Month 24: I Made It.

{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}

Kung Fu Story Time:

I kicked a car.

In my defense, the car totally started it.

One fine morning, I’m walking my kids into their school (they’re in elementary, so they’re still young enough to enjoy being seen in public with their Mom), and I have one kid holding each of my hands. We’re about to cross the line of cars dropping off their respective kids, so I clock which car we’ll need to walk in front of and catch the driver’s eye. My hands are full, so I gesture with my head as if to say “Hey, we’re gonna walk past you”. The driver nods. The three of us start to walk in front of his car when it suddenly lurches forward and -

BAM!

- I shove both kids behind my back, plant one foot on the ground in backhorse stance and slam the other foot into the bumper of this guy’s car so hard the sound of it turns every head in the school drop-off line. I don’t even think about it; just get the kids safe and kick.

The driver is staring at me, all wide eyes and dropped jaw. I’m staring at him, my heel digging into his bumper like it wants to punch a hole through the engine block. Everyone, teachers and kids and other parents, is staring at both of us. Slowly, I take my foot off the car and hold the driver’s gaze with a hard glare while my kids and I finish crossing his path. Only once we’re safely past do I glance down to make sure I didn’t leave a dent on the bumper (nope, not that strong, more’s the pity).

As we walk away, my son asks, “Mommy, why did you kick that car?”

My daughter answers him, “Because that car wasn’t Being Safe, so she had to kick it to make it stop. Right, Mommy?”

“That’s right,” I reply, with all the quiet satisfaction of a Mama Bear polishing her claws.

~fin~

So, okay.

Maybe his foot slipped off the brake accidental-like.

Maybe he misinterpreted my eloquent head gesture to mean “Hey, you in the car, go ahead and drive by while my two young children and I stand here in the middle of a parking lot because that’s totally safe” and was honestly surprised when we walked in front of him.

Maybe he got swept up in the Lord of the Flies-esque entitlement warzone that is the elementary school drop-off line and tried to intimidate us in retaliation for the two-second delay we were causing him.

I’ll never know. We did not have a conversation. My inner Mama Bear was in charge at that moment, and she didn’t give a shit what the driver of the car that nearly ran over her two children had to say for himself. He seemed to sense that and wisely stayed in his car.

To be clear: I am not saying that kicking cars is a good strategy. It’s not. Don’t kick cars. There is nothing a wee human foot can do to stop a half-ton of moving metal. I’m very lucky the driver stopped.

What I am saying is that, once upon a time, my reflex would’ve been to grab my kids by the scruff and jump back. Maybe squawk a little. Definitely scurry out of the way and splutter with impotent terror and anger at our near-collision. But nowadays, when confronted with an incoming threat while my hands are full of my beloved offspring, my reflex is to calmly plant a solid horse stance and kick the bad thing as hard as I can till it stops coming at us. Apparently.

That is a fundamental change. A thorough rewiring of basic caveman-level functions. Somebody took the time to tinker with my Fight or Flight responses, bypassing Flight entirely and adding a complex option tree of aggressive defenses and crippling techniques to Fight. That somebody was me, and my Sifu, Simo, a small army of other students, and Grandmaster Moy Tung. And the time it took was two years.

I have completed the Two Year Training Program at Moy Yat Kung Fu Academy.

According to the structure of the Two Year Program, based on the consistent time and effort that I’ve put into my training, I am now a basic expert in Ving Tsun kung fu. Which is quite possibly the strangest sentence I’ve ever written about myself.

At first, it didn’t feel real. For a while now, I’ve been cruising on a wave of steady momentum in my training, only somewhat hampered by my wackadoo health. Somewhere along the line in the past 24 months, kung fu became less about physical therapy for my lupus-addled body and more about genuinely enjoying the training. I’d been happily trucking right along on my kung fu journey, so interested in the new bits of road beneath my feet that I missed the milestone as I passed it by.

