Letting go
I went to my first training pass in HEMA November 2014. From the very start I knew that this was something I’ve been searching for during a long period of time. I wanted something challenging in my everyday life, something that always have new challenges to give. It was a lucky coincidence I found HEMA and today I am very glad I did. The challenges I’ve been going through during those years have been bigger than I could ever imagine. Surprisingly enough the roughest challenges HEMA has given to me is not my development as a fencer, but as a human being overall. One of the many things I had to handle is the performance anxiety I always get when I want to do something. Doesn’t matter what I do. If I want to run, then I always tells myself I have to get better. I’ve been through the similar thoughts during my time in HEMA. This creates such a pressure on me that I, when I get to tournaments or a normal training, perform on a level that is far below my actually performance level. I’ve been asking myself a lot about this; where are those thoughts coming from? Why am I thinking like this? I don’t have the complete answer on this though. I think it has a lot to do with the society and how it’s build. We go through school and have to perform to get grades in subjects the system told us to be good at. Even though those are subjects that you maybe don’t even care about. Maybe you had a family that didn’t give you as much attention as you deserved, that all that mattered was how good you were in school and what grade you was given. It was like this for me. I was my grades. If I didn’t perform well I wasn’t good enough. Of course there is a lot of other things than just this that is a ground to all of this anxiety about performing in other situations, this was just an example on what could be the reason why we are telling ourselves that we aren’t good enough. I’ve been working a lot with these thoughts. Even before I started with HEMA. But for me, practicing HEMA helped me a lot getting through and pass those obstacles in my mind. They are still being a fucking bitch to me at times, but I’ve got a lot better on this front. I had a discussion with my trainer before this term started about those things. He told me that I can perform better than I think, but that my mind is getting a grip over me. This started a process. Almost every training I went to made me feel anxiety in some way. I was never happy with my own performance. Every hit I took during sparring made me feel angry, why, WHY, where the others better than me?! Why was I always getting hit by them? Why didn’t I parry better? Why was I such a bad fencer?! First of all: I wasn’t bad. The others, well they are always “winning” over me. But that, in fact, is not at all weird. They have been training for several more years than me. And even if they were beginners who were better than me, why would that matter? I train for my own sake. I want to get better from my level, not theirs? I started to tell myself to let go of that feeling. Let go of that shit that I HAVE to be better than everyone else. I don’t. I don’t even have to be better than the last time I trained. The only thing I need to stay focused is to not getting stressed up during training, cause this my friends, is the worst thing you can do if you want to learn and perform better. Relax. It will be alright, you will learn. If you just let yourself be.. Mediocre at something. We all have to start somewhere, right? I’ve told myself this over and over again. That I am not a champion. Everything you do needs practice. No one of us could walk when we was born. Still, walking in our everyday life is something the most of us take for granted. But at first, taking your very first steps took hours of training. You fell, and got up again. Everything you do that is new to you will be hard and rough. You will have easier for some things than others, and the other way around. But when you start to accept your ground level you can rise that bar in small steps. Little by little. You just need to keep doing it, and accept that Rome wasn’t built in a day. For me, those insights made a lot for me lately. Now I often feel pretty satisfied with my performance during trainings, and I actually think that my fencing level increased a lot lately just by letting myself go and accepting that I was not born with a sword in my hand. I just need to let myself learn how to handle it.
