Build Your Own Brave

I’ve been back from this year’s Big Island Writers Retreat for a week or so and I still feel the “island vibe” as I like to call it. On a whim, I added the Labor Day holiday weekend to my trip, not realizing the impact those few extra days would have. Or perhaps my intuitive Higher Self did?  I was on vacation August 31st through September 12th, with 6 of those 11 days on the Big Island. It was unbelievably glorious (and so necessary) since I only took 5 days off for last year’s retreat.

Last year I had so much fear and insecurity surrounding the trip, it triggered months of dysfunctional behavior prior to it. Could I guide a yoga class outside of my yoga studio that anyone would like? Was I capable of writing for 3 straight days when I’ve only done 1-day workshops up until then? After a rocky start with my writing, the answers to those questions were a resounding “YES”!

I was more confident in my [yoga] teaching and writing abilities this year but that never stops my head from running the mental mindfuck game. It focused on the draining stress of my job, living on my own, and my growing concern about supporting myself for the first time in my life. It was only a matter of time before I began to think negatively about the trip. It started with my plans to be organized about packing, which always turns out to be a cruel, running joke I can’t stop telling myself EVERY TIME I GO ANYWHERE. A few aspects of the travel plans hit minor snags that my mind naturally turned into a collective rip in the very fabric of my world.  A surprise gift I organized for the facilitator of the retreat came in the mail from Amazon and I was literally crestfallen when I saw what it looked like in real life. Oh, who am I kidding? I was probably just as big of a mess this year as last year! Only it happened in a much shorter timeframe. This was the week of the trip! Oh, and trust me, those are the things I’m willing to admit to… there is ALWAYS more to tell you but it makes me look a lot worse so let’s move on to the proactive phase of this cycle, shall we?

I sat down with all my icky feelings about myself and the trip, grabbed the closest tablet and poured it all out onto the paper. I ain’t gon lie… it was a lot of shit (remember the stuff I didn’t tell you about?) and while I did not feel instantly better, there was enough of a shift getting it out of my head, out of me. After that, I wrote out the things I needed to do because that day was Saturday, Sept. 1st. You see I decided to fly out of Los Angeles in order to be on the same flight as a friend and writing mentor who was also going to the retreat (her first time). That meant I was driving up to Pasadena for Labor Day and the day after to hang with my grandkids & my Pasadena fam before heading to Hawaii on Wednesday, Sept. 5th. Which also meant packing a bag for L.A. and a suitcase for Hawaii.

Back to the list. It helped tremendously and I got started with everything on it. Saturday was a most productive day and getting into action seemed to be the anecdote to all of my woes. Sunday was a day for packing, teaching yoga and really pulling it all together to hit the road for L.A. I arrived in Pasadena Monday morning of Labor Day for some serious quality time with my Ava and Charlie. I was finally on my way and breathing a sigh of relief. Hawaii was on the horizon in a couple of days and I could enjoy my Pasadena family in those present moments.

I really don’t know why I do that to myself. Or do I? Was it the remnant of my fear of showing up in life? The fear so dysfunctional and deep once upon a time that I literally could not show up for my life or myself? I’d cancel or no-show for moments and events, important and insignificant. Now, instead of no-shows or canceling, I have a tendency to catastrophize or minimize according to whichever will make me feel the shittiest. It’s exhausting and demoralizing, but the difference is I’m able to work my way through it. Sometimes on my own and many times with the help of others… as you’ll find out in Part 2 of my prelude to Hawaii.

I am navigating through interesting and different spaces in my life of late. Deja, the last of my three grown children, will be transferring to a four-year college in August. She is currently working two jobs, babysitting in her spare time and attending her last semester of Junior College (online). She already arranged for her father to drive her to school in August and he is helping her pay for the remainder of her education. The empty nest is imminent but the truth is she is gone so much now that it’s like a long, slow goodbye. I am strangely free since I wasn’t expecting to be on the outside looking in. Free from the bulk of the financial and logistical burdens of it. Oh, I know I’ll help here and there, but basically, she and her dad got this. It’s an odd feeling.

Watching my daughter so focused and working hard towards her goal has illuminated how lost and unfocused I’ve gotten on my own goals. That doesn’t feel good, but rather than deal with it, I avoid it in all manner of distracting dysfunctional ways. Nothing too crazy, but enough to have me off my game when it comes to dealing with my present life. It’s a symbiotic spiral. The lack of focus and energy on what matters leaves space to get tripped up by what DOESN’T, which can easily spiral downward. That leaves me feeling worse. Disconnecting from myself leads to disconnecting with people and things that feed and fuel me. Which leaves me feeling alone and somewhat isolated. Damn, I need to write here more often, I miss this. Writing into my truth.

