fight or flight

Stayed briefly for open mat time last night, something I've been avoiding.  You have to find someone to train with, and like, ask them if they want to..  Someone invited me to roll, it went well, we talked briefly as I needed to rest for a few minutes afterwards, but then suddenly I said goodbye and left.  I guess there was a decision to leave in there somewhere, but despite feeling pretty good about it overall, it's been nagging at me.

As I think back on the moments before making the decision, my memories of the details, I realize there's so much room for spin.  I can explain the behaviour any number of ways.  Some more likely to be true than others.  I don't actually know what the real reason is.  I was exhausted, it seemed like a good time to call it.. but I only needed to rest for a minute.  It's as if that didn't occur to me.

My training partner seemed surprised when I left, as open mat had just started.  I was nervous, I was tired, I had a plan but it ended with "stay for open mat" so that's as far as I got.  I felt like getting out of there, and after two hours of yoga and bjj, my faculties were too diminished to resist.  Or even think about it for a second?  Baby steps, I guess.

Funny how it makes me feel worse in a way, to confront my fears, only to drop the ball every goddamn time when I do.  Progress seems to require an awful lot of failure.

Open Air Jiujitsu

Thinking about braving something like this now.  First Sunday of every summer month, people from schools all around meet to grapple in the park.  Like that's not scary enough, I'd have to bike there and it's way the hell on the other side of Burlington.  I can imagine myself giving it a shot, but geez, I don't know.  It seems ambitious but I've been looking for something a little more social to try.

- update 6/23/2019 -

I actually went.  Well, I tried.  I biked all the way there, spent like an hour biking around the park, couldn't find anything but regular park stuff.  Which was nice I guess, but I gave up and went home.  So over ten miles, lots of pedaling uphill on my single gear mongoose.  Only to realize I had the time wrong.  I'd been an hour and a half early.

See what I mean?  What the goddamn fuck.

still not speaking human

There have been times not long ago, when merely writing something constituted an effort on my part.  Those were the earliest entries in this blog, back when forcing myself to write was about doing something, anything.  Now I try to fit in an update now and then, between everything else I've been up to.

How am I doing, right?  This is one reason for keeping a blog.  If I want to know what my state of mind was a year ago, two or three years ago, I can just look it up.  I've been trying to make progress for a long time.  I seem to like my writing a lot better from a distance, but am I doing better?  Am I getting anywhere?

I can look back at these old entries, like "So many mountains to climb," a straight-forward reference to feeling that I have a long treacherous and difficult path ahead.  Starting with the dishes.  Clearly, I'm doing more than I was, more that I want to be doing, more that would be called productive.  My kitchen is well stocked, I listen to music all the time lately, and that MMA place I took the sad little picture of?  I've been going regularly for over a year - so why do I feel like I'm treading water?

I'm certainly doing better, relative to where I was, but the rest of the world still feels so very far away.  Alienated, disconnected, socioeconomically precarious, I hesitate to laud my accomplishments too much, lest anyone think I'm doing well.

I try not to dwell on it as much, almost to the point of forgetting, but beneath all my latest efforts, I'm also still this person.. "I Don't Speak Human," the title of song I'd just stumbled across on youtube, a cartoonishly vivid portrayal of how I feel, but in particular, framed in a way I would have related to especially well a decade or three ago.  That part of me is still in there, cheering when they're flipping off humanity.

I can go back a few more years though.  Circumstances were pretty dire here.  Before I'd even been put back on growth hormone.  I didn't even understand how it worked yet.  I didn't understand why some people say it takes six months to work, while other say years - this is akin to asking how long calcium takes to rebuild the bone loss of a long standing calcium deficiency.

It is a luxury to be able to worry about the things I worry about these days.. "Mind at the End of its Tether," an H.G. Wells title, referenced in another book I'd read decades ago, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson.  In which the author seemed to consider it apt for an intellectual mind's eventual slide into the final stages of madness and depression.

So.. yeah.  I am doing much better.  I've lived my whole life with the shame of all the things I wasn't doing, but I'm also still not doing enough yet.  I'm doing better, but I have a long way to go.  Let my guard down for half a second and I'm napping again.  I'm doing so much better in terms of energy levels too, but it's exhausting, still so often grappling with exhaustion.

Still quite a few mountains to be climbed, I guess.

winning

I've been thinking, there's no way I could keep doing this school thing, if it weren't for taking martial arts.  It's difficult to put my finger on exactly how it helps, but it provides a feeling of emotional substance.  Without it, I'd be running on empty, and don't think I'd get anywhere at all.

This place where I train recently added a yoga class on Fridays, so I've been going to that too.  Probably a good idea, may even reduce my risk of injury.  Then afterwards, a muay thai class, and brazilian jiu jitsu across the room.  Lately I've been focusing more on BJJ, determined to get to the point where I might even be considered at least kinda good at it.

What really seems to draw me into it more than other arts is how I feel tested, almost every class.  It's known as "the gentle art" because of the way we can try what we learn on each other, we can see how well it works, how brutal it could be - without anyone getting hurt.  When I'm in an effective submission hold and have to tap out, it's because I've been indisputably beaten.  I'm grateful to be in a situation where tapping out is an option.  You can't test muay thai the same way, without people getting hurt.

So as I've blogged before, I tap out a lot.  Few times every class.  I'm drawn to a test that I've been repeatedly failing.  There are all sorts of reasons, but one of them could simply be that almost everyone there is relatively good, most of them having trained longer then me.  Never mind how they're all bigger, stronger, younger and they have pituitary glands.  I don't mind all the losing so much, because I'm grateful to be physically capable of doing this at all.

Still, felt good to win a few.  New student tonight, previous experience included "one semester" of BJJ, few inches taller than me.  He asked if I wanted to roll, after class.  Uh oh, I thought.  I just love being beaten by someone new, but of course, let me grab my mouth guard.. and I won.  Repeatedly.

I saw openings, omoplata, armbar, triangle, and went for them.  Somehow actually getting them right, except for the omoplata.  That's a tough one.  I almost got it, but had to transition into another armbar.  Sometimes it feels like maybe I'm finally making progress.  I'm skeptical, but come to think of it, I did pretty well the other day, too.

It's odd how despite all this, I still have to push my self so hard to go.  I almost always feel good afterwards, so you'd think I'd look forward to it, instead of desperately fending off excuses for why I should take the day off, every damn class.  When I fail that test, it makes my whole weekend depressing.