n. splendorr!

If you ever feel like you can't learn anything new, first of all you're wrong. This is a trick your brain plays to avoid doing work, however small. But here's an example I just remembered, and want to write down for myself. Hope this helps!

My whole life, growing up, I was known for stomping and being too loud moving around. In middle school I practically doubled in height, and became a gangly, body-uncomfortable, adult-sized kid. Throughout my teens, I crashed regularly into walls, door frames, and any other obstacles, because my sense of my body was fucked. I would also run everywhere I possibly could, including in the house and at school. But I remember my parents regularly telling me to slow down, and to be quieter; even walking at regular speed, I remember my feet slapping the ground loudly, clumsily. It was part of my identity, to be clunky, loud, and to take up more space than I needed to, in lots of ways.

When I was 20, I took Okinawan karate lessons for a month from a questionable group of middle-aged southern men in a rundown retail building across the street from my house in Milledgeville, Georgia. I was lost, looking for direction and structure anywhere I could find it. I remember vividly walking around in the little dirt lot around this big old house where I lived with 7 other college kids, most of whom I had barely met, and having a painful conversation with my good friend Craig, accosting me for not being able to keep up with the band we had started in Atlanta, even though it was the thing I wanted most in the world. I was already massively depressed, having suffered through my 12th grade ego-cursed sabotage; spent 3 months in a prison school and then 5 months sleeping through class back at my regular school where basically everyone hated me for the wrong reasons; 3 months playing world of warcraft; the first mostly-friendless semester of college with a roommate who had bone cancer and went to bed at like 5pm, wherein I would just lie on the top bunk in the dark listening to music and wishing I was anywhere else; and then the next semester working the library night shift, sleeping 20 minutes every 4 hours and eventually losing my mind for a sleepless week in which I somehow aced my finals and otherwise just played the sims; a summer of hope and bike-riding and meditation and green tea and new love, at the end of which I had sex for the first time and then immediately had a pregnancy scare that turned out to just be low body fat percentage, but which damaged that relationship and traumatized me around sex for the next many years; then half a year in a little house by myself, writing songs in the middle of the night, howling like a mournful cat about everything that had gone wrong that I had no one to really talk to about, no one who could understand and even worse no one who could do anything about it; and even now I've hardly ever really talked to anybody about most of this except to allude to it, this period of several years in which my entire personality was torn down, and everything I valued about myself turned from gold into ash, the anti-Midas years; and even during all of it I had been writing songs on the piano and guitar, practicing with a band in Atlanta and trying to make a new band in Milledgeville and driving all over this cursed, sweating state, and I can remember moving into that big house when I realized that staying by myself might be killing me, and a good friend took a chance on me and let me move in with them, and I fucked that up the next summer by not knowing how to be in love either up close or at a distance;

— I am not in a moment of crisis. It is only out a sense of personal calm that I can reflect on, let alone project, any of this —

all of that behind my inarticulate reply, when Craig asked me about keeping up my end of our collaborative deal to come to Atlanta yet again to practice, which felt impossible and useless despite being one of the only meaningful activities I had, when he asked me, "Why can't you just do it, then?" and I replied, "I don't know... but I can't."

And I was looking at the Okinawan Style Karate School, dark glass front, no one ever visibly coming or going, but a flyer on the front that said accepting students, $90/month.

Maybe karate could help me. So I signed up, took a month's worth of classes, learned the word kata for form, tried to practice the katas but found it so tedious and clumsy that I couldn't lose myself in it usefully. I learned how to punch, with the first two knuckles forward; I was told that, if you do it "right," you could punch someone in the stomach and leave a bruise on their back. That you don't want to have to, but if you needed to, you could break someone's spine by punching correctly. These guys were intense, probably fucked up ex-military, seeking control over their own dark pasts through practice and communion in physical exertion. It was around that time I decided I maybe didn't want to spend more time with them. I've never yet had to punch anyone with my two first knuckles.

What stuck with me most vividly, and what I successfully practiced enough for it to stick, was being taught how to walk. They watched me walk across the room, and explained what I was doing wrong. You don't flap your feet flat on the ground, or go heel toe, heel toe; these are unstable movements, and even the slightest pressure can throw you off-center. It's also too noisy; it attracts attention. What you wanna do, they said, and what I continue to do unconsciously even now, is sweep each step from behind, down the center line of your body, and then out toward the hip, placing the outside of the palm of your foot — whatever that's really called — down first, placing your toes down quickly from the pinky to the thumb, planting your heel along the way. This is the way ninja move, they said. It's stable throughout, and it's silent. Practice, they said. As you walk around town, from class to class, or from your bedroom to the kitchen, practice this motion, over-exaggerating it until it becomes natural. And so I did, everywhere I walked alone around that campus, for months, until it became unconscious. Until I became quiet, until people couldn't hear my footsteps anymore, until I stopped trying to perform publicly, until I stopped seeking attention with every waking moment and accepted that, despite my drive and my talent, the world had no use for me, and that I would struggle to move solidly and stealthily through the rest of my life. To greater and lesser extents, of course. So that for years now, I've regularly and accidentally spooked people by just walking up behind or near them, and having them jump and say, "Jeezus! You scared me. I didn't hear you!!!" And I apologize, and feel strange, because I still feel like the clumsy kid who didn't fit inside this body.

I just remembered all of that in a flash as I walked quietly across this room, from the kitchen to the desk, trying not to wake someone sleeping just feet away, so I could sit back down and resume the challenging work of programming that I only seem to be able to do consistently at night, in the dark, when everything else has vanished, when music and code are the only things left for me to think about, when I used to howl and cry out strumming my guitar so loudly at 3 am that the neighbors would yell at me, a terrible nuisance I'm sure but wanting so badly to be heard, so badly to be heard

"you were hoping to find"

how to learn something new, and move so you are not noticed

"Strange dreams and weather"

"a remedy that can erase your sting"

"Well, what a wretched state of danger we've made here"

"Horses comin' out of the ocean"

"over, and over"

"for the first time"

"I don't know what this feeling means, my reflection"

"Holding on for tomorrow"