The Beginning of Your HEMA Journey
Inaugural Post: Where to Begin? The First Step Most of us start our HEMA journey with hopes of being an elegant, effective, and impressive sword fighter. We hope we will learn quickly and impress our instructors and classmates. We hope we hope to win tournament gold one day. Some of us do just that, but most of us mere mortals don't. Things are tricky, the lingo is hard to remember, and some stuff just takes a while to figure out. In our first tournament we might not even win a single match. And that's perfectly OK. If this were easy, everyone would do it. There are a few rare, talented individuals to whom everything comes easily, but measuring ourselves by their abilities is never helpful. There is only one person you need to compete with, and that's the person you were yesterday, and you won't even win that competition every day. That's also perfectly OK. But we have to start somewhere, and there is only one piece of advice that truly matters: never give up. Just...