This morning I went down to get my gi from the laundry rack. And I had a bit of a scare seeing my purple belt hanging up there. “Oh, no, I’ve gotta put that in my bag!… …. wait a minute…”
On the one hand, a very large weight has been lifted. I’m no longer wondering what else I have to do to be promoted. I’m no longer tracking if the instructor is watching everything I do. I’m no longer critiquing every little movement as to whether it’s “purple belt level” (let alone brown belt level, goodness) or not; everything feels like a nice brown haze, lol. Even when the biggun’ white belt tossed me around last week and sat on me and I seriously considered tapping to pressure (because omg the pressure), still a brown haze.
I also feel more free to try stuff, and it feels like things are working better. I feel like I might be rolling better and more fluid even with the people who don’t roll that way back, probably mostly because I’m not putting so much pressure on myself.
On the other hand, if I think about it too much, I panic: they expect me to know jiu-jitsu now! And my brain blanks out and claims it doesn’t know any. I taught the Friday morning before I was promoted, and it was no big deal because I’ve been teaching morning classes now for months. Then Tim asked me to teach a morning last week after being promoted, and I panicked; when one of the black belts showed up that morning, I turned it over to him instead because I couldn’t think of anything to teach. (I did feel silly afterward, but at the time, just pure panic.)
I did stop training 2-a-days. I had already dropped Fridays because I was wiped out by the end of the week. Then at the beginning of this month, Tim suggested that I train a bit less because I seemed tired and burned out. So I started taking the evenings off, which also let me get back to doing things around my house (all my other evenings are taken up with other things). I did feel a lot better in the mornings, though I was missing some of the people from the evenings. I’d already decided to go to class that Wednesday evening that ended up being my promotion, so I did go then.
And zomg, only crazy people do 2-a-days! I even just played around with one of the other ladies for 2 rounds and then sat another. I was d.e.a.d. the next two days. I have no idea how I did 2-a-days for so many months.
So I’m still on mornings only. I intend to try to do 1 evening every few weeks and/or go to Saturday open mat sometimes so I can train with those folks, though knowing that I’ll likely be wrecked again after.
BJJ Grrl 