I'm going to do away with the normal pre-amble and cleverness. I'm mostly writing this one for me. On the off chance it's helpful to someone else though, it'll be here for you.
I have dyspraxia. It's one of a number of neurological disorders that tends to cluster with ADHD and Dyslexia (I have those too). Dyslexia is a condition where information in your brain gets flipped, reverse or otherwise distorted while it's in your head. Sometimes 2 + 3 is 6 and sometimes 2 x 3 is 5. Dyspraxia is a similar except that instead of mangling information in your head it mangles information that your brain transmits to your nerves. Functionally, it's not having hand-eye coordination because the sequence of commands your mind gives to your muscles to move them to where your hand is gets mangled, and so it gets in that general vicinity but doesn't actually line up with where you want it to go. Over the years my brain has learned the shorthand of basically chunking up those instructions into series of muscle movements so that each step is harder to have get mangled and fires more consistently. So instead of 1 series of complex instructions that get mangled you have 20 sets of instructions that tend to fire correctly because there's not much information there. Even then, sometimes it doesn't line up. As it turns out though, "close enough" tends to work just fine for the majority of tasks even when it means I spend my mornings walking into walls because I'm not awake enough to compensate for my brain giving bad instructions to the rest of my limbs. If I see that something has gone wrong in the instructions I've tried to give I can correct them, thanks to having spent a bunch of time trying to make my brain faster most of the time I can compensate for this particular neurological disorder, to the point where, unless you're around me all the time to see the times I don't compensate, or you've spent enough time interacting with me when I'm tired, you probably have no idea that this is a thing, or that it's the case.
Dyspraxia is probably why I haven't stuck with any other kind of physical thing. In my youth I did basketball, tennis, soccer, karate, rolling skating, roller hockey, street hockey, and sailing. I was moderately good at most of those things, although karate, being composed mostly of series of complex instructions I never got far with because it was mentally the most challenging thing. I've also never gotten the hang of a layup in basketball, apparently that's too complex relative to simply taking a shot. What I have wound up sticking with was Belegarth. I think it's in part because I've always felt like there wasn't a consequence in failing. If I fail to make a block, if I don't get that swing I needed to in, I don't have an entire team giving me grief, I'm losing the championship or anything like that. It's just one isolated mistake. It's meant that from the time when I started where I stood still as the shock of combat washed over me and my brain attempted to think and move only to do nothing and I died by being hacked to pieces before I could so much as process that I'd been hit to now I've been able to improve in bits and pieces. It took probably 6 months in order for my brain to get over the shock of "lay on" and actually begin to move consistently when that happened. After about a year I could move, swing and block when lay on was called, even if I wasn't capable of any kind of fancy motions. I spent the first few years learning to not do stupid things like, block with my head or punch block red weapons. Long story short, it's been a painful and painstaking process to develop to the point where I have, to the point where, when lay on starts my mind is simultaneously checking the person in front of me, looking for projectiles, tracking people out on the field, taking note of the way folks move, looking for flankers, noting the locations of good fighters, noting the relative strength of the line, and noting where the polearms are up from, "omg, omg, things are happening, I should do something".
Having spent 12 years at fighting, and at ACTIVELY working on it to become better, to sharpen my reflexes, expand my shot selection, speed up my eyes, my hands, my feet I feel like I've really gotten somewhere. Rather then pick up a tower shield when I started, knowing that having a high set of defenses would likely keep me in the fight longer, I picked up florentine, knowing full well what I'd do was die over and over again, until something in my brain finally clicked and those muscles moved instead of stood still. I was content to embrace my failures and simply chunk away at it because I felt like I could fail without getting chewed out and because success in having my body respond to my brain meant I was doing therapy for my head. Hell, someday maybe I'd even have some approximation of hand/eye coordination, even if it meant spending a ton more time processing. That also instilled it's own kind of honor. Any noob can pick up two swords and flail at an opponent, alternately taking hits late, or not taking them at all until they get something to connect. To become a good florentine fighter you need to be able to hit your opponent and ALSO SURVIVE. That's the difference between a novice and a vet in that arena, just the ability to be able to block shots so that you can kill more then one person. Anything else and it doesn't matter. Anything else and that kill doesn't count in my eyes. I'd much rather lose then win dishonestly because for me, that success or failure is tied into actually having control over my own body, my own limbs. If I needed to block and didn't then it's my own retardation that still stuck with me. If I get that block and it leads to a kill... great, but that's more a side effect of learning to suck less, not a goal in and of itself.
The fun thing about dyspraxia (or whatever else is wrong with my brain that's clustered with it) is that it's two directional. In addition to having my muscles not move the way they are supposed to I'm also stuck with a situation where sometimes my nerve endings don't actually report back information in a way that makes sense. In the morning, if I'm tired/out of it, I can walk into walls without really feeling much of anything but a sense of impact, conversely, when I'm awake enough I can be holding onto a cup of coffee and feel like it's burning my hand, but to anyone else it's just warm. I'd bitch and moan about it, I'd get angry, but it's pointless. This isn't a thing that can be cured or fixed so the best I can do is try to cope with it and move on. As far as I know there aren't meds that will do anything for me either since it's my brain just having inherently faulty wiring. This is just what it means to exist for me, every day, for the rest of my life.
