Unexpected side effects.
The reason why I started martial arts was the complete usual – it sounded cool and I wanted to get in shape. The reason why I stayed in martial arts, was that I found a level of sanity there that I never thought possible. There’s a lot of painfully cheesy talk about how martial arts ‘centers your mind’ and that kind of thing, but that’s not where I’m going with this. To me, it was an escape. My mind, especially then, replays everything, stresses everything, and was running a constant paranoid dialogue about what everyone else was thinking about me at all times. And I don’t mean the everyday level, because everyone worries about what everyone else is thinking. This was a crippling, bordering on complete paranioa, problem for me. What I found in Taekwondo that I didn’t expect was an escape from that. It required so much of my mind to focus on what I was doing, and to do it well, that I would get relief from the insanity in my head for a while. And as time went on, I found ways to hold on to that relief in the rest of my life. The degree to which martial arts fundamentally changed my life and my personality is incredible. I love it for a lot of reasons, but the pure mental relief was one that I never expected, and probably saved my life.
