The first competition is coming up in less than three weeks.
Well that gave me anxiety just writing it down. I’ll put off the endless spiraling into “oh shit I’m so screwed” for now and focus on some reflections thus far because on the bright side it has also been close to a year since I started Taekwondo.
I’ll start by working backwards from now. When I look back, I realise that learning Taekwondo had induced more self-doubt than anything else I have done. I think it has to do with the nature of our competition. Unlike netball, or any other competitions, Taekwondo Poomsae (which is the performative aspect) is a competition fought in the months leading up to the “big day”. It’s a competition in preparation. And I feel anxious because then it always makes me feel that I’m not doing enough and I would have no idea how much my competitors are practicing and I would put even more pressure on myself to train more so that “better safe than sorry” I have less chance of being surprised by another competitor. There I go off again into the spiral.
Around September 2018 I first started to panic at the thought of stagnation. In comparison to the initial months, I felt that regardless of what I did, nothing was improving and I was still the same as me in May. I suppose I was overly critical of myself because when I looked back on my competition videos, I realised how far I’ve come. Recently (perhaps in the past few weeks), this same anxiety has been plaguing me. Each time I start to panic about not being good enough during trainings, I cannot focus on a course of action. The anxiety is paralyzing.
And why am I panicking randomly? It’s not that I need people to constantly reaffirm me. It’s just a feeling of being left behind as I watch some people improve so much. I’m worried about my own lack of progress because wherever I am at right now will not be good enough to win at a competition with even better players. I need to improve. But I don’t think I am, and being a very competitive person, it makes me die a little to feel that way about myself when I see other people pulling ahead/catching up.
Times like these, I have learnt, the best thing to do is to break out of my head and just act. Focus on the basics and leave the pattern alone. Set numerical goals and hit them. It is something your body could do on auto-pilot when your brain is panicking.
Also if I were to be honest, the Taekwondo belt system plays a role in making me anxious. I know that belt colour is not correlated to ability but humans are far from rational creatures. I think the biggest issue is the idea of a “double promotion” because to me, it is the equivalent of getting an A, and I want it despite knowing how difficult it is. And I know that the higher belt I go the harder it gets. Does it stop me from feeling super demoralized knowing that I have only just passed my previous two grading and that many others are catching up by double-promoting? I keep making excuses for myself to appease some strange ego of mine: oh no it is alright I was not at my best because I have just touched down 8 hours before the grading from a week hiatus from training. But the lizard brain sneers down at me: sure, sure keep thinking like that.
Thus far though, I seem to have given the impression that everything had sucked in learning Taekwondo. That’s not it. Sometimes I wish that I could drop out of Taekwondo without meaning what I say because I know how much I actually enjoy it outside of this period of competition pressure. It has taught me a lot about long term investment, be it a sustainable skill or in general health.
When I think of Taekwondo, I don’t get set on fire and feel an adrenaline rush like I do with netball. It’s not that kind of passion. What Taekwondo had offered me was quiet and maintained a sort of neutral balance in my otherwise chaotic and reactive emotional world. I kid you not: those martial artists are legit when they utter the cliché saying of finding your inner peace. Competition is another matter, but in general taekwondo had allowed me to focus more on myself and less about my relative position to others.
Some people have expressed that they enjoy studying because they know with certainty that there are guaranteed results. In the same way (but hopefully less perverse) I like how in Taekwondo there are no miracles. You walk every step of the journey one foot at a time. I like how in Taekwondo the results are not instantaneous. It is accumulative so that when you look back on it one day you are dazed by how far you’ve come. For sure it is not a philosophy that sits well with young ambitious and impatient teens, me included, but it is starting to rub off me in some way.
There is also the other component of sparring. To be honest I enjoy it a lot more for the athleticism and reactivity it offers. It’s a lot more aggressive and confrontational: perfect fuel for my competitiveness. It’s also objectively more fun. I have a good time, but even sparring has taught me a few things.
First, people generally enjoy doing what they excel at. Hwa Chong Taekwondo peeps in general do better in Poomsae because that is what we train and compete for, and there is a general inclination towards that because, well, most people are better at it. Without placing a value judgment on these inclinations, I think it reminded me of the need to constantly get uncomfortable and reassess my motivations. Am I choosing something just because I am too lazy to take up the alternative?
Second, how to face my irrational fears. If I were to plot a graph for my enthusiasm for sparring, it would look like a U-shaped graph with a dip in between the initial bubbling excitement and the current state I am at. I was terribly afraid of injuring someone and getting injured in the process of sparring. Did not help that there were so many stories about fatal knockouts. No matter what anybody else said, I could not convince myself as much as I had wished I could simply “get over it”.
The trick for me was to get hurt first. Sounds crazy and mildly masochistic but I think a lot of fears have that much control over us because it is intangible, like stepping into this black spot not knowing how much you would fall. It becomes different when you feel it actualizing and not just see it in your head (we generally create exaggerated monsters in our heads). When I get some bruises, or feel my feet dying, it reduces the fear to what it is. This serves two purposes, it either makes you realise “hey, this is not as bad as I thought” and propel you towards overcoming it, or it could help you figure out “not bad, I am this far from the goal” and propel you towards charted improvement.
Getting this off my chest helped put things into perspective and I just hope that you know, all will be well soon.
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