The Budding Optimist

I told Dr. B about having a panic attack after teaching yoga several weeks ago, and that after this happened, I decided I wanted to teach yoga so that -- by intentionally putting myself in anxiety-inducing situations -- I could learn to be strong through the panic. Dr. B said that basically what I'm doing is exposure therapy. He said exposure therapy is 100% the most difficult form of therapy. But also that it's the most effective. When he said that, I thought, "Well that settles it, I have to do this. It there's one thing I'm good at, it's choosing the most extreme option." So first I climbed a fkking rock wall. I did this for two reasons: the first reason is that I'm scared of heights. So I climbed that damn wall over and over. And the second, because the last (and only) time I went climbing was with my former best friend 4-ish years ago. I wanted to take climbing back, regardless of the fact that Charlotte had decided to leave and take our entire fr

I used to read through my friend Stella's essays for her when she was in grad school. This was back when we were working together in Hazelwood. She already had one degree in English and had been teaching literature for at least a decade by this point but insisted she needed feedback before submitting any work. That lunatic would actually write 3 different versions of every essay and ask me to choose which one was the best. She eventually got the degree and left to go work in Clayton, where -- surprise, surprise -- that kind of insanity is rewarded. I remember she showed up on my doorstep one night months later, in tears. She didn't know if she could survive the new job -- she was getting 4 hours of sleep per night and answering 150 emails a day  from middle school students and parents. That was years ago. She's fine now, but that night always stuck with me because I thought, There is no fkking way in hell I could handle that amount of pressure. I would have a nervous breakd

  I am teaching a weekly yoga class this month. The problem with this is that I have ZERO spacial awareness and am full of an impending sense of doom. In addition to the millions of hours I spend on lesson plans, I am now also spending evening hours writing sequences and studying yoga manuals.  Jade thinks this is a wonderful opportunity during which I will grow as a human being. That is why I am doing it. I want to grow as a human being. I've never been comfortable being bad at things.  Therapy Elsa insists I stop saying "bad" and instead say "imperfect." More than any other thing she has repeated over the last 4 years is the sentence, "I don't think it's as black and white as all that." She (and Jade) says that I am a perfectionist and that my idea of "bad" is anything at which I do not excel. The black-and-whiteness in me says that if I am not excellent at it, I am bad at it. No one likes to be imperfect at things, but I feel like