So I trained in Shudokan karate from when I was 7 years old until about 15. Lately I've been watching the Cobra Kai series and I've enjoyed the themes of balancing defense and offense, and of when to be kind and when to drop the hammer and be mean. There were times when I was little when I felt like I learned the wrong lesson at the time. My dojo Teaneck School of Self Defense didn't do a lot of tournaments. I think I only did two. The first one I didn't do well, i must've been 10. But when I was 11 or 12 I wanted to try being aggressive. I took all my energy and ideas of vengeance against bullies and walked around the tournament with serious "eye of the tiger" face like i was gonna kill somebody. I enjoyed the rage and scaring people. A kid even came up to me and congratulated me as I did my kata, before I officially competed. I was surprsed. When it got time to spar, I ended up using too much contact and was disqualified. And I thought maybe I had used too miuch of the dark side I was tapping into. A couple of years later we had a new teacher join the school, and he was very aggressive in his style. He was very much like the Silver character from Cobra Kai. I liked the idea of learning this effective way of fighting, when in the past I kind of felt like I was just learning moves but not great application. When it came time to do this tournament and I was one of the only students set to compete, I got really stressed out. Deep down i didn't like this teacher, and i was somehow worried that I wasn't going to do well at this tournament, or that this teacher was going to turn me into something I didn't want to be. My dad was driving me to the tournament, but I felt sicker the closer we got. So my dad and mom encouraged me to back out and turn around, and I sort of made an excuse for not going, one of them being that I didn't like the teacher. That teacher ended up having some kind of falling out with the head sensei, Sensei Lou, and he never came back. But sometimes I think back to that time, and feel like I should've followed through, that maybe this was an instance where my parents gave into my hyper-sensitivity, that I needed to toughen up and learn how to deal and manage under that kind of pressure, that I wasn't going to catch anybody's brain, or die. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened, in a similar vain, if I had stayed in this private school where I had been bullied by a bunch of wealthy kids, that maybe I would've eventually won more friends once i got past that tumultous early teen years. My life probably would have been much different being friends with wealthy kids, having that kind of super quality private school education. Teaneck high school (public school) was a great school, but sometimes you wonder. I write more about those formative years in my memoir. At the end of the day, much like the Cobra Kai series, I know now I didn't have it all correct back then when it came to my takes on the world, and it's been a long journey to learn how to better embrace the tougher sides of me, the beastly monster that can eat up everything around me, if I just let myself stop being the nice guy all the time. Still finding the balance.
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