Zen and the Art of Nausea Cycle Maintenance

TK-Oh! – South Bend Roller Girls

I'm pretty sure the long and arduous road to mastery not only begins with a single step, but also the sensation you are going to hoarf weapons-grade chunks in the general direction of any bystanders unfortunate enough to be—well, bystanding.

Without fail, this happens to me every time someone passes me the star panty, and I've been torn because even though I really like learning to jam, sweartogod, it's only a matter of time before I accidentally hurl a barrage of copper jacket baby carrots and take out half my team. There must be a solution to this, and I will find it by the end of this essay, damn it, but let's get you up to speed here before we talk about all that, shall we? Please join me now in recapping last Thursday's scrimmage:

“Mind, you rocked that last jam. Way to keep my hands to myself this time. Boo-ya.”

“Absolutely, Body. And hey, when Schmitt shoulder checked us and I screamed like that kid from Goonies, thanks for not dropping into the fetal position and playing it off like you were falling small. That would have been embarrassing.”

“Aw, sure thing. We held our own out there, didn't we? Still some bugs to work out with timing those hits, but blocking seems to be coming along, huh?”

And THEN...

“TK, you're jamming next.”

Pause tape. This is the interactive part of our essay where you try to picture my face smiling, my head nodding, my coach extending the star panty, and me just standing there like some kind of bobble-headed derby doll. Can you see it? Yeah, not my finest moment. OK, roll tape...

“Mind. Mind, reach out my arm and take the panty from the coach. Take the panty, Mind. Takethepantytakethepantytakethepanty. MIND!”

“Whoakay! Stop yelling at me!”

“Pull it together, dude, we're jamming next. J-J-J jamming; let's practice juuuuuking, ooh, ooh, ooh, juuuuking...SING with me, Mind!”

“Wait; so he really just said we're jamming?”

“Uh, yeah. What's wro---- ugghhhhh... OK, not cool, Mind, not cool; don't do that. We've got business here in a minute; really bad time to barf.”

Aaaaaand that's about how it went from the second I touched the star panty until the second the whistle blew to start the jam. But check this out, all that went away after the whistle. Yep, everything was fine, and I later realized that everything is always fine once the whistle blows and everyone starts moving, so I chalked it up to a case of anticipatory nerves.

With that, I cashed the reality check that I had a little experience with this kind of thing and thought hey, this might be a good time to pull out some of my old mantras like, “total calm, total calm, total calm.” Those came in pretty handy back in the day when I was squaring up to bat, or waiting for the horn to go off for foot races and open water swim starts.

But alas, none of the mantras worked this time—like, not even a little, and because they had ALWAYS worked in the past, I spent the drive home from practice and the better part of the next day trying to figure out what happened. The best I could come up with was that in past games/races, no one was looking back over their shoulders and smiling at me like, “Hey, welcome to the starting line. I'll be eating your face off in about 30 seconds.” I mean, I hadn't felt nerves like this when lining up as a blocker, right? Deep down, though, I didn't really feel like it was an intimidation thing, but I wasn't sure what else it could have been.

My gut feeling turned out to be right, because in retrospect, I think the problem with thinking my mantras were short circuited by thoughts that Pivot Beasts and Blockasaurus Rexes were going to annihilate me is that honestly, I'm not really afraid of getting hit after having been knocked across the floor 87 billion times since the beginning of fresh meat training. If anything, the prospect of being hit just makes me want to get my butt through the pack that much faster! It's kind of a rush, actually, and despite all that flubble-blah Mind was just saying, I like looking for the holes in a pack, I like the challenge of getting through the walls, and I LOVE trying to juke.

So, what then? If I'm not afraid of getting hit or falling, and I love everything about the prospect of jamming, what's left to cause these crazy, rabid butterflies to play chicken in my stomach every time I line up to jam? Hmmm, well, logic would dictate that if it's not the known I fear, it must be the unknown, right? And the only thing I don't know in this scenario is how I'm going to do out there with everyone watching.

Whoa!

And that's it—performance anxiety. That, my friends, is it. Now hang on to something because we're about to get our analysis on:

Not knowing what will happen breeds anxiety because there are elements out of our control. The only way to make that feeling subside is to bring some control back into the picture, and that starts with making a plan. For my situation at the jam line, then, I need to stop worrying about how it'll all turn out in the end and start making conscious moves towards building the steps to get there. I mean, what makes you feel less anxious, getting into a car with directions to your destination, or without? So, before the jam whistle, maybe I can just focus on the first three things I want to achieve: establishing “point A”: a good starting position, establishing “point B”: finding that initial hole (or creating a plan to make a hole), and figuring out the quickest way to get from one point to the next. After that, I just have to believe I can do it.

All right, well, I feel better, and if nothing else, Mind will be so distracted by trying to plan for the immediate “here and now” that it won't have time to be scared half-to-stupid about the “overall.” All I need to do is figure out how to get from Point A to Point B, which usually just amounts to a few steps, and man, I can do anything for a few steps...so, breathe, assess, believe.

Heh, cool. Looks like I have a new mantra, guys.