Normies don’t get it, and it’s really hard to explain. In this case, me telling my brain that I would just do five minutes of stretching a day is what allowed me to start my at-home practice. I did it as soon as I got up and fed my cats/cat, and now, it’s just after I go to the bathroom and take my meds.
I have added to that five minutes bit by bit until I had a solid routine. Now, it takes anywhere from one-and-a-quarter hours to one-and-a-half hours. It went from a few stretches to me doing the whole stretching routine (twenty minutes), plus a few more tailored specifically to me (another fifteen to twenty minutes), the weapons (fifteen minutes to a half hour), and now, Bagua (fifteen to twenty minutes).
It’s automatic, and I don’t consider my morning done until I have done my routine. Doing this every day has helped me keep my body mostly pain-free. I’m fifty-three, and I looked and feel younger. People tell me I look like I’m in my forties, which is funny. When I was a kid, I always looked older than I was–until my thirties. Then I looked younger, and I give all the credit to Taiji. Well, that and my genes. Asians stay young until seventy or so and then everything falls apart. Except, that’s not even true for my mother. She’s in her eighties, but looks twenty years younger. Her hair is all white, but she’s stil mobile and active.
I look at pictures of all my friends who are near my age, and I’m shocked at how much white hair I see. My hair, on the other hand, is about fifty-fifty. I made a vow twenty years ago that once my hair turned all white, I would cut it to ear-length. Currently, it reaches mid-thigh. Honestly, I thought I would have had to cut it by now, but nope. It’s still as much black as white.
I have to say, I am proud ofmy biceps. They bulge out, and it’s not because of the light weightset I do on Wednesdays and Fridays. I tend towards muscles (it’s just my body type), and the weapons forms have helped in that area. My last ex was angry that I had bigger biceps than he did, and I couldn’t help thinking that he could lift if he wanted. He had regressive ideas about men and women, which I didn’t find out until we had been dating for a few months.
I have always been muscular, which caused me no end of grief when I was younger. I recently read in a forum someone who declared that there were jeans for everyone. She was so confident about it, and I had to laugh. How like normies to assume what was true for them was true for everyone. She made the comment with the assumption that it was harder for fat women to find jeans, but I found that it was the hardest for me when I was anoreixc (in my mid-to-late twenties). Why? Because I have very muscular calves and thighs, whereas I had no ass at the time and slim hips. I tried on dozens of pairs of jeans at one time and could not find a pair that fitted me.
I was with my then-boyfriend at Target. He picked up three or four pairs of jeans that had his waist/inseam and declared himself done. I tried maybe twenty pairs, ranging form size zero to ten, and none of them fit right. Again, it wasn’t my waist that was the issue, but my chunky thighs and calves. Anything taht fit my waist would not get past my calves and thighs. Anything big enough to slide over my calves and thighs were swimming around my ass, hips, and waist. After several hours, I gave up and decided never to wear jeans again.
I found out from my mother bringing me clothing from Taiwan (where they actually make clothes to fit Asian people) that I much prefer pants with flowing hems to jeans of any kind. Not just because jeans are hell to fit, but because I don’t like denim. I need soft fabrics, not itchy and scratchy denim. i have not worn jeans since, and I could not be happier.
That went far afield, and I am ready to go to bed. More tomorrow.