the habit of being

I go around and around with my mother about my future “career.” She is the only person I can have this conversation with, but it’s still so upsetting. We talk about what I should do with my life, but it’s always really about what I should study. The question is whether or not a person is obligated to pursue the thing she does best above all others, even if it fills her with dread.

I see people studying calculus in a movie and get excited about school again, about pouring myself over a problem for hours, about having a clearly defined purpose. The thought of writing essays just makes me feel trapped and afraid. I will never be as “good” at science as I am at literature and the humanities, and maybe that is precisely why it is so appealing.

The creative writing topic just makes me cry. Do you write fiction ever? No. Do you write poetry? No. But…

Somehow we come through that, the academic dilemma, which we’ve been over again and again, and, for once, I realize that the real question isn’t about picking a subject.

If I could have any job, I would be the one who tells scared teenaged girls coming to abortion clinics that it’s okay and they’re going to be alright. That’s it. I could do that all day long and feel like I was really making a difference. Because I would really mean it and really care.

Instead of saying something about money, or returning to the topic of law school, she says she’d actually wanted to do the same thing, that she’d even looked into it after her own abortion, after seeing a fifteen-year-old girl with the most pissed-off looking woman in the world sitting beside her in the waiting room.

My mother says that I would be so good at doing that, because I am so soft.

This isn’t just about getting pregnant when you don’t mean to; that’s just one example of a time when people really need support. It’s about life. It’s about suffering, and surviving. My mother isn’t the first person who’s described me using the word “soft.” It’s especially strange that that particular word tends to come up, because a lot of the sort of “issues” I’ve come against at a young age are the sorts of things which are traditionally thought to “harden” a person.

I think this is what my having the “hard” experiences I’ve had and coming out of them is for.. so that I can empathize with just about any person in any situation without being judgmental. Sometimes, when it comes to seeing the world from someone else’s perspective, there is no substitute for really understanding how very easy it is for a person, any person, to find herself in a whole lot of trouble. (Lucky for me, my mom understands that too. )

When I was a child, as part of her job as a ward secretary and nurse’s aide, my mom often was the first one to talk to patients coming in to Willingway, a hospital for alcohol and drug rehabilitation. Primarily, she just helped put them at ease.
“You think I’m drunk, don’t you?” she’d be asked.
“Of course you’re drunk! If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t be here. It’s fine.”

The central premise of yoga philosophy, which appeals to me as well, is that we are all fundamentally okay… we just can’t always see it because of all the drama that gets in the way.

Helping other people get through to their okayness is the thing I want to do. I want to help people give themselves permission to be okay, despite their troubles, memories, and pain. I want to do it through listening to other people’s stories. I want to do it both one-on-one and through writing. I want to do it through movement and touch and talking. And I think a career in therapy might the best possible thing I could do for myself, too, because if there is one thing I know, it is that the only way for me to be “happy” is to get out of my head and do something for somebody else.

I wake up some mornings frantic, unable to place the last time I used a tampon. Sometimes this sudden memory lapse happens in the middle of the afternoon. Always, two days later, I’m waiting in line at CVS with a pregnancy test in my hand, no matter how unlikely it is.

A girlfriend told me once, she was going through this same routine, trying to avoid looking the salesgirl in the face, and, out of the blue, the woman said “Good luck!” and gave her a big smile. She found then that she’d crossed a line. She’s now someone who looks like she could be a mother.

All I’ve ever gotten is an “Um. Do you want a bag for that?”

I’ve lost count of how many negative pregnancy tests I’ve had in the last two years. It’s a ritual for me, just a regular part of my sex life now, and invariably there’s disappointment mixed in with my relief.

They didn’t mention this in the “After Your Abortion” pamphlet.

. . .

I know that I am getting older, because I am able to go for longer and longer periods of time without expecting things from people, emotionally.

I’ll find myself crying with my arms around my knees, wanting someone to please do something about it, and it will seem like I’m acting out a scene from my youth. It’s a sort of nostalgia for neediness.

Somewhere along the line I started getting more interested in other people’s problems.

Still, “Why can’t anyone help me?” and “Why can’t I help anyone?” feel remarkably similar running through my head over and over.

. . .

I dream about war crimes now, but it still doesn’t seem like enough. I cannot keep away from this pornography. I even seek out the images they won’t show on TV. A man. A murder. A lonesome head. Unaccustomed to such acts, I think of the playing card Queen. Her court scorned and hooded. Maybe I am lucky that this scene is more surreal than I can process. A head without a body makes for only a fairy tale to me. But what more can such a media spectacle be? I think I’d rather have the prison sodomy pictures than this beheading. That I could at least begin to relate to. That would look more real.

. . .