What else am I navigating? A right knee injury since November of last year which is not going away. It limits the activities I used to enjoy and impedes the ones I need, like hiking and vinyasa yoga. The injury is pretty bad and I’ve avoided going back to the doctor because I don’t want to deal with the energy and courage it takes to advocate for myself in today’s health care system. I’ve gained weight because of it and that brings it’s own issues to my self-image/esteem.

Then I signed up for a six-week online writer’s workshop I thought I was prepared for. It was a scary writing premise for me but I wanted to expand my writing so I tried to dive in but I couldn’t. The best I could do was dip my toe initially. That left me an emotional wreck for a little bit. I wrote what I felt I could in the group but it feels as if I failed myself and the amazing facilitator of the workshop. Everyone, including the facilitator involved in the workshop, was nothing but encouraging and accepting. But I felt out of my element in a way that made me question myself in a session with my kick-ass therapist a couple of weeks ago. I am struggling with finding the lesson in all of this for me and my writing.

So, if I can spiral downward, it can also spiral upward. Right? It starts with awareness, perspective, and a little action. When I become aware of my spiral what were my choices? With my daughter, I was extremely proud of her rather than resentful or jealous. She is pretty fucking inspiring! With the writing workshop, I chose to try to the best of my willingness and ability rather than quitting. I faced how the workshop affected me and participated anyway. With my knee injury, I gave it a couple of months (longer actually) to heal like my doctor initially said. Now I get to use my healthcare plan to help me resolve this, no matter what it may take. The truth is also that while I can’t walk and hike like I want to, my job has a free gym with cycling equipment so I can get cardio exercise without any harsh impact to my knee.  I can eat in ways that won’t contribute to weight gain while my mobility is limited. With a willingness to look, choices in our responses and a little bit of footwork, we can alter the trajectory of our own spirals.

A while back, on Facebook, I posted a prayer asking God to help me let go of worry when I’m in the in-between places in my life. It got larger than normal responses. It also continued to resonate in my heart, circle my thoughts and settle into my mind. I don’t care for the in-between places in my life. I want to say I hate them but… [huge sigh here], my experiences taught me they are a necessary part of life when it comes to growth of any kind be it emotional, spiritual, or personal. I have a five-year timeline, technically four and a half years now, for where I am moving my life and work. My yoga and writing figure prominently in this timeline. They will in fact figure prominently in my Life moving forward.

Yet I’ve felt stuck and stagnant again with both. Which seemed contradictory since I attended a writer’s retreat in Hawaii, completed a 20-day deadline oriented online writing workshop, and participated in full weekend workshops in Los Angeles, where I’d previously attend 1 of the 2 days! I teach a regular Sunday morning yoga class at my home studio and I substitute for other classes regularly. I’ve been invited back to the Hawaii writer’s retreat as a writer this year, but more importantly, I’ve been paid to offer my services as a yoga teacher for part of the retreat again!

Where are the disconnect and the sense of stagnation coming from? Part of it is that I have not been writing or sharing any blog posts with any regularity or consistency. Another part is my day job I’ve been at for eleven years and counting. The 9-5 corporate cubicle grind is back to draining and stressing me out. It’s driven me back to many of my old dysfunctional avoidances such as emotional eating, mindless television, and reading. I injured my right knee in early November of last year and 3 months later it’s still not right or close to 100%. I’m unable to walk/hike or do more of the strenuous yoga I’d like to.

I haven’t blogged regularly because I’m tentative about what to write now. When I started my blog I chose to write about building my brave while I  navigated the next phase of my life. This included living a heart-centered life of presence. Yoga showed up on my path almost immediately after I began my blog and the end of my yoga teacher training opened my heart and eyes to the path of social justice and trauma-informed yoga practices. This awakening showed up on my path almost simultaneously with our Presidential election of 2016.

My growing awakening to our current social injustices is so overwhelming and has evoked a reawakened trauma response. All through this, my eyes have been open, my heart has been hurting, but my mouth has been essentially closed. I don’t know about you, but I was raised to sit down somewhere, shut up and be quiet. I learned those lessons as well as I could to survive my childhood, but I was not always successful at it. It leaked out in rebellion, sneakiness, lying and living a dual life of sorts. I don’t want to keep doing that. I can’t keep doing it.

