Learning, Structure, and Motivation: Getting back into things

In addition to learning to fence, a lot of my past year has been spent learning how I learn, and I'm getting increasing sympathy for my poor grade school teachers. I have issues of focus related to boredom and distraction, issues of focus related to anxiety, a need for clear, detailed instruction and structure.... But fortunately I knew most of that already, so I prepped for it as best I could in the free form world of teaching myself a skill outside of formalized classes. I'm still not wonderful at it, though, so here are some observations and thoughts for improvement:

Part the First: 

I realized recently that I'm bored. Not because I've mastered anything, but because I stopped giving myself goals and reading material (it's been a busy couple of months), and now there aren't any large concepts that I'm trying to work my way around. There's plenty I can do to improve, and I have a ton of drilling to catch up on, but without something new to throw my brain at my motivation and morale both fade. The solution here is, likely, to sketch out some goals for learning material to go through over the next few weeks. I already knew that I wanted to start seriously reading through Capoferro's manual, so that plus comparing with The Duelist's Companion and relevant duello.tv videos should be fun! I'll see how far I get on that this week with a concerted effort, and use that to baseline more quantitative goals in July.

Hopefully that will translate into smoother fighting. As it is, I've started pausing as I try to think about next steps and what I want to do in any given situation, which is nice to be able to do, but I keep coming up short on the answers, getting frustrated, and becoming more aggressive in ways that haven't been helpful to me. If nothing else, knowing that I'm actively studying again will encourage me to be patient and start cataloging those situations so that I can go back and look into them later.

In general, I need goals, and I need to know what's next. First there was authorizing, then there was a sea of EVERYTHING that I managed to break into smaller chunks, and then there was dagger, and now, I hope, the next step is some slightly more advanced thinking/technique for me to focus on while I continue drilling to improve at the basics. Maybe now I'll finally be able to break into that flow chart, or maybe something else will make more sense to work on. We'll see. I asked for a reasonable new fencer syllabus when I first started out, and I don't think that desire will ever entirely go away, I just have to sit down and make my own (and run it by folks who know better to see if it's reasonable).

Part the Second:

Getting the most out of events and practices. On bad days (of which today was one), I have difficulty ...making things go. Talking to people is hard, motivating myself is hard, and it's nigh impossible to determine if I'm making sensible decisions or simply being very good at convincing myself. What I need to do, and I've said this before without acting on it, is make goals in advance of an event. "Fight X people," or even "Fight these specific fencers I don't otherwise see around." Figure out what I want to be working on, whether that's a fun play day or specific techniques or testing myself. I'm going to do this before GNEW, even if all I do is write down some goals with exclamation marks on the drive down.

This is another issue that's exacerbated by a lack of outside structure or goals, which is the catch to self-motivated learning, so I'm glad to try to find workarounds in fencing that I can carry over to other activities. Another of those workarounds involves a lot of checking with people I trust to see if I should go do the thing, or if maybe the thing won't be helpful to me, or if I should just go off and try a different thing.... Helping end my decision paralysis by giving me the opinion of someone more trustworthy than my own thoughts. But a.) that's an imposition on the people around me and b.) more and more I know what I should be doing, and just need someone to confirm. So it really shouldn't be necessary, but often another voice confirming or telling me to just go do the damn thing is helpful. It's the main thing that makes me envious of folks with formal teachers and mentors some days. Fortunately people are good enough about that that if I show up at an event and ask if I should join the tourney everyone's talking about, pretty much everyone in ear shot says yes. (This might have happened at Sommer Draw.) And my friends aren't shy about telling me Soandso or Suchandsuch is a fun and good person to fight, all of which is helpful.

Smaller event and practice bits I'd like to work on: 

 - "Safe" warm-up fights? Warm-up fights are good, and when I'm feeling particularly off, and extra disinclined to fight someone new, it might be good to reach out to people I fight regularly as a start, and I should likely not feel bad about asking people to fight at a fight practice.

 - Downtime. This is far more of a problem at events, but I get antsy when I don't have anything to do and don't know what the upcoming schedule is. "Should I pack up now, or might there be pick ups later?" "Everyone's off at a command meeting, if I wait here how long will I be waiting and will anyone be coming back this way?" And left to my own twitchy devices I do the next thing on my To Do list to fill the time, which usually involves cleaning up and leaving. A lot of this can be solved by more aggressive checking in with folks (which is unlikely to happen), better planning beforehand, having something to do during downtime, and remembering food and water so that my brain doesn't shut off.