I have too much hope for my words now. I cannot even birth a thoughtless paragraph. Before I knew meditation as a practice of watching thoughts come and letting them go by, I did this almost constantly with a pen in my hand. It was so easy, not knowing enough to try. I could put the nib to the line and the words would come up and go out so completely that I could barely remember them a few lines later. I wrote with such a fever and such aloofness that I did not recognize my own clauses the next day. Writing was an intoxicant this way, and yet it was calm. Thoughts got slurry, disjointed, metaphorical. One sentence did not necessarily have any obvious connection to the next. Images came to me which were not there during ordinary life. In those days, I thought of the written me as the “real” me, the unfiltered me, the authentic me.

Now I try to create such feelings with alcohol and love affairs, as I suppose I was always destined to do, but I find it was so much better have an addiction which produced something, even if only scribbles in a now-forgotten secret code.

Amazingly, only a year ago, the studio where I work still rented a reception room at the Church of the Holy City - a beautiful room with big open windows on three sides and dark creaky wood floors. On Sundays, we’d have to kick old Mexican women having tea in their stockings and hats out of there so we could start class on time. Sometimes at night there were loud revivals with live music, the Gospel in Spanish blaring over a microphone out of the sactuary with its stained glass and impossibly high ceiling, into the yoga room, drowning out our pseudo-Indian Krishna Das and Deva Premal CDs.

Couples came in wanting to know how much it cost to rent the chapel for their wedding, and I’d have to explain that I didn’t actually work for the church, but since there was no other authority figure there, I’d show them around. The windows. The spiral staircases. Sometimes drunk homeless men came in looking for the minister. One such fellow walked past me at the desk and right into the middle of a yoga class, asking for coffee. Then there was “the stroker,” who liked to reveal himself outside the windows for all the lovely yoginis to see. And the kids who just threw rocks, leaving shards of glass to pepper our sticky mats.

The “boutique” was a rolling rack of logo tee shirts and yoga pants that always collapsed halfway between the closet where it was stored and the office, which was a library of old misogynist religous texts with a large desk. We kept a “change owed” log for clients when we ran out of small bills, and we kept people’s class histories on a rolodex. Sometimes in the winter the heat wouldn’t come on and we’d practice in 40 degree weather, and in summer we had bug spray available at the front desk. We made tea using water from the bathroom sink. We had to work the class times around the church schedule, but at maximum it was about twenty a week, and they were almost all packed.

I became the Assistant to the Director just as we signed the lease on what we then called the New Space - a permanent home with two studios, a tea lounge, a real office and boutique. The plan had been to move in January first, 2003. It took until June.

Getting a Certificate of Occupancy in the District of Columbia is not an easy thing. We had electrical inspections, plumbing inspections, fire inspections. They made us build new walls, install new doors, new toilets, a new “mop sink.” We had to clean, paint, build, decorate, transfer years of files into our new computer database, a program called OmSoft (straight out of California and especially for yoga studios, it’s as flakey and unreliable as you could possibly imagine). There were massive trips to Target, Linens and Things, Walmart, hundreds of dollars spent. It was a time of constant transit between the church, where we were still operating business, the owner’s home, and the New Space, where we were setting up everything as fast as we could, only to run into more and more problems with the building that needed to be addressed.

My boss and I broke down in tears together. I hauled bottled water from the New Space to the Church in my old hitch-hiking backpack, covered with signatures from around the country, and they’d fall out and roll down the street. She called me at all hours of the day; insisted I have a cell phone. I was making eight bucks an hour and could barely pay my rent. We held teacher training and workshops at the Space on the sly. It was so long between our “Open House” party and the time we were actually cleared to open for business, we had to have another one. But, somehow, with our gay male yogis trying to be manly and build us shoe racks, me with my pink hair even pinker from all the pastel paint going up on the walls, Kimberly holding back tears while talking to the DC government on the phone, it all worked out. Though in many ways things only got more stressful from there.

Now there are over 40 classes a week, many more students, programs and teams and managers and policies too numerous to count. We were mentioned in Lucky magazine last month. Students keep bar codes on their key chains, which we zap with scanners to sign them in. Teachers are starting to plug their iPods into our stereo systems to use favorite playlists during class. Things have changed so much, and though I’ve had a role to play in the studio’s success, it just makes me sad sometimes to see it become so obviously a business.

Yoga is supposed to be a “union with the divine,” not a commodity surrounded by promotional materials and overpriced clothes. I thought working for a yoga studio would take me just about as far from a corporate or capitalist environment as possible (while still earning me a paycheck), and to a large degree that is still true and always will be. All this time, my work day has begun with brewing herbal tea. I’m not allowed to wear shoes in my office. We’ve donated to countless charitable causes. Everyone who comes in knows my name. At the same time, one can’t escape the reality that we’re playing the same game as every other company out there. The game just seems lot more ironic in the yoga business.