Blacklisted

Over the last year I've been preparing to test for my black belt in Kukkiwon Chung Do Kwan Taekwondo.  Now that the actual test is 33 days away, I'm beginning to have to face some things I thought were long gone.  Stuff I thought I'd successfully buried and repressed like any sane person would.  But over the last few weeks, I've been trying to write my black belt essay (in which we're supposed to talk about why we want to become black belts and what Taekwondo means to us), and in brainstorming for that essay, I've come face to face with some very ugly truths about my own self concept.

People have asked me how I feel about the test -- what I'm nervous about (if anything), what I feel most confident about, etc.  And as I've been about to spout off routine answers, like, I'm nervous I'll forget the moves or I'll freeze up and not be able to perform or I won't be able to break my boards, or I feel really good about the poomsae (forms), I've realized a couple of key things:  

1)  My fears are my strengths; my weaknesses are my wisdom.  That might not make much sense outside my own head, but it's similar to a lesson I learned a long time ago from Pema Chodron (wise Buddhist teacher).  In the last few months, I've had to relearn that lesson over and over again.

2)  The thing that scares me the most -- the thing that stops me in my tracks when I'm going to the gym to build endurance or when I'm stepping up to a set of boards to break them -- is the fear that I don't belong here.  That I'm trying to wedge my way into a milieu, an arena in which I simply don't fit, have never fit -- a party to which I am not, never have been, and never will be invited.

In short, to my great surprise, my biggest obstacle in achieving black belt is...myself.

Criminally Mediocre

So last night I took a look at a friend's blog and noticed that not only does she continuously say witty, clever things, but she also does high-tech stuff like posting pictures and videos and various links to cool sites and whatnot.  And I thought, hey, how come I don't do that?  (A lot of times when I have a thought it starts with hey.)  Which then brought me to another thought:  what is a blog "supposed" to be like, anyway?  And because I basically can't be bothered posting pictures and videos and whatnot, I'm going to go ahead and say a blog is whatever it is.  That leaves things nice and wide open so that success is almost a given.  I like it when success is a given.

At the moment I sit in a 24-hour laundromat wondering why I didn't push for an apartment with washer-dryer connections.  Of course there's the traditional hum and whir of the industrial sized washers and dryers, and at the moment there are people waiting in line to use such things -- it's Sunday, so of course the laundromat's packed.  But just to give a picture of the rest:  to my right sits a twentysomething attempting to talk to her dad on Skype, and by "talk" I really mean "scream at the top of her lungs so as to out-volume the washers and the all-'80's radio playing above us."  Three kids all under the age of five are frantically and happily doing figure 8's among the machines while their alleged parents chastise them in another language.  Very loudly.  My laundry detergent is safely stored next to me -- occasionally I put my arm around it to make sure it's still there.  Last week someone stole my detergent right off the top of the washer where my clothes were.  You gotta wonder what kind of person does that -- I mean, if I were going to allow myself to stoop to a criminal level, I think I'd pick something a little more worthy of bragging rights than Mountain Fresh Tide 2x strong.  Not to mention it was almost empty.