Current mood:	hopeful
Entry tags:	news, personal protection specialist

So Whatever Happened To Jade?
For those of you who know me, you know I've been considering going into security services, specifically personal protection i.e. bodyguarding. It was something I've wanted to do since before I got sick. I went to the one day seminar then, started to get into shape for the week-long training, and then came down with this mystery ailment (which my doctor insists could be fibromyalgia, a disorder I still don't believe is real). I'm not saying people with fibromyalgia don't have pain or symptoms, I just think there are other underlying causes that maybe aren't being looked at closely enough. To me, fibromyalgia is where they lump you when they aren't sure what it wrong, and it probably covers more than one actual ailment.

I spent the next year being sick and not getting better. The more I rested, the less energy I seemed to have. In the spring, I decided I'd simply had enough. If I could not get myself better and live something close to the life I desired, than life simply wasn't worth it. Being a disabled lump unable to do anything isn't really living, and if I followed all the doctors' instructions that is exactly what I'd be. So through all the pain, I spent the summer getting myself into shape for fall bodyguard training.

I entered my first 5K and beat my goal of completing it in under 40 minutes. In fact, my time was 35 minutes. Training was a bitch, months of painful walking and then jogging. I found out that jogging was no more painful on my joints than walking or any other exercise.

I started a new medication that seems to be working, but makes me so tired I literally fall unconscious. I ate more vegetables and became religious about taking my vitamins. I played CNN in the background all the time and read newspapers online. I found a martial arts instructor, after experiment with things like acupuncture, yoga, and qigong. I willed myself better.

In the meantime, AgtOrange and I scrimped and saved for my tuition. I worked my first security gig, a street festival, that tested my abilities to stay awake and focused without sleep. I had worked it out that I could quit anytime I needed, but I made it where others who weren't sick failed. In the end, I worked 22 hours straight through and figured I was ready for school.

What was school like? It was like the longest powerpoint presentation of your life coupled with a sleep deprivation experiment. Practical exercises came later in the week. What did they teach? If you really want to know, take the damn class yourself. It's a good school.

What did I learn? Well, as I told the instructor at the end, I only learned one thing, and that was the breadth and scope of everything I didn't know. Now there is a list of all the things that come next if I really want to work as a personal protection specialist. I also learned (in prepping for school) that I am capable of grasping all the fundamentals of one thing if I spend 3 months of my life doing nothing else. That means I can properly learn only 4 skills a year.

In three months I took my body from near-bedridden to my first 5K. In three months I can grasp conversational ability in just about any language. In three months I can touch base with every concept I need to learn to work security. In three months I can gain proficiency with just about any job I work. I sure as hell won't be an expert, but the foundation will be solidly laid.

Why didn't I blog about it every step of the way? Because it was no one else's business. Because some things are private. Because, while I will happily tell you anything about myself, including things that most people would consider secrets, I don't blog stories that don't belong to me. The things I learned at school are not things you can commit to ether; there is no proper way to explain an abstract.

What comes next? AgtOrange and I have plans to visit my family sometime closer to Christmas. He will probably meet my mother, whom I haven't seen in almost a decade. This is not a reconciliation; I feel it is important he grasp my background. Since she is a native Vietnamese speaker, from now until then I am teaching myself that language. It will be a surprise when I go visit. (I'm not worried she'll find out by reading this blog because she doesn't read English.) Maybe someday I will visit my family in Vietnam. Either way, I have a pool of native speakers at my disposal to help me with a second language, not to mention all the Vietnamese speakers I live near. So far, this is proving to be the only language I have absolutely no aptitude for learning. It must be a mental block, but I will overcome it.

In the spring I will start running again, even though I detest running. I want a better time on the 5K and I want to maintain my body. At that point, I will begin training in Shaolin kungfu in earnest and maybe go back to capoeira (which I haven't done since I got sick). The skill after that will be Spanish, a language I've dabbled in for years but never seriously applied myself to learning. In the fall we'll be vacationing in a Spanish-speaking country and I'll get to put my skills to use. I'm not sure what I should do after that, but it falls along the lines of getting my EMT-B and maybe working as an EMT (even if I have to volunteer) for at least six months. I will dabble in other skills that may or may not prove useful, such as crowd surveillance and how to spot a fake ID (some of my friends are bouncers). Maybe I'll take a computer class. I might also start doing that clinic escort work if I can. It will give me practice for real bodyguarding later.

I am hopeful that in two years I will be ready to look for work as a protection specialist. If that happens, I'll probably stop blogging entirely.