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.
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