People have complained about my honor since the first day I picked up a sword. I can't think of a time when that's ever not been a thing. I've learned to live with it for the most part. Some of it is probably me legitimately just missing shots, some of it's communication, some of it's bad will on the part of my opponents, often coupled with either low skill or slow eyes. I don't mind all that so much since I've just sort of assumed that it will be constant. I've had people talking shit about me for some or other reason for as long as I've been alive, but I think that comes along with having a dysfunctional mind. It hits you hard when you're younger, but as you grow older you learn to just tune that shit out and ignore it. One of the downsides of having picked florentine, and having developed fast hands is that many people don't actually see the blocks that I throw in the same way that many people can't see the shots that I throw. It's just that when I throw a shot they can't see and hit them, they can instantly recognize what happened, but when I throw a split second cross block, they only know they hit something, I haven't called anything, and I'm not dead. If you've never seen this half second cross block before it's either sorcery or cheating. The problem is that as a culture we rarely call "weapon" to communicate that's what it hit, since it's assumed that you can see another person's weapon, or at least get feedback from your own weapon to know that you didn't hit something squishy (though that's very much a high level fighter skill). I'm also super bad at communicating because for the first 4 years at the time when you establish those sorts of habits, I lived with all of my realm mates and fought only them. If a person had a problem with a call of yours, or had a question they talked to you about it and you worked it out, either on the field or later when you got home for the evening or over a party or some other social gathering. It meant that on the field most people didn't communicate anything because they inherently trusted the other fighters to be honorable, and when there was any question it was dealt with one on one. I would love to return to a culture like that but unfortunately in most cases it's just not feasible. You won't have time to spar every person you fight at an event who isn't 100% on what happened with their shot, so we have to be good at communicating in the moment exactly what happened. *sigh* So, I'm working on that. My favorite thing of all is when a new sword and board fighter covers their face with their shield, swings wildly at me, misses, and then emerges from behind their shield to tell me what a shithead I am for not having taken their shot. It happens all the damn time and has at least in one instance almost started a fight on the field where the sword and boarder in question was ready to throw down their gear and come at me. It emphasizes the importance of actually looking to see where your weapon goes, rather then just assuming things went as planned. The reverse of that particular behavior is also just as fun, where a person responds to a wrap shot by throwing their face behind their shield so that you can no longer tell where their face is. In a perfect world you'd intuit it's location and avoid hitting them 100% of the time but more often then not that person gets hit in the face because you a) can't see where you're about to hit them b) can't pull the shot if it's going to be in their face and c) are swinging blindly at a moving target.
What vexes me is not that people talk shit about my honor, it's the attribution that people give to that shit talking. The assumption is that it's all about my ego, that in order to win I have to cheat because otherwise I wouldn't be any good. The assumption is that I'm actually good enough to feel 100% of the shots that hit me and any lapse in shot taking is the result of malicious intent to sluff that guys shots. If I'm getting attacked by multiple people (because of course, that never happens) and fail to communicate effectively then regardless of whether or not my honor was good, flawless or terrible it's assumed that I'm totally cheating. And that... that aggravates me. All of my conditioning is from a place where the people giving me feedback lived with me, knew me, where my friends, and so I'm conditioned to accept without questioning any time a person gives me crap about some aspect of my fighting. Over the years that's shifted somewhat, but that's at least where I've started from, I assume all critiques are heartfelt. So when I get wind of people talking shit about my honor, or read on Bel Confessions "does anyone think R--t has shitty honor?" it gets under my skin some. Not because someone thinks I have bad honor, but because it's so rare that anyone is having that discussion with ME. Talking shit about a person's honor behind their back is almost certainly never going to go away for any of us in any of our foam sports. It's just too easy to get away with. But on my end it means that either I'm not taking my hits because my body has been betraying me as it sometimes does and I'm losing out on the opportunity to work on and try to fix those things so that I get something closer to "normal" or I am taking those hits because I've done everything correctly but I need to work with that individual so that they can see the blocks, etc that are being thrown to thwart them. In the former case it means a decade of trying to fix something fundamentally wrong with me is thrown in to question, and that is incredibly demoralizing. In the latter case it makes me sad because it's possible that if I'd simply sparred with this person perhaps it would flip, and if they are missing blocks that I throw then that kind of behavior is probably cascading into other fighters which means that the person in question is helping to breed a toxic environment for everyone.
I don't expect folks to understand or empathize, and I don't want people to look at me differently just because they gain this knowledge, it's part of why I normally don't share it with other folks, I don't want it to be some kind of excuse, I don't want to let those problems have any more sway over my life then they already do by fucking up every day of my life in the ways that they already do. But I guess I needed to vent, I had to tell someone, somewhere for my own sanity because my struggle to become the fighter I want to be has so much more at stake then just whether or not I win or lose. It's not about my ego, my pride, my reputation, it's about mastering myself. When things get in the way of fighting, failing and learning I start to feel warped/twisted because that's why I'm in the sport, that's the part that provides me with joy and meaning, that's the thing that keeps me here and coming back. If you made it this far... thank you for reading. I'll sort myself out soon enough, just needed a moment to breathe.
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