Month 12: Halfway There

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12, Month 18}

I’ve completed a full year of Ving Tsun Kung Fu training. Me. The chronically ill suburban mother of two whose favorite activities include cupcakes and not running.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this, notions that have been tumbling around in my head like drunken june bugs for weeks, cheerfully mocking all of my efforts to wrassle them into cohesive narrative for a blog post because I’d rather poke my eyeballs out than go all Buzzfeed and write a damn listicle.

But ya know what?

- Ving Tsun has taught me how to pick my battles. Don’t try to force something to work that’s not supposed to work, whether it be a palmstrike that can’t get through or a blog post. So fine. Fine. Listicle it is, and I’ll just try to find a way to sleep at night.

- They’re not fat rolls, they’re Muscle Bumpers™. Kung Fu training has done a lot to deprogram a lifetime of internalized body-shame. I’m a big ol’ gal, always have been, and while my training has added pounds of muscle it hasn’t subtracted much fat. Probably I could lose some of the extra curves if I liked ice cream a little less, but that’s not even an argument worth making because it involves less ice cream. And, also, because who cares? My body is a gloriously mighty machine capable of doing just about anything I ask of it. Which is mind-blowing to someone who, just a year ago, spent more days limping than not.

I’m healthier today than I have ever been. Not just healthier compared to a year ago, but compared to the entirety of my adult life. Speaking as someone with a chronic illness, who will be some kind of sick every day for the rest of forever, that’s pretty freaking awesome.

So if this amazing collection of muscle and bone and blood that I get the privilege of driving around this world has some lumpy bits that aren’t conventionally pleasing to the eye, that’s the viewer’s problem. Not mine.

- I’m tougher than I ever thought I could be. If I look back over the past twelve months and squint a little, I can see the early days when every single class sent me home with sore forearms that would be all the colors of the bruise rainbow by morning. Nowadays, I typically don’t bruise unless I’ve been handing out bruises, too.

But it’s not just the physical. I’m tougher on the inside, too. Everyday crap that used to make my head pop clean off is now more likely to get a raised eyebrow, a deep breath, and Dealt With. Because, honestly, if it’s not trying to hit me, how bad can it be? And if it is trying to hit me, well, probably I can hit it back.

- I’m stronger than I know. Not like in a badass kung fu warrior way, so much as in an oversized puppy way. I’ve had multiple fellow students comment on my strength. Some have asked me to go easier during drills. One even used the word “brutal”, in a breathy-laughing please-stop-hurting-me kind of way. I’d like to take these moments as compliments to my training, but there’s this voice in the back of my head that worries VERY LOUDLY about accidentally hurting people.

I grew up a girl, so I’ve heard it all my life. Don’t play too rough, it’s not ladylike. Don’t show off how strong you are, you’ll scare off all the boys. Don’t be too pushy. Don’t be bossy. Don’t take up so much space. Don’t don’t don’t be anything but small and quiet and non-confrontational. It’s always gone against my nature (my body is built big, my voice is a natural megaphone, and I’m contrary as hell), but it’s what I heard, so it's what I hear. Now, it tells me to go easy during kung fu drills. To not play so rough. I can grind my teeth and ignore it, but the teeth, they are a-grindin’.

Luckily, there’s always some iron-armed sihing available to knock me around and remind me that A) I’m nowhere near the strongest beast in the room, and B) never, not once in the past year, have they ever gone easy on me. They may have taken a drill slow for the sake of getting the technique right, but they always kept their hands solid. There is patience in their strength; I try to remember that.

I’m stronger than I think I am, which means that my thinking needs to catch up with my muscles. Then, hopefully, I’ll develop the sensitivity to be able to trust myself not to accidentally hulk out on some poor unsuspecting sidai.

Just a few of the folks who have to listen to my teeth grind. They're the true heroes of this tale.

- Competence is a fickle mistress. I’m starting to understand the idea of my kung fu, my application of the techniques and how my body translates the movements. I’m developing expectations of my own performance. And getting frustrated when I don’t meet my own arbitrary expectations.

At this point, I’ve learned a lot of the pieces of the kung fu puzzle. Enough to get the notion that I’ll be shuffling them around and finding new ways to fit them together for the rest of forever. When it comes to the basic stuff, the drills that I learned in my first few months of training, I have a half-baked idea of what I’m doing. I’m competent.