Then Simo reminded me to stop wearing my dingy white training shirt (for 2nd year students) and start wearing my bright blue training shirt (for 3rd year students). I blinked. That couldn’t be right. No way that kind of time had passed. I mean, sure, I had been attending class three times a week, almost every week, for as many weeks as it took to add up to two years. And yeah, finishing the Two Year Program had always been the goal, but … surely that was still in some kind of hazily defined distant future, like always?

Grappling with my own warped kung fu space/time continuum, I slipped my old training slippers off of my feet, the ones I’d been wearing since my third week, ready to replace them with a brand new pair. I stopped. Stared at the soles of my slippers, old and new. There was all the proof I needed.

One hour of training (left) vs 500+ hours of training (right)

My old slippers had been through some tribulations. The seams were frayed, the insoles were shredded, and somehow the hard plastic soles had been worn paper thin by floors made of smooth wood and slate. Unless some mischievous fey creatures had been sneaking into my home at night and gnawing on my slippers, this damage was all done by me. By my training. For two years.

Well hot damn, I actually made it. Me. The middle-aged overweight chronically ill suburban mother of two. I did that.

Technically, I could stop here. Having completed the program, I have all of the basic tools of kung fu that will serve me well for the rest of my days even if I never set foot in another class again.

Physical Protection - While I have no desire to know if I could kick someone’s ass, I’m confident in my ability to keep someone from kicking mine.

Health - My mind and body have reconciled, and now my body is stronger than it’s ever been. Not in terms of raw power, so much as what it can endure and how easily it can recover. And when you’ve got a forever-disease that’ll drop-kick your body through the seven layers of hell just for funzies, that comes in pretty handy.

Patience With My Limits - Used-to-be, I’d rage against anything that tried to limit me, fling myself against barriers just because they dared to thwart me and then sulk when I couldn’t get past them because that’s kind of how barriers work. Now, though, I know what I can handle (a helluva lot) and what I can’t. I’ve figured out that if it’s bigger than what I can handle, it’s probably pretty damn big. I’ll either try again when I’m stronger, or just ask for help.

Doing Less Harm … - I’ve been hit really hard, many many times, by people who are much scarier than me. The world didn’t end. In fact, I kept going, knowing that if I got hit again I’d be just fine. Bruised, maybe, but fine. The calm that comes with that knowledge seeps into my everyday life. I’m nicer than I was two years ago. Not too nice (*cough-car kicker-cough*) but certainly more patient, more helpful. Less cantankerous now that I don’t feel like I have to gnash my teeth and swipe my claws at the whole world just to keep myself physically and emotionally safe.

… Taking Less Shit - All of those things - self-defense, health, knowing my limits, being at peace - add up to a person who can’t easily be pushed around. It’s hard to intimidate a woman who happily spends her free time learning the most efficient ways to make an attacker swallow their own blood.

All of that is my kung fu. Every student has their own kung fu. There are others like it, but this one is mine. A big shiny treasure trove of skill and experience that I’ve spent the past two years building, gathering bits from other students, catching pieces from instructors. My own personal hoard of calm badassery. I could stop my training right here, and for the rest of my life I would be a better person for what I’ve achieved.

But …

… why in the WORLD would I stop now?

Now, when I’m finally comfortable enough with my own kung fu to enjoy the work so much that I forget to compare myself to other students.

Now, when the voice in my head that used to be so loud when it told me how fat and slovenly and ridiculous I look can barely be heard over the roaring quiet of my kung fu.

Now, when I suddenly realize that the amount of effort I once spent scrambling for a white-knuckle grip on just one or two concepts in a class, I can now spend on absorbing multiple new details and integrating them into known techniques and flowing comfortably from one drill to the next because I’ve either done them before or I know the pieces that make them.

Because it turns out the more kung fu you have, the more kung fu you get. Which means that there is a potentially infinite world of kung fu out there, an endless landscape of wisdoms and humilities and epiphanies and tricky brutalities, all waiting for me to learn it … if only I have the will to keep training.

