CLEANING THE MAT

I pressed my body back into child’s pose and something broke inside of me. I began to sob, large wet tears falling to my mat. I had just spent the last forty minutes moving through rounds of sun salutations and a flowing asana practice. Child’s pose was my moment of rest before moving on to seated postures, but then I started ugly crying. I didn’t realize just how much I’ve been holding everything in, but all the stress over work and worries about Josephine and frustrations with time mismanagement came flooding out. Josephine is blind. It’s been a fairly sharp decline with in the last month and we have an appointment for Friday with the vet for her yearly where we will discuss all things related to a senior dog. She’s fine. We still go on our morning walks and she moves through the house with ease. New spaces are a challenge, but Josephine has no fear in exploration.

There is a very large part of my brain that knows that all of this is fine. We just have a blind dog now. That doesn’t mean she’s not enjoying her life. We are just adapting to life with a senior pet. Michael, on the other hand, has gone straight to doom and gloom with predictions that Josephine will not be with us next year and how he thought we’d have more time. Every time he starts up, I want to smack him across the face. I get frustrated with his inability to be present in the now. He goes to straight to the ending. This relationship almost didn’t happen at all because of that. He went from “I really like you.” to “We’re going to break each other’s hearts.” to total silence and ghosting in the time span of a week. He’s kind of lucky to be here, but he wants to fix things, solve a problem that just might not be solvable. If he doesn’t have an answer or a fix, his go-to is straight to done. He doesn’t seem capable of sitting still and being present with situations like death, illness and aging.

He’s never had to do it.

So, I don’t include him in my own thoughts on Josephine or any of the other unfixable concerns I am having. I have some women friends (Jenn and Heather) who I’ve confided some of those concerns with but for the most part, I just sit with all of that festering around inside me until I reach a limit and explode. That’s what happened Monday. The previous week, I’d spent countless hours troubleshooting and coming up with a solution for running batches of slides without losing focus. I was sure it was fixed by the time I left work on Friday, but when I went to run the program Monday morning, the thing failed and locked up the computer. Two hours later and a call to tech solved the issue but my morning felt like spilled milk. With the program now running the batch of slides, I grabbed my yoga mat and headed to the yoga room in the gym where I spent an hour on my yoga mat.

Where I spent an hour taking care of myself.

Later, I was thinking and mulling over what I had already written for this post. I know the writing advice of “write what you know” but its kind of starting to feel like all I know is work, stress and despair. Or rage. I am completely surprised and taken off guard by the rage that can suddenly bubble up and out of my body. I feel like Katie Ka-Boom, the teenaged cartoon character from the Animaniacs. Sometimes, while standing in line somewhere or just at my desk, I will look behind me and be a little shocked that the people moving about doing their own thing are intact, that I haven’t set anything on fire behind me while I stand at my desk simmering. But, of course, everyone around me is fine and intact because none of that rage ever actually leaves my body. I just stew and imagine complete destruction and then stuff those feelings under a shoulder blade or into a hip joint.

I am not this person. Or at least, I haven’t always been this person?

I do not mean to make any kind of excuse for my rage. My anger is validated. I mean, just last week the most popular website was a website that teaches men how to drug and rape women. There’s a line from a Courtney Barnett song Nameless/Faceless that scrolls though my head quite often:

Men are scared that women with laugh at them. Women are scared that men will kill them.

Making it to the age of fifty with experiencing only minor sexual assault and not rape (or murder) should not feel like the miracle that it is. There are plenty of good reasons for a woman to be ragey right now. But the person I was before tended to be a little bit naive about the world around me. I don’t really want to be that naive person either, but there is a lot of weight to knowledge. There’s a lot of weight in the feelings and frustrations we hang onto. At some point I have to realize and notice when I am carrying too much. Everything, everything, is a choice. I need to make different choices, the kind of choices that make for a more joyful writing experience.

Baby steps.