Competent enough to have a little bit of pride in it. Competent enough that, on the rare occasions when a training partner looks at me in all my mom-shaped glory and assumes that I don’t know what I’m doing or that I can’t handle a drill, I can feel the sharp edges of my slow-spreading smile and know that I’m about to set somebody’s wrong head on straight. Few things in life give me more joy.

Naturally, it is in these moments that my disease may choose to demonstrate its fine sense of ironic timing. Sometimes, I measure off with Assumey McPreconceivedNotions, fully prepared to hold my own and show them that behind this maternal facade beats the heart of a badass, when that badass heart will skip a beat. Or my lungs will gasp and my hands will shake. Or maybe the lupus fog will ambush me and all I can do is watch (from the bench) as all of my hard-won competence drains away in a whirlpool of sudden fatigue and clumsy limbs and I seriously could chew nails and SPIT BULLETS in those moments.

This is why it’s good to have just a little pride. Makes it easier to swallow.

- Time doesn’t mean what it used to mean. If you had asked me twelve months ago if I’d still be training in Kung Fu right now, not just training but geeking out about it, signing up for seminars, tumbling down rabbitholes of kung fu videos, well … I would’ve tried to distract you with a cookie, because the answer would’ve been “no” and I wasn’t as good at saying that word a year ago as I am now.

Every second of training has the potential to go on for eternity, like cold molasses made of fire ants that march endlessly over you searing skin as your face contorts into a rictus of grim death and let’s just say conditioning is my least favorite part of class, okay? And yet somehow I blinked my sweat-stung eyes and BOOM! A year is behind me. This phenomenon isn’t new to me; I’ve got two kids who are all weird smells and bony knees now, but I swear that just yesterday they were drooling lumps of cuddly screaming biscuit dough. I know from time warps. It’s just that it never occurred to me that they could apply to physical training. Which tells you something about my level of athleticism twelve months ago.

Whether I believe it or not, a year of training has passed. According to the school’s 2-Year Program, I am halfway to being a “basic expert” in Ving Tsun. Which is kinda like saying I’m halfway to the moon because in no way do I feel like my road is half-traveled. I have so much more to learn.

Month 6: Pros & Cons

{Prologue, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4}
{Month 2, Month 3, Month 4, Month 5, Month 6, Month 7, Month 8, 2016 WSD, Month 11, Month 12}

When I first started training in Kung Fu, I promised myself that I’d stick it out for at least six months. 

I know it doesn't seem like much of a commitment, but I honestly wasn't sure I would survive the first class, let alone forty-some-odd more classes after that. Considering my physical condition at the time that I started (poor-to-middling) and my own natural tendency to not do difficult things, six months felt like a pretty ambitious goal.

It also seemed like a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to an activity so far outside of my comfort zone that it would need to invent faster-than-light travel in order to reach my comfort zone while I was still young enough to participate. Two months to warm up to the training, two months to settle into a routine, two months to decide whether or not I hated it. And if it turned out that Kung Fu was not for me, that the benefits were outweighed by the costs to my family, my time, my poor beleaguered health, nobody would judge me for bowing out after half a year of honestly trying.

Sensible, right? So here I am, six months later. Time to evaluate. Continuing with the sensible approach, I shall attempt to list the pros and cons of my training experience.

PROS of Kung Fu training:

• Improved physical and emotional stamina. If I can slog through hours of sweat-soaked exertion and only dissolve into a puddle of scalding, frustrated tears once in half a year? Well, then there just ain’t much I can’t do.
• Symptoms of my forever-disease have never been so mild and manageable. Starting this training was a gamble, a wild toss of the dice that such a dramatic change to my exercise might do more good than harm. I had nothing but a vague hope that studying a martial art might be like couples’ counseling for my mind and body, giving them a project to work on together instead of fighting each other all the time. And it seems I may have been right: the inflammation in my joints is minimal, my mobility is hugely improved, and I’m just not so daggum tired all the time. Which is great, because I love being right.
• Now a part of a solid community of people who know that I have lupus and treat me like an adult about it. By which I mean they’ll scrub up with hand sanitizer before we work out, and they’ll respect my need to take breaks, but we are Gonna. Work. Out. And they generally don’t say any of the facepalm-worthy things that people can't seem to help saying to the chronically ill*, either because they’d never think to say them or because we’re all too busy training to talk. Either way, I’m happy.
• Greater confidence moving through a world that is suddenly much less full of insurmountable threats. Spend enough time imprinting your muscle memory with a variety of efficient ways to overcome physical confrontations, and the world is a less scary place. Especially for a lady.
• Greater humility to balance that confidence. I train with the kids’ class most of the time, see. Nothing keeps you humble about your kung fu, and about life in general, quite like getting your ass handed to you by a sihing who’s half your size and one-third your age. Speaking of which ...
• My kids and I have something in common besides the fact that we live in the same house. They’re training right along with me. We bond over the challenge of drills and our mutual post-workout stank.

