It’s taken me a decade plus of teaching to realize how young the kids are. I keep getting older, but they stay the same age. They don’t age with me. They’re always eighteen, nineteen. They are freshmen and this is their first college class. They never learned how to properly write an essay. They do not know how to begin, what their introduction should look like, sound like, whether or not they’re supposed to use a semicolon or a regular colon. And it’s fine! I didn’t know when I was a freshman. I still barely know how to begin. It doesn’t bother me or annoy me, their newness, their not knowing. I find it rather endearing.
I give the class a free write: Write a scene between you and a sidekick. I'm teaching writing through the lens of Archetypal Psychology. I was hired two days before school started, so I assume the desperation of filling the role means I can teach the writing class however I want. For the free write, the scene can be real or imagined or a mishmash of both. It can be in the form of a play or a script. It can be funny or gory or sad. It’s the first piece of writing my students will turn in so that I can gage their skills.
While they write, I open my planner and look at my to-do list. It’s laughable, how much I aim to accomplish in a single day. We’re still unpacking at our new place. I’ve missed the last few days of writing because I’ve had to prep for this new job. I'm so behind that I almost just feel like taking the L and napping when I get home. Or would a nap be a W?
A student walks up to my desk and shows me a blank page in his notebook. He whispers, “I don’t know where to start.”
“That’s okay,” I whisper back. “You can start with an image, or with a line of dialogue, or just in-scene. Whatever you want!”
“No, like, do I need to have a heading and a title?” He asks. This human being is at least seventeen years younger than me. This person probably talks to his mom on the phone at least once a week. Before I became a mother, I never thought of my students as children, children who belonged to their parents. Now, all I see is this boy who was once an infant and his mother clapping when he first rolled from his stomach to his back on the floor.
“Yes, yes, that’s a great question,” I say. “Let me write the heading on the board for everyone, thank you.”
Once back in his chair, he looks up at the board to copy down what I’ve written.
“Okay,” I say to the air in the room and take my seat. I take my phone out of my bag and scroll through pictures of my daughter. My daughter “reading” a book in her car seat; my daughter making a fish-face at the dinner table; my daughter climbing through a rainbow ball pit and looking up at the camera as she smiles.
*
I wake up at 5:00am for yoga. It’s still dark when I drive to the studio. I wear an outfit that I picked out the night before and laid on the chair next to the dresser so I wouldn’t have to rifle through the drawers in the desperation of morning. Of course I would rather be asleep. But I recently heard something that is probably very unhealthy but it’s become a sort of mantra to me: How bad do you want to feel good?
A fitness influencer on Instagram is the one who said this quote, so I am sure to take it with a grain of salt. But still, it rings true.
I'm so grateful to have found a yoga studio I really love that is within five minutes driving distance from my house. I'm grateful to have the means to join and be a member and get unlimited classes. I appreciate how many different types of flows are offered, including one I’ve never heard of before called Sunrise Primal.
The description reads:
Ready to get Primal?
Come and experience the re-awakening of our primal nature through the releasing of blocked energy and uniting of the Sacred Masculine and Divine Feminine in all of us!
Primal flow blends traditional Vinyasa with Buti Yoga techniques and philosophy to create the perfectly balanced practice of movement and stillness for mind, body, & Soul.
Primal Flow uses a formula and science to sequencing with creativity while maintaining structural integrity. This format works with anatomical principles to bring dynamic, primal, and intuitive movement to life!
Primal Flow alchemizes the 4 Elements, integrating Pranayama (breathing exercises), Salutation Variations (breath guided flow sequences), Challenging & Grounding asana sequences, Vibrational Shaking (Shaking Medicine/Facia Disturbance), intuitive dance, Grounding Deep Stretching Poses and Calming Savasana Meditation.
Allow the breath to be the medicine for the mind; the movement to be the medicine for the body; stillness to be medicine for the soul.
Namaste.
They lost me at “Sacred Masculine,” but still, I go to the Primal Yoga class.
The first forty-five minutes of class presents as a relatively “normal” yoga session: stretches, sun salutations, a few posture sequences. But then, the teacher dims the lights in the room, raises the heat, and changes the gentle song that had been playing to what I can only describe as the sound of beating drums.
“Let’s get primal!” she yells and then encourages us to move our bodies however we want in the space. There is no right or wrong. It’s just movement. It’s just flow.
I look around to see what everyone else is doing (lol) and find that the darkness of the room makes it hard to judge anyone. The other yogis are spinning and dancing and shuffling and throwing their hands in the air and stomping their feet on the ground and they are…being primal. I guess I hadn’t thought hard enough about what primal would entail, but apparently, it’s pretty close to its dictionary definition: “relating to an early stage in evolutionary development; primeval.” Further, it can also mean, “essential; fundamental.”
I hadn’t thought about how fundamental and essential it is for a consenting adult to get…primal!
So I closed my eyes and got primal.