I boycotted the NFL this year because I stand wholeheartedly behind Colin Kaepernick and his willingness to peacefully and patriotically protest the continued killing of unarmed black men, women, and children by the police in this country.  It’s been difficult to respect people I know who deliberately voted for a third party candidate or didn’t bother to vote at all last November, blithely protected in their privilege to do so. The #METOO movement sprung up so suddenly because women in the public and positions of power were coming forward and not backing down. The collective conversations about these injustices and pushback from systems which are the principal cause of the injustices have been swirling about social media.

This has been I feel the source of my fear and reluctance to write in this space. However, now, I believe I can reframe how I feel about my “in between place”. It’s been more of a self-cocooning until I was ready to reemerge on to this path that has been so clearly set before me. Answering His Call or The Call was something I committed to long ago right here in this space. That doesn’t mean I can’t curl up and rest in a protective ball from time to time. As long as I don’t lose track of my path, ever inward.

I don’t remember his last words to me. My father was back at Johns Hopkins Hospital calling from his room there. The doctors thought his recently transplanted kidney was rejecting. This was after he’d been out in the world for several weeks living from the belief the transplant was successful. He’d gone back to work and was attending church, a strange thing to say about my dad. In any case, he was sick again. I was at work on my new job I’d started a month ago in August as a messenger desk clerk for a land title insurance company. It was September 21, 1998, and I was earning enough to support myself and the kids as a single parent. We were finally off of welfare and thanks to a welfare-to-work initiative implemented by President Clinton, my childcare was paid for a year. My baby girl was 3 and the boys were 8 and 10, so having free childcare for a year was a huge financial relief for me. I was also less than 2 years clean and sober. I tell you all of this because I was still a self-centered, dysfunctional hot mess and my dad had been sick for the past fifteen years.

Here’s what I was thinking at the time. He’d been living with 3 separate medical conditions since he was 37 years old. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis, diabetes, and hepatitis due to his alcohol consumption up to that point in his life. After that, he quit drinking and changed his dietary habits in an effort to take care of his health. However, over the years his kidneys gave out and he’d been on dialysis the last few years before the transplant procedure. All of this seemed pretty far removed from my awareness and comprehension since he lived 3000 miles away on the East Coast. I couldn’t see the toll this had been taking on his body. There’d been a false alarm of sorts almost 10 years earlier with him. He’d been at the hospital and doing bad enough that the family back East thought my sister and I should come see him before it was too late. So my mother flew my sister and me back there but the doctors drained his lungs and he recovered.

For me, my father remained the emotional bully he’d always been. It was something I either realized or was finally able to admit as an adult. I was sensitive and excitable as a child and as an adult, which he never liked. I couldn’t deal with the hurt of letting my guard down and being myself with him because his verbal abuse and chastisement were too painful. I didn’t have the voice or the nerve to stand up to him and our relationship took a hit for that. I just pulled away from him the last seven years of his life. I stopped my regular calls to him, but I did take his calls when he reached out on holidays and birthdays. The conversations were about him catching me up with the family back East and I caught him up on the kids. That was pretty much what I felt safe exchanging with him.

So on that last call that I didn’t realize was our last call, it was superficial in the way it was with us then. He told me he was going into surgery that afternoon, I think. I’m sure I must have said, “I love you, Chump.” I must have said it because I always ended our calls that way. Even with my imposed breach between us, I called him by the beloved nickname I learned from him as a child. And I always said I love you. So I know what I must have said but I don’t remember his last words to me.

I hear it, his voice a smooth, charismatic and soft masculine timbre. I hear his voice but not what he said.

I hesitate when I try to make myself remember or recall our phone call. Is it really so important?

I hose down the guilt that rises up from my stomach into my heart because I don’t remember his last words to me since I didn’t know enough to care it may be our last time with each other.

I hand over this useless feeling of guilt I hid out from for years because I refused to think or write about it.

I help myself now after the distance of time and the experience of personal growth taught me compassion. Compassion for self and finally, compassion for him.

I hang on to the good memories and laughter I shared with him. There were so many.

I hold up my smiles born of those stories, his stories about his life, our life.

I hover over the space inside of me I created for him. A space of compassion, healthy anger and acceptance.

I happen to believe I’ve come to this integrated resolution of my father because I don’t want to keep seeking him in relationships anymore.

For us, now it’s about being free. Making a space where joy fits in instead of guilt and anger.