CONS of Kung Fu training:

• Spangly dangly earrings no longer swing prettily over my shoulders. Because I have muscle there, now? Apparently? Weird.
• Newfound tendency to talk about Kung Fu. Like, a lot. Please stop me.
• No longer able to pawn heavy lifting tasks off onto my mighty husband. I am now perfectly capable of lifting rather heavy things. A solid tan sao can haul an awful lot of groceries, y’all. (note to self: move this one to the Pros list)
• Strangers seem to feel that I owe them an explanation for my forearm bruises. Dear Concerned World: I am not being abused. Promise.

Girls can play rough, too, ya know.

Well. That seems like a pretty clear balance far in the PROS favor. But what about the introspective overthinking about the philosophical impact of my choices? Haven’t done nearly enough of that.

How has my perspective changed over the past six months?, I wonder to myself. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, I had never thrown a punch in my life. Physical confrontation was something that I blithely pretended could never happen to me in this modern civilized world. Because ignorance is the best prevention. OBVIOUSLY.

Now, though? I’ve lost count of how many punches I’ve thrown and have been thrown at me. Thousands, maybe? No idea. Enough that a punch has ceased to be an astounding alien weapon, and has become a common tool, something that I use so often that it’s worn shiny and smooth, comfortable and efficient. All of the techniques that I’ve learned are tools. No more exotic than a hammer. There’s nothing mystical about them, just the simple physics of muscle and bone, plus a lot of practice.

It’s easy to forget that the vast majority of people are not familiar with hitting and being hit. That when such things happen, it can seem too fast to follow, mysterious and complex and a little scary. Recently, Sifu and I did a brief demonstration of basic self defense techniques on a morning news show. During the demo, I did a simple tan sao followed by a pak dar to escape Sifu’s grip. My punch happened to tap his microphone, which made it sound very impressive to the viewers at home. Ditto for our lovely hostess, apparently:

(click this link to view the video that would be embedded here if I was smarter)

It was just a twist of a tan, then a pak dar. Just a little something that I learned on maybe my second night at Women’s Self Defense, before my actual training even started, but to the nice lady on camera with us it was magic. And Six Months Ago Me would have been right there with her, all agog and what-sorcery-is-this. But after spending hours out of every week for the past half a year training, immersed in the small, quiet sea of Kung Fu, where force is not the rocks we crash against, but the tide with which we ebb and flow, I’m seeing a different kind of magic.

The kind of magic that inspires swooning waxy-poetic run-on sentences, apparently. Not even sorry.

What I see is the kind of magic that’s not magic at all. It’s just practice. Hard work. Sweat. Repetition of good technique, or at least repetition until the technique gets good. Learning all of the pieces and then mix-and-matching them to suit any situation. Hitting and getting hit, and conditioning the body’s reflexes to handle both ends of that equation.

Any ol’ fool who’s willing to work at it can do this stuff. You can tell, because I’m doing it. A lot has changed in the past six months, but the basic facts about me remain the same. Still thirty-five years old. Still clumsy. Still the stay-at-home mom of two. Still chronically ill. And also? Still training.

Seems I’ve gone and talked myself into not quitting. I’ll give that Six-Month Milestone Quit Option a jaunty wave as I cruise by, on my way out the door to class. Because this training is totally worth a little less dangly in my spangly earrings.

*I’ve heard every single one of these things, in some form or another. If you look closely in that video around the 3:15 mark, you’ll find me and my overly aggressive lipstick.