Last night I took an aikido class for the first time in three years.
I first started doing aikido about ten years ago, during the summer when I finally started to treat my depression. I stayed for about two years at a very, very tough dojo, then quit for a variety of reasons (including my desire to quit my lousy job and go freelance.) About three years ago I found another dojo in my nabe and was there for maybe seven months, before the instructor moved to California.
The points being a) I’m not a complete beginner and b) all of this took place before my transition.
These are relavant because last night, for the first time ever, I had to leave the mat while class was in session. Twice.
Now, there are some decent reasons for that: it was hot and muggy yesterday. I didn’t eat a big lunch (my usual onsite gourmet meal of yogurt and a buttered roll, with a peanut butter granola bar thrown in for good measure.) I’ve gained a lot of weight recently. And of course, I did have major surgery five months ago.
I think there was more to it than all that. The fact of the matter is, I’m not the same person I used to be.
One of the things that shocked me about starting hormones was just how much muscle mass I lost in a relatively short time. I never needed to worry about binding my breasts (Not that there was a lot to bind. Then, I mean.) because my suits and dress shirts suddenly got huge on me. And I also stopped doing a lot of physical activity after a few months on HRT, so I wasn’t really keeping track of how much I was changing. (I dropped my gym membership after about six months because I couldn’t stand using the men’s locker room anymore, which meant that I stopped biking into work–about a 6.5 mile ride each way; in any case, I wasn’t pushing myself anywhere close to what I had done before hormones.)
So I think that a lot of what I learned once before I’m going to have to unlearn, because the strength (and endurance, until I get my wind back) just isn’t there anymore; a big part of my “failures” yesterday was trying to do things as if nothing had changed. But it has.
This isn’t really a bad thing, because one of the reasons I decided to go back to aikido is that it is the only martial art I know of with a philosophy against domination–and as you may have gleaned, my current project is to find ways to live without dominating other human beings. My first dojo had a definite macho air about it, and I learned to use my strength–not that I was Conan or something–in ways that let me blow past a lot of the deeper philosophical lessons of aikido, like blending with your partner or using her energy against her instead of using your own.
So like everything else related to my transition, this is a learning moment. And I hope I can really learn from it–maybe I’ll even be able to survive the whole class tomorrow.
I hope so–I have a peanut butter Twix bar waiting for me when I do.
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Blog note: I had wanted to start another new weekly feature, “Evil Willow’s Weekly Web Round Up,” which will have some snark–er, witty–commentary on the dreck that Google Reader finds for me, but for once there’s a paucity of teh stoopid on the nets right now–and a surfeit of actual, horrifying evil. So it can wait til next week.