I haven’t felt much like writing for a bit. I got caught up in an early morning yoga and meditation routine that I thought was serving me, but I don’t know. A friend said to me recently that sometimes you can do the healthiest things and still feel terrible, and that makes feeling terrible all the more bleak.
It’s not that I feel terrible. I feel lost. Sometimes I notice this more acutely when I spend too much time in my body. Which is a funny line. We’re all in our bodies too much. But are we always there?
A lot of times, during those steady inhales—1, 2, 3, 4—holds—1, 2, 3, 4—exhales—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8—somewhere inside of them, I feel so breathtakingly sad. My eyes will shoot open, and I’ll want to escape. Stop with the sitting and the redirecting and the breathing. Instead, I’ll realign my posture, tip my chin, close my eyes, and return to
Anger?! Fuck.
Sometimes writing pops up in my head involuntarily. I’ll squirm on my stacked blanket, itching to get it out, repeating it to myself like a mantra.
Meditating sometimes forces me to sit inside of my inadequacies—the things I never did out of fear. The kid in me who literally opened Microsoft Word every day and wrote fan fiction about Lord of the Rings. (The details of that are not important…)
I think we are all meant to reconnect with who we really are if we’ve departed from that for too long.
Ms. Maxine Wood was my English and Creative Writing teacher in high school. She was also the only teacher I did my assignments for, regrettably. Maxine had big, sad blue eyes, a short blonde haircut, and a petite, athletic body on a small frame. I remember the distinctive thing about her wasn’t just her direct yet whimsical style of teaching, her pacing frequency, or her Southern drawl—but the fact that she was a young widow. And her loss was palpable to me.
I bring her up in the context of this post because she popped into my head during a metta meditation—the face of someone who believes in you. Well, I don’t know Maxine today. But at sixteen, I remember her grabbing my forearm gently before leaving class and saying, “You’re a writer, you know. You could be a published author, if you wanted.”
And even if I didn’t believe her (because my god, high school wrecked me as a person) I felt lifted.
Somewhere along the way, it’s really easy to lose the ability to lift yourself. We need all the Maxine Woods in the world. And we need to figure out how to embody them for others, too.
(Not-So-Daily Writing 016)
Thoughts?