A Period of Self Reflection amongst Exam Mayhem

Guess I just had to do this, huh. In the middle of the friggin' exams...

Life hasn't been kind to me lately. Yet I consider myself more fortunate than most on absolute terms.

Still, sometimes my head can be my own demon. Conquered it many times, yet there is still a dark shadow still lingering somewhere. I am afraid to face it. I don't know this darkness, and I don't know what will happen to me should I succumb to the darkness which I don't know.

Ever since this semester, I've been telling myself that I'd strike a good balance between kendo and studies, but as time went on, it proved impossible, and I can't tell whether it's because of my own volition or because of circumstances that I didn't put enough effort into what I considered to be something I hold dear to me.

In either case, I have had this loose joint injury on my right hand since the start of the year, as a carry-over gift for not blocking a strike properly with the shinai during the annual year-end kendo training camp. Doctor said I had to skip up to 6-8 weeks of kendo to allow this injury to heal. Still, being the stubborn guy I am, I continued training, and it hasn't really healed much.

It doesn't hurt as much now, but whenever I swing the shinai now and then, the same intense pain still comes back. Is this injury gonna be permanent? I don't know.

I don't have many people I'd call friends so far in my life, unlike most people by my age would have. And kendo discovered me when I was about to go my lowest in life a few months right after I finished NS. Through kendo, I got to know a lot more people who made kendo club look like a kaleidoscope of different personalities and made me feel I belong somewhere. Me who cracks terrible jokes, socially awkward, an adult at the age of 22, yet doesn't know anything about being an adult at all... Sometimes I look at myself and I lament at the mess I am, yet despite all the differences I feel like a part of them. At least for the beginning.

And when the training gets tougher, I find my body difficult to adapt to the faster paced training that was said to characterise kendo. I want to train harder, fight harder, move faster, be stronger... Yet for every training I attend, I find myself always lacking in something. Lack of speed, lack of stamina, lack of zanshin (alertness). With each training I feel that I fall behind further while the others are steadily improving, and my body feels like it can give way anytime soon even before I get to the gikeiko (sparring) towards the end of each training session.

It's almost as if kendo is telling me that I am not suited to do kendo. And I got lousier at maintaining my grades. They started to fall behind by much more than I expected myself to, even though I had a strong personal commitment to the club. It's as though each step of the way, you keep encountering failure, never a single moment of success.

With my training getting more and more irregular because of erratic school work and the stupid unplanned-for project work hours I had to sacrifice training in place for, I now feel I can't keep up with the rest. At all. In terms of camaraderie, I am no longer as close to them - they have their supper groups, chats, etc. And most of them made it into exco. I long to be among their number as well, but sometimes, well...

I feel like a failure sometimes. No, almost everytime I go for kendo. Is that what I came to kendo for? And it is not just kendo - the heavy schoolwork and now the exams have started. And it's always getting more and more hopeless by the day - how do I keep my morale up amidst all these things happening to me?

I ask myself - was it the injury that made me think like this? Or was there something more that I failed to realise all this time during kendo? Or am I just incompetent enough for kendo?

Kendo aside (it was a pretty big part of my university life so far), schoolwork is always never-ending, and it only gets more and more uphill. Always feeling hopeless after each and every tutorial - like the feeling you get that you could've gotten the answer to tutorial question if you used the following solution steps, and yet when you actually do it you can't solve a single question in that week's tutorial.

I smile at my friends, encourage them to continue to stay strong and never give up, but inside I scream.

I scream.

Can I get any better than what I already am? Or am I just gonna be stuck in the rut all the time, falling behind everyone else while they exponentially improve? How will the future turn out to be? Why the hell am I working so hard for? Why do I continue to stay in kendo? Why am I even thinking like this in the first place?

In a time of great uncertainty

It's been a long while.

So recently I've gotten into university, and it's almost the end of the second semester... How time flies. Took up biomedical engineering, and frankly, I'm starting to wonder why the hell I took up such a daunting major. I'm starting to believe I'm going for the wrong major.

Man it's just batshit crazy these days. Nothing but work work and work. First, the EG1109 project on building a truss bridge design was a nice and fresh but epic flop - calculations in the report were error-ridden, and I actually skipped my birthday just to finish up that stuff... Major bummer. And add countless of 4am bedtimes just to produce that.

And then came physics and math, which come relentlessly along with graded programming sit-in labs every 2 weeks. How the hell could anyone understand the use of pointers and master it within such a short time? Physics and math though, it's getting more familiar because we're always doing them whether we like it or not.

With that amount of material, it's hard to believe I'm still alive man.

Can't break now, it's only 2 more weeks to exams.