So, I’m in the process of leaving my tae kwon do school. It’s where I started training. Seven and a half years ago, I was in fifth grade, ten years old, and innocent to the ways of martial arts. Now, I’m seventeen, a senior, a black belt, and ready to move on.
I dated my instructor, who is 21 years old, for quite a number of months last year. It was a solid, emotionally-based relationship. He respected the age difference and my parents demands that, at least in their presence, he was my TKD instructor, and nothing more. I was also going through a completely-unrelated emotional crisis of sorts, coming to terms with certain events in my childhood. We broke up after about seven months, peacefully. We’re still friends. He’s still my instructor.
But, at some point, I started loosing respect for him as my instructor. To me, there needs to be a certain degree of a certain type of respect between a martial arts teacher and their student. It needs to be mutual but different from both sides, and we were both failing there. I found myself (due to some changes at the school) one of the only black belts training. I was someplace between a student and teacher to the rest of the school. The two of us are still someplace between teacher and student, friend and friend, and ‘more than friends’.
It’s not an easy choice and I’ve been batting it around in my mind for months, but I need to move on. A good dojang is not just a school or a place to train, it’s a family. Even when we moved to a different building, the soul remained the same. It was where I earned my black belt. The place where I’d cried, literally, in pain. Where I’d time and again broken the limits I had unconsciously set on what I could do.
But, I’m loosing respect for the art of tae kwon do. I’m not ready to quit training; that’s not an option. I’m familiar with one of the other schools around here: I have some friends who train there, and I know one of the instructors. I’ve already started taking classes there. It’s going to be odd for a bit – there are stylistic differences, and differences in the curriculum from my almost-former school. So while I will keep my black belt, I’ll need to earn it again. For a few weeks, I’m going to be taking beginner classes and advanced classes – beginner ones, to learn the material that’s new to me.
I was surprised, when I took my first class there, this past Saturday, how much like home it felt. I was comfortable with the instructors and students. Despite not knowing some of the material, I felt as if I belonged. It felt right to me. I felt the same way I did before, at my school. There were summer days when I’d have my parents drop me off at three, and finally be picked up at eight or so. This past Saturday, I went up to my new school at ten in the morning, took an intermediate/advanced class, worked one-on-one for a bit with one of the instructors, and ended up assisting with a demo class for a troop of Girl Scouts.
They were mostly second-graders, the Girl Scouts. When I was a Girl Scout, in second grade, my troop went to a demo class at a local karate school. That was my first exposure to martial arts, and I was hooked. Three years later, I started training, the rest is history.
I think it was a sign. It wasn’t, of course, planned for me to help out. I wasn’t even planned to show up on Saturday. But I know the head instructor there, and finally got my emotions ready to say, “I’m ready to switch.” Then the class felt right, and I found myself worked naturally into the joking after class. I felt a renewed passion for learning new techniques as I was working with an instructor. Then, I literally saw myself, in that troop of Scouts: shorter than the rest, skinny. Brown hair sloppily tied back and glasses. She was me in second grade; and here she was, maybe starting a life of martial arts.
I’m not leaving my home, my dojang. It just moved, and I’m just finding it again.