Goals and Motivation

I know I don't actually need an introduction for this sort of thing, but old habits die hard and it might some day be useful to know where I'm coming from on these topics. With that in mind, why did I start fencing and what are my goals for fencing now?

On the broadest level, I've been wanting to learn a martial art for years. For my health, for my curiosity, for the pleasure of safe and controlled violence, and in more recent years to combat body dysphoria with greater body awareness and control. Fencing, of all martial arts that I could look into in my area, offered the opportunity to learn surrounded by friends and folks I already knew in an already familiar environment, and given my massive social anxieties, that wasn't much of a contest. As an added bonus, it gave me more to do at SCA events!

My goals have since then revolved around learning historic Italian fencing in general and Capoferro in particular. In part because I learn through structure, and there are already all of these lovely resources that break down historic Italian fencing in ways that are easy for me to digest. It's a consistent style that I can study, work on, and measure my goals against. (Though I do need to switch to reading Capoferro directly, and will talk about that here at some point.)

I'm also coming at this as a nerd who's never been into sports, and so for me it's more of an intellectual and research exercise than a desire to be competitive. Learning history and a specific historic skill set is fun, interesting, and entirely in my wheelhouse. Learning to win at a game is not as familiar a motivation, and arguably not as tangible and realistic a goal. It took a while for folks to even sell me on tournaments, since it seemed outside of what I was doing, but I see their value now. I'd still feel more accomplished losing while staying in the forms I'm trying to learn rather than winning messily, but tests and markers are important regardless. (Obviously winning cleanly is better than both, but priorities are helpful to acknowledge, and in any event I'm still at the losing messily stage and will be here for a while.)

And a smidge of the reason is that of the fencers I most like to watch, many are fighting in one specific style (not all Italian, mind) and there's a crispness or a cleanness in the way they move that I enjoy and would love to one day echo. That might not end up being Italian for me, but it's a place to start.

The rest is all Donovan's fault, probably.

For now I go back and forth between focused research and drilling and less focused "I'll go to practice and try to get better at swording in general", but my main goal is definitely one specific style. Once I feel comfortable with Capoferro, I'll be interested in branching out and looking at other styles for new learning and for the sake of comparison, and I'm very interested in one day looking more into cut-and-thrust, (for reasons that are in no way related to my guilty love of Highlander), but one thing at a time.

About This Blog Title

Before I do anything with this blog, I'd like to explain the title and give credit where credit is due. "The Alchemy of Practice" is a line I've borrowed from a blog post by Guy Windsor. Back in the summer of 2015, a trans woman was denied entry into a woman's longsword tournament. I honestly don't know the details; I'd picked up a sword all of two months prior and had little knowledge of the world of swordsmanship beyond my local SCA practice. But a number of fencers blogged their opinions and support, and one of them was Mr. Windsor.

One sunny August day, while helping a friend move, I came across Swords Do Not Discriminate, Neither Should Swordsmen. It's worth reading in its entirety, but one paragraph in particular caught me and hasn't left: "This is the whole point of training swordsmanship. You start out wanting to be something that you are not (yet): A swordsman. You train, and sweat, and bleed and suffer (in my classes, anyway), and through the alchemy of practice you become the person you aspire to be. For any swordsman to fail to see the similar but vastly more difficult course that trans people go through strikes me as a pathetic failure of imagination and empathy."

It's perhaps worth mentioning here that I'm a trans man. I officially came out to everyone in early 2015, began filing paperwork in May, and started medically transitioning in the early fall.  Between those last two steps, I started fencing. 

I don't know that I can fully express what that quote meant to me, coming across it when I did. Two years ago, I wouldn't have believed that I could take the step and come out to the world and be accepted as the person and gender I always have been. I definitely didn't think I had the grace or skill or physical ability to bother picking up a sword. But I've proven both of those wrong. I'm proud of everything I've done and built over the past year, and I look forward to further building up toward the best version of myself, through conscious thought and effort, and "the alchemy of practice."

So when the time came to blog about my SCA journey, which at this point is mostly the story of my learning to be a swordsman, that's the only phrase that felt right for the title, and I hope he won't mind my using it as a reminder.