Pathetic Self Care

One of these days I will actually learn to take care of an injury rather than plowing through it.

No, I don't have any new injuries at the moment, thank goodness. The knee has settled back down and is behaving itself, though it does have a new, and very loud, click when bent deeply.

What's annoying is my back, which I sprained back in December, and which stills acts up occassionally. It's how frequently it acts up vs. how much it should act up that is making me annoyed with myself. You see there are three things I can do, any of which by themselves will prevent my back from hurting.

1) I can take ibuprofen at inflammation-reducing levels (I.e. every 4-6 hours whether my back hurts or not).

2) I can lie down and put my feet up, once with ice, or 2-3 times without ice, for 15 minutes each day.

3) I can do back exercises: 1 hour class, 4x a week. This prevents pain after about 3 weeks to a month of consistent exercise, and continues to work until I drop off significantly, defined as missing more than 2 classes/week for more than 1 week.

It says something about me that #3 was the first thing I discovered that worked, and that I figured it out more than six months before I realized that rest and/or taking ibuprofen also worked. In fact, I didn't even try them until a chiropractor pretty much forced me to.

It also says something that once I had worked up the exercise schedule I only fell off the exercise enough to have a recurrence twice between December and mid-May, both times during vacation weeks. On the other hand, now that summer's here and I can't fit the back classes into my schedule, I'm failing to follow through on rest or ibuprofen to the point where my back hurts more days than not - even though 15 minutes of rest/day is sufficient to prevent pain for that entire day. Mind you, I'm not someone who considers sitting (or lying) still a punishment. I can happily lie on the couch for hours reading, if I'll allow myself to do it.

But apparently I'm only permitting myself to actually take care of an injury if it is in some way a punishment for me. Lying around with an ice pack, reading a book is insufficiently difficult or something. Which is getting deeply annoying as I keep hitting evenings, when I pretty much can't go lie down - dinner, karate, baths, bedtimes, etc. - and discovering that oh crap, my back is going to make me miserable tonight, isn't it?

My subconscious is apparently a weird and masochistic place and I'm getting a little tired of it.

"Cindy is cool"

I was an unpopular kid. Deeply unpopular. So unpopular that merely being in my proximity without immediate loud protest of the fact would endanger the status of the proximate kid. So unpopular that kids from four grades down knew my name, who I was, and that they needed to stay away from me or suffer.

Why exactly I became so much of a pariah, I have little idea. Middle school was the worst of it (5th to 8th in our system). By High School I had become merely invisible, which was a great relief. If I had no friends except my boyfriend (a charming fellow who called me "Hippo Hips" and reminded me constantly that no other boy in the school would talk to me voluntarily), at least I also had no tormentors. When I hit college, I began to find friends (most of whom are still friends today), who took me as I was, and from there I never looked back. If I still didn't understand popularity, I didn't really care anymore.

Still, those early lessons are ingrained, and ingrained deeply. So you can imagine my shock when Tuesday I overheard the two boys (pre-teen 1st and 2nd gups) whispering back and forth. "Why do you get to stand next to Cindy? I wanted to stand next to Cindy!" and the reply "Because I'm senior, and Cindy is cool."

Taking Up Space

I'm working on learning Kusanku and Kusanku Sai at the moment. This is both easier and harder than working on two different katas. Easier because the general movements are the same for each, and even a lot of the specific movements are so similar as to make little or no difference. Harder, because that exact similarity makes it really, really easy to criss-cross the two versions when working back and forth between them. Like putting the lift from the lift and punch in Kusanku into the simple stab of Kusanku Sai.

One of the things that's striking me as I work through these katas is the amount of waiting that's built into them. There are a lot of places where the move isn't a strike in-and-of itself, but rather it puts you in the proper position to strike. The kata doesn't flow from strike to strike, but rather from preparation to strike to the next preparation.

I don't seem to be having the daintiness problem so much with this kata - which is good, Sensei's been after me about it for about two years now. I do seem to have a problem with the waiting postures. Every time I'm too tense, to close in, too small. I'm holding my arms tight in to my sides, my hands are close to my body rather than out and relaxed. I seem to be trying to make myself as small as possible - afraid of taking up space.

As soon as I made that connection (which only took about the 50th time Sensei pointed it out), it was easy to relate to a lot of my behavior out of the dojo. I do try to take up as little space as possible - sometimes consciously, sometimes not. I tend to think that making room for me is inconvenient for other people, so I try to make myself small, even though it inconveniences me. When I look around the house now, Robbie and Aaron each have their own room. Rob has the basement and the garage as his. I have a corner and one closet of the guest room - which I lose easy use of every time we have a guest. And we're about to move my computer into the family room, which makes it even less "mine".

When I ponder the house arrangement, it makes sense that things are this way, until I start looking back at all the prior houses. We've owned four houses over the years, none of them small. In none of them have I ever had a room that was completely mine. Not even in Tennesse where we had a perfectly enormous house and only Rob and I. All rooms were shared, but the back garage was his. Unless you wanted to call the laundry room mine - which might have passed if it had had anything in it but the washing machine and dryer. In Arizona we had four bedrooms. Rob and I shared the Master Bedroom, Robbie had one, Rob's office was one, and the fourth - it was my office and Rob's craft room. In addition to housing the futon for houseguests. Somehow this arrangement - Rob has private space; the boys have private space; I have shared space - has become the norm, accepted by everyone, including me, as the obvious and natural arrangement. And it's not because Rob has shoved me out of places. It's because he took it for granted that he had the right to take up space - and I never did. I could easily have staked out a room in the house in Tennessee, but never did.

So now I'm trying to learn to take up some room - starting with the tiny step of trying to relax into largeness in Kusanku. Because honestly, if I can't stand somewhere with my arms out and say (mentally) "This is my space.", how the heck am I going to learn that I can do it with more permanent things?