My choice is pretty clear.

Month 18: The Foundation

{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}

Eighteen months ago, I walked out of my first kung fu class feeling like I’d just spent an hour trying to calculate pi to the last digit while composing a symphony in a sauna. Everything was new and weird and really hard to do and also I was sweaty.

But I went back for a second class because … well, for a lot of reasons that I could wax all poetical about for a few thousand words and paint myself and the school in all the noblest of lights, but if I’m being honest with myself and the internet, there was really only one reason: for a few blessed hours after I left the school, for the first time in years, my hands didn’t hurt.

One of the hallmark symptoms of my systemic lupus has always been painful inflammation of the knuckles and wrists. Turns out, if I do enough huen saus I can clear that up right quick. At least for a little while. For someone who despaired to find any non-pharmaceutical solutions to a hellscape cornucopia of ailments, being able to do this one thing to help myself was a game changer. Give anyone with chronic pain an “off” button for their hurting that doesn’t involve addiction or creepy side effects, and they’ll happily keep pushing it.

So I kept going to class. Kept chasing that temporary relief from my forever illness because instant gratification is kind of my thing. And somewhere along the line, almost accidentally, I built up my kung fu.

And that’s the thing. The kung fu. When I first started training, I heard folks talk about kung fu like it was some kind of quantifiable substance. Someone could have a lot of it, or not enough. It made no sense to me. They were using the wrong kind of noun. Kung fu is a martial art, a philosophy, not an object. They might as well be talking about trading handfuls of impressionism or pieces of epiphany.

Which is, of course, exactly what we do.

Pictured: a staggeringly wide range of kung fu quantities.
(hint: I'm the sweaty, tired, disheveled one. ... no, the other one ... no, the other other one...)

Kung fu is a thing. Everyone has their own kung fu that they make for themselves. Nobody else can make it for you. Students can exchange it back and forth. Sifu can give bits of it that seem like pebbles when they leave his hands but grow to boulders by the time they reach mine. I don’t know how to explain it better than that without touching hands with you.

Over the past year and a half, without really meaning to, I’ve developed my kung fu. I’m not sure what anyone else’s kung fu looks like to them, but mine looks like less pain in my life.

... Like hands that can grip a coffee cup.

... Like getting knocked flat on my ass by injuries or setbacks, and having not only the desire to overcome them, but (finally) also having the physical ability.

... Like not being forced to take a nap every single day.

... Like slowly digging, inch by hard-earned inch, a well of stamina that can handle a weekend’s intense training workshop or a serious bout of illness without running dry.

... Like walking without a limp.

... Like not starting half of my days wondering if I’ll plummet through a Series Of Unfortunate Medical Events and find myself in a hospital by bedtime.

... Like a patient friend, on those days when I’m too sick to train, waiting quietly nearby with no judgement in its steady presence, just a readiness to get back to work as soon as I’m able.

Whatever else my kung fu may be - self confidence, personal safety, strength - it is, above all of that, the thing that has allowed me to regain some control over my health.

Not complete control, of course. Never that. No lupus patient dares to dream quite that big. But ...

After eighteen months of training, my kung fu is the solid foundation that I’ve built beneath my feet, layer upon layer of effort and focus and sweat, that makes sure that when my house of cards does inevitably come tumbling down … it doesn’t tumble quite so far.

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 8: There's A Reason That Word Has "Power" In The Middle

{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}

Kung Fu is empowering for women. 

With the Women’s Self Defense class coming up, that’s something I’ve been saying a lot lately. It seems obvious. Clearly a woman is going to feel more able to defend herself if she’s learned how to throw a wicked punch. But is that all there is to this empowerment business? Just the ability to discourage (read: badly injure) a hypothetical attacker and keep myself safe? Don’t get me wrong, that’s a pretty sweet benefit when you consider the sickening statistics of women being assaulted. That alone is reason enough to attend a month-long series of self defense classes, and then stick around for eight more months of sweating my cha-chas off three times a week.

