The Budding Optimist

I think if I still lived in South Carolina, I would be described as tender-hearted. And it would not be a compliment. It would be like when you say, "Bless her heart," while watching someone from New Hampshire try to figure out grits. Tender-hearted is too easily given to feelings. I think my feelings are bigger than the rest of me put together. If I could get rid of some of my feelings, I think the first one I would get rid of wouldn't be anger or sadness or jealousy. It would be hope. I hate hope. Hope is the thing that kills you. I know that's an expression commonly used in soccer-football but since it's the Superbowl here in America, it feels appropriate. I had a date tonight. My friend Abbie gave me this beautiful necklace a few days ago that she said helps manifest love. For the first time in a long time, I actually felt hopeful... I mean, not that I was going to fall in love on a first date, but like -- hopeful that I could even still feel positive about a ...

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. I've been thinking about how an aspect of Judaism I've always admired is the "sitting shiva." My mom's family was Jewish but since she was raised in foster care, we didn't really get a lot of the aspects, except for as they were watered down by Christianity. But I have always loved how Jews sit together for a period of mourning and remembering after someone passes. I think it's telling that shiva  is a death-mourning for Jewish people and Shiva  is the god of Death in Hinduism and savasana  is the "corpse pose" in yoga. Death transcends culture. In the last several weeks, we've had a student bring a gun to school (he got suspended but will be back in August); two mass shooting threats written in bathroom stalls; and a student carry another loaded gun into a gym full of 1,500 people. The administration team keeps either a) telling us nothing, b) telling us "there was a threat but it's m...

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 ...

 

I hung out with a friend recently at Oktoberfest. I realized exactly how long it had been since I'd seen him when he informed me that he'd been living in the Pacific Northwest for over a year already (which I had failed to notice prior to the request to hang out while he was "in town.") This very drunk guy came up to us in the beer hall tent and asked us if we knew that Jesus and God are the answer to everything that ails the entire world? (I'm not going to lie, it reminded me a teeny tiny bit of several experiences in my yoga class.) "Only in this area," I told the man soberly. Then he wandered off. Appropos of nothing, Theo told me that in his dating adventures, he has discovered that FOBO is a real thing. I had never even heard of this. I'm familiar with FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. But apparently, FOBO (Fear of Better Options) is a malady that particularly affects the newly divorced. Having never been newly divorced, I'd apparently missed out ...