I've said before, I am not a physical person. My dad used to take me out in the backyard to play catch. He'd throw the ball at me and I'd invariably be unable to catch it. A couple of times I got hit in the face with it. I think the week after he hit me with the baseball, I insisted on the softball (on the grounds, that, well, what do you think my logic was)? A softball hurts a hell of a lot more than a baseball, and I think that was the end of my throwing and catching skills. I was probably 5. Maybe 6.
I hated gym class, for various reasons, but the overall, lasting reason was that we were expected to do things without being taught. The middle school gym teacher yelled at me for skating "wrong." I never learned to skate properly, pushing off with both legs, I roller skate like I'm on a skateboard. If I hadn't wanted to go to skating parties in elementary school (because it was the 90s, and everybody went to skating parties) I never would have learned. I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was 10.
Other skills I was yelled at in middle school for not having included the ability to do a chin up, running a mile in less than ten minutes (though, really, that was sheer spite, I had no interest in running, I was perfectly happy to walk around the track the entire semester), jump rope, making a volleyball go over the net, and tinikling (which is some kind of Spanish hopscotch auto-de-fe).
There was no instruction. For tinikling and jump rope, they'd bring in a couple of older kids to demonstrate and we were supposed to copy them. That's as far as it went. Except in middle school we were graded for our skills. A combination of that and my refusal to consistently wear gym clothes meant that I got pretty much solid Ds in gym all through middle school.
In high school, gym was a little better. They handed us bows and arrows and didn't teach us how to use them. They also didn't yell. Much. They yelled in swimming, but we only had to take that one semseter. I was a good swimmer, but there was no swimming done. Diving. Doing turns. Neither of which I'd been taught in my lessons, and I had more swimming experience than any other kid who wasn't on the swim team. But they yelled at us all equally.
I took gymnastics for years, at the end of which the list of things I couldn't do included a cartwheel, a head stand, or a handstand. Or vault. At all. There was no yelling there, there was a lot of, "try it again," but I had no idea what I should be trying or doing differently.
Middle school introduced a new and more horrible thing- choreography. I liked to sing, I liked to perform, and so, invariably, this lead to being forced to dance. I couldn't learn the dances, and I definitely couldn't look anything less than stupid doing them. I auditioned for musicals for years, suffering through the cold dance audition, watching the show choir kids around me. What was the difference between us?
Then in high school. Vocal and physical warm ups. I love vocal warm ups. I hate physical warm ups. Yoga. In high school, I was in the best shape of my life and physical warm ups and stretching left me worn out, sweating and furious, because there was no way we were ever going to do any more movement in rehearsal than in the damn warm ups. These days, I understand the ritual, but I still hate physical warm ups.
In college, I was kicked out of a movement class and eventually changed my major emphasis because the professor told me I was not going to pass his class. A combination of all those years of baggage and the resentment that this was a required class called Vocal Production, where we spent the first 6 weeks breathing and doing horrific physical exercises, of all things (I thought we were going to learn IPA).
This is what I bring to the world.
So I really hate it when I'm trying not to be this person, when I'm trying to find something I don't hate and be physical, and I get middle school all over again.
The girl teaching circus tonight had subbed in for the class I took before. That was a bad day and did not go well. It went even less than well when she looked at me like I was from Mars when I didn't know what a plank was or how to do one. Well, fuck you, lady. She did, at least, show me. So I can do one now.
This time, she looked at me and I felt recognition flicker in her eyes. "You didn't sign up for the whole session did you?" No. Just today. The terror changed to relief. "Well, warm up whatever you need to."
In that history up there, is there anything that might suggest I know how to warm up, or what to warm up? When someone leads warm ups, I can barely follow along.
And then we revisit a whole bunch of the things I can't do- pull ups, hand stands, and each time, this girl teaching goes, "you can't do that?" No, I fucking can't. "That's as wide a straddle as you can do?" Yes. Fuck you for asking that way. And apparently I also can't point my toes. "There are exercises you can do at home with dance elastic." With what? "You didn't take dance?" What part of you telling me how to point my toes maybe didn't clue you in that I didn't take dance?
This is why I don't do this stuff. I don't need to be treated like I'm an idiot. I have to live in a world surrounded by people who can't recite the plot of Hamlet and like to wear sandals and I'm not allowed to treat them like they should be nuked from orbit.
The lesson in all this, of course, is don't take another class with this girl, which isn't as easy as it sounds. There are two of them and they swap schedules depending on sign ups. But the difference is real, I've had two classes with this girl and walked out of both of them wanting to quit and never go back, and I've never had that from the other. With the other girl, the first class made me feel that I was going to be hopeless and I was wasting my time, but after that, I didn't feel that again, at all. So I know that's the difference.
It just makes me mad that there is a difference. I run in to these people in all kinds of physical environments, choreographers, equestrians, gym teachers, people who don't really believe anyone who doesn't already know how to do it will ever be able to, and who want to treat those other people like crap because they aren't part of the culture. I'm sorry my interest in something and subsequent lack of skills ruins the entire discipline for you.
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