frailty & strength

One summer night, when I was thirteen (almost fourteen, I would have told you then), my best friend Nikki and I ate chocolate-covered espresso beans and stayed up all night, hyper-ly talking and joking. At approximately 3:00 A.M., I decided to join karate.

Nikki had joined karate a year before and was tired of being the only girl in the class with no friends to talk to. I thought it might be fun, a new thing, even though I had thought before that I would never be caught anywhere near anything athletic. I don't really know why I said I would join exactly. It probably had something to do with the amount of espresso and chocolate in my system and the excitement of a summer night sleepover. But in the morning I told my mom I wanted to start karate. She was, understandably, shocked. Me? The bookish one who trips over her own feet and shoots at her own team's goal when forced to play sports in gym class? Join karate?!

That decision would be a major one that changed a lot of the next four years. I joined. I was terrified. The instructors were nice, but firm. You couldn't get out of doing anything they told you to do. Respect was imperitive and so was obedience. I was a white belt in karate and a freshman in high school. The lowest of the low! But I really liked it after a little while. I liked testing for a new belt twice a year and learning new forms. I hated sparring, fighting my classmates with pads and helmets, but liked memorizing movements put together to make a form, what they call a kata, because the movements were artful and precise and looked like a dance - albeit a violent one, but I didn't like to think about the violence!

I still take karate today. Whenever I tell anyone, they are shocked. I am small in stature and appearance, I look younger than I really am, and most notably, I am not one known for aggression. Actually I'm known for passivity and being completely the most non-aggressive person anyone has ever met. A pacifist; a bookworm, not an athlete! I go out of my way to avoid confrontation and solve conflicts by discussion, not aggression! So everyone has many reasons to not believe that I do karate.

I find it funny myself. I know myself and know that doing karate doesn't fit in with much of what I define myself to be. I've an independent, nonconformist spirit - but karate requires discipline and obeying everything the instructor says. I'm a pacifist - I would literally never even think of squashing a bug. I'm terrible at sports.

I wrote the other day in the "lies" post that the main lie I tell myself, though, is that I am frail, too little and meek to have any strength. And I told Mogget the other day that the main criticism that I get from my karate instructors is being too meek and not showing any power. I get berated all the time for not yelling loud enough, not hitting hard enough.

But I also know I'm not that frail. Get into a verbal argument with me and I will actually like tirelessly trying to convince you that I'm right. Insult Thoreau around me and you are in for a long and fervent verbal lashing! And, dork that I am, I really do take a special pleasure in arguing for the sake of grammatical correctness and proper spelling and sentence structure and if you misplace a semicolon I will probably jump all over you for it and have fun doing it...

But besides my enjoyment of verbal adeptness, I know I'm not that frail in other aspects too. I'm not frail enough, for instance, to be afraid of being different and afraid to stand up for what I believe in. I am not afraid of either of these things and do not let the opinions of others dictate what I will do or say or be. I am a dreamer and do not let the arguments against idealism change my outlook. I am innocent, and in some ways childish, but I have had to go through things that taught me lessons and made me 'stronger'.

I guess it comes down to this. Sometimes people have called me a "mouse", because when I was little and actually up until around eleventh grade, I was terribly shy, terribly afraid of others' opinions, and was known all throughout elementary, middle, and part of high school as "the quiet girl", and if anyone calls me that to this day I get angry. I don't want to be a mouse. The analogy that gets used most at karate for how we should do our forms and display our power is being a "tiger". I don't want to be a tiger either. Tigers are beautiful and scary. They are fierce and attack poor little animals. I don't want to be a tiger. I want to be strong in a more quirky way. Like a flamingo, for instance. They are bright pink but just stand there on one leg minding their own business.

Okay, I know anthropomorphizing can get really annoying so I'll stop with the animal analogies.

What I mean is: I am realizing that I am not as frail as I think I am. That the perception of frailty is something to hide behind - appearing frail may protect me from getting hurt because people don't want to make "the quiet girl" cry. I can hide behind the supposition that I'm too shy to do something when I am really scared to do something that would be a wonderful experience if only I let myself out. The perception of frailty holds me back. It keeps me from growing and learning.

As far as karate goes - some days I hate going. I try to think up excuses to get out of class and when I have something to do on a Tuesday or Thursday night I rejoice because I don't have to go to karate. But really, I don't regret at all that I signed up after deciding to take karate on that caffeinated night. I've learned a lot about myself and about others and have met the kindest instructors. Sometimes I drag myself through class and do a horrible job. But every so often, I do something right. I yell loudly and hit forcefully and get complimented and clapped for and feel like I let 'something out' in some way.

I'm going into a tournament on March 12 because it's a requirement. I thought I would just go and get it over with and probably lose but at least it would be done and I wouldn't have to think about it any more, I'd go in thinking I would just lose and that I was horrible to prevent myself from having to make an effort. But that's dumb... I can try to do something, to pay attention to my form [I'm doing weapons and normal forms] and put everything into it and learn from the experience rather than wasting the time.

I'm not as frail as I, as others, think I am. I'm not "the quiet girl", the mousy girl, the one who is too afraid to show anything, to be anything. You don't even know how much I hate being called "the quiet girl"! If someone says it it makes me want to yell and scream that I'm not, I can be loud, I can argue, I can be crazy! I guess it's time I stopped hiding behind the excuse of frailty, then.