Still, I can’t help but notice that there’s something more to this empowerment gig. And not just the fact that I’ve typed the word so many times that it looks weird and I’m not even sure if I’m spelling it right any more.

Maybe it’s this new independence I’ve got. I do find myself remarkably able to open jars and lift heavy things without hunting down a Big Strong Man™ to help me.

Or maybe it’s this freedom from the tyranny of the scale that’s haunted me for my entire overweight life. I have always (always, always) dreaded being weighed. Ever since I was old enough to catch society’s signal that the higher the number the less I was worth. But this month, when I stepped on my doctor’s scale I felt none of the grumbling hesitation, not a bit of the usual bracing for the impact of a wave of disappointment when the number would inevitably be too high, no bleak anticipation of spending the rest of the day trudging around in a cloud of self-loathing, planning how best to punish myself for gluttony and hate-downloading yet another diet app. When the scale reported to me with its cold indifference that I’ve gained twelve whole pounds since I started training, for the first time in my life, I just smiled. I grinned at those numbers, all wide and toothy, because now? Oh-ho, now anyone who wants to mess with me has to mess with Twelve More Pounds Of Muscle Me, and good freaking luck with that.

So maybe empowerment is those things - being able to fend for myself, and loving my body for what I know it can do rather than hating on it for not looking the way I think it should. Maybe it’s something a little bit more, too.

I have never been a shrinking violet, never had a bit of trouble expressing my displeasure about anything, but - like most women raised in Western society - I have also never been one to push for a confrontation when it could be avoided. Particularly with strangers. Extra particularly with men.

There had always been that back-of-the-mind thought, that cautionary whisper that said oooh, be careful, don’t cause a scene or he’ll escalate this to a level that you can’t handle, followed by vague images of crime scene photos and newspaper headlines proclaiming Mother of Two Found Tragically Slain After Inane Argument With Complete Stranger. Any time I was harassed or made publicly uncomfortable, I would either pretend I didn’t hear it or just put on my best bitchface to cover the fact that I was totally fleeing the scene.

But now, after eight months of Kung Fu training? Well, let me tell you a little story...

It was a bright, sunny day when I drove into a grocery store parking lot. As I pulled into a handicap spot, I passed a man who was standing by his car. And he stared at me. Unblinking and deliberate.

Now, I have a handicap parking tag in my car, so I am legally allowed to park there. Having lupus makes me extremely sensitive to sunlight and often limits my physical mobility, so my doctor basically wrote me a prescription for Not Having To Limp Across Big Sunny Parking Lots. Thing is, I often don’t look terribly handicapped, and sometimes people think they can judge me for being what they assume is a perfectly healthy person stealing a parking spot from the disabled. Which is what this guy was doing with his stinkeye so strong that I could feel it through my car windows.

I climbed out of the car and looked in his direction. We made eye contact and his gaze was heavy, full of judgement as he slid a very pointed glance between me and the handicap sign. Disgust was drawn all over his face in bold, ugly strokes. Like if my car hadn’t been between us he would’ve spat on me. It was almost cartoonishly intense.

Eight Months Ago Me would’ve put on the retreat-bitchface and walked away. He wasn’t particularly large, wasn’t standing between me and the store, and he hadn’t said anything or moved to stop me. He was just doing his best to silently shame and intimidate me into moving my car. Rude and a little scary, sure, but nothing that I couldn’t afford to let him get away with so long as I didn’t mind a tense walk to the store and having to keep an eye out for him on the way back to my car in case he decided to hang out for another round of unpleasantness.

But … dammit, I’ve seen scarier. I’ve had my forearms bruised by scarier, been taken down to the training floor by scarier, and gotten back up to deliver a few bruises myself. Hell, after thirty-ish weeks of punching and kicking and sweating, of measuring my strength against that of people who could take me apart without half-trying, I am scarier.

I am strong, and I know what to do with that strength (which are two different things). I am aware of my own rights and my worth, aware that I’ve earned that stupid parking tag through a gauntlet of illness and pains that this random guy was not entitled to have explained to him. I had nothing to be ashamed of, and the idea of wasting the next half-hour of my life on worry and fear that this guy might Do Something made my teeth grind.

So I didn’t walk away. Instead, I surprised myself.

Without consciously deciding to, I bent my knees and relaxed my shoulders. I faced him squarely across the roof of my car and met his glare with a flat stare of my own, felt my expression take on that too-calm, sleepy-eyed look that falls into place during drills, and heard my steady, clear voice ask him,

“Is there a problem?”

All of that negativity and judgement and shame he had tried to shove into my day slid right off of me and flopped in a useless heap on the pavement. It simply had not worked. Seems I’m not so easy to intimidate these days. There was a long, silent moment while I calmly waited for him to figure out how to respond. Apparently my not-wilting under his disdain and opposite-of-collapsing into a puddle of apologies was a deviation from the script he had in mind.

So help me, he blinked. Got into his car and fired up the engine. Thinking the conversation was over, I walked towards the entrance of the store. Apparently my ability to walk was infuriating, because he rolled down his window, leaned out, and shouted, 

“Really? REALLY?!”

I took a breath. Turned to face him on wide-planted feet, ready to turn and run for the store doors if he decided to use his car as a weapon, but unwilling to show him anything but steadiness. Moved my hands in front of me in a halt gesture that unconsciously protected my centerline, and repeated my question,

“Is there a problem?”

Again, I didn’t follow his script. This time, he did spit in my direction, which was super classy, but he also drove away without another word. Revved his engine and squealed his tires a little on the way out to make himself feel better about fleeing the scene. The vehicular equivalent of retreat-bitchface.

Watching him putter away, I expected to feel some kind of smug triumph. Or maybe the jittery jangle of post-confrontation nerves. Someone had tried to bully me, after all, and I had faced him down. Surely a deep breath or two would be required, at least. And yet. All I felt was calm, comfortable on my own two feet, and a little sorry for that guy. I mean, how insecure does a man have to be to pick on a lady in a handicap parking space?

And sure, that moment wasn’t exactly EPIC. There will be no ballads sung of my heroism in defending my first-world right to be chronically ill in public. But it’s moments exactly like that, little aggressions and intimidations, that can happen every single day of any woman’s life. If it’s not about a parking space, it’s about the length of a skirt, healthcare choices, walking down the street at night, etc etc etc. We learn to live with those moments, avoid them, allow them, accept them as just an unpleasant part of life in modern society, but we so rarely learn to counteract them. To stand up for ourselves in the Little Bad Moments like my little parking lot showdown, so that we know we’ll be able to do it again when the Big Bad Moments come along.

That’s the core of this empowerment thing. The real result of all this training.

It’s made me very familiar with my limits and my strengths. Turns out that knowing those two things about yourself takes a lot of the stress out of everyday life. I know what I can handle and what I can’t; how to handle what I can and get help with what I can’t. My mind is calm, confident in the knowledge that the body it’s steering through this world is equipped with the skills and reflexes to defend it. If the situation calls for it, I know that I can throw a barrage of nasty little punches until the problem goes away. And, perhaps more importantly, I trust myself to accurately assess whether or not the situation calls for punching (hint: it almost always won’t).

I’m not borrowing strength and confidence from some outside source to wear like armor over my tender lady-body for a little while, a temporary fix to a forever problem. Nope. My empowerment is giving myself permission to access my own strength, to have a working comprehensive knowledge of what I’m capable of, to respect my own worth and require that respect from others.

I’m not saying that Kung Fu is the only place a woman can find empowerment. I’m just saying that’s where I found it. Me and a dozen other women at my school. And maybe you can, too.

Pictured above: friendly neighborhood stone cold badasses