I swayed my body. I jerked my knees up into the air, felt my feet hitting the floor as each one landed out of time. I reached up to the sky and then hung my head down and like a goddamn weeping willow. And when the teacher told us to meet in downward facing dog, to open our mouths, stick out our tongues, shake our heads from side to side and exhale loudly for Lion’s Breath, I did it with glee.
Primal Yoga got me thinking how I am feeling pretty done with insecurity. What’s the point? To walk around feeling so bad about myself—what is it helping and who does it serve?
I'm over it—in life, in writing.
Now, excuse me while I go full roar.
*
During one of our last weekends in Tennessee, I woke up in the middle of the night and convinced myself that I needed to get off all my medication. It felt very serious at 2:00am, lying there in the dark, Googling things on my phone, the house silent. I thought that maybe when I woke up the next day I’d feel differently, the way that most middle-of-the-night-ideas seem to lose their significance once the light of day hits. But I woke up still feeling the urge to quit everything.
It took me almost a year to find a postpartum therapist. And I didn’t like her. She was…kind of mean! She ended every session asking me what I was going to do for self-care, which was really annoying. Our sessions were always 3-4pm, so like, I'm going to pick up my child from school and then I do not have a self, lady.
When I told the postpartum therapist about my middle-of-the-night-idea, she asked me to explain. I said that I felt like my body had been through so much: pregnancy, birth, surgery, anxiety, OCD. And then all these different medications we were trying. I wanted to return to some sort of baseline for myself.
“Well, what if your baseline sucks?” she said. We were on Zoom. I could hear her daughter playing in another room of her house. It was a gloomy day, the threat of a storm pondering the sky. Her lights flickered, and then mine flickered. How was this the person I was supposed to confide in?
“That’s mean,” I said. If I had been in person, maybe I’d have had the courage to get up off the couch, walk to the door, and then promptly slam it.
“I don’t mean it to be mean,” she said. “I just feel like it’s against medical advice to wean yourself off medication, is all.”
Reader, against medical advice, I weaned off all of my medication last month. I was blessed not to have brain zaps or fatigue or any harsh withdrawal symptoms, although I did have a headache for two days, but nothing more. And so, now, I am back to a baseline. And let me tell you something, the baseline doesn’t suck.
*
My LitHub essay has truly popped off in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. I still get some wild comments here and there, some new subscribers, some personal emails reaching out to me and sharing a story of insanity. I appreciate all of it.
The other day, someone commented that they wonder what would have been different if hadn’t been on medication at the time and hadn’t received my bipolar diagnosis a few months prior to attending the conference. That perhaps the meds and the diagnosis are what exacerbated my…experience.
Au contraire, the conference happened almost a year before my 2nd breakdown, which led to a self-hospitalization, which led to the diagnosis and meds. I was au naturel at the conference, baby! I was at my baseline!
And this isn’t an anti-medication post. I can only speak toward my own experience here within the psych realm. I will say that I did want the medications to fix me, to heal me, to make me whole again.
Still, I don’t think the baseline sucked, or sucks. I think the situation sucked. I think maybe the conference sucked (Lion’s Breath emoji), at least it did for me. It wasn’t right for me, and that’s okay. The conference just took place again a few weeks ago and everyone most likely had a blast. Good for them! It wasn’t for me.
My baseline knew I shouldn’t be there. My body was working correctly, telling me to GTFO of there. I'm not saying I don’t have mental and behavioral issues. I do, quite a myriad. But I don’t think I need to fix myself of these things and be rid my body of what makes me, me.
What should I do, then? I'm still not sure. But I think it begins with, and I quote Simba from The Lion King here: “I'm brushing up on looking down / Working on my roar!”
*
Our Sunrise Primal teacher invites us to seal our intention with her: accept the challenge. Hands at heart center, I allow the breath to be the medicine for my mind; the movement to be the medicine for my body; for stillness to be medicine for my soul.
Is the challenge that I feel so constantly new to all of this? Is it that last night, around 7:45pm, my personal email got blasted across the Internet and bots signed me up for thousands of subscriptions under my name? Is the challenge that I thought I was going to take a break from teaching, if not quit it altogether, but yet I continued to send out my resume and see what was out there, what was open? Is the challenge in listening to my body, the vessel that created my daughter, the shell that once was only me but now can never not just be me?
Like the archetypal hero on her journey, I am, at first, usually reluctant to the call. I want to refuse. I want to go back to my ordinary world and get cozy. But if I accept the challenge, the many challenges, that each day brings, at least I am participating in the quest.
In my writing class, I lecture my students about the Mentor archetype. The word mentor comes from The Odyssey, where a character named Mentor guides the young hero, Telemachus, on his journey. Good teachers and Mentors are enthused, in the original sense of the word. “Enthusiasm” comes from the Greek en theos, meaning god-inspired, having a god in you, or being in the presence of a god.
The Mentor as a god within. The self as medicine.
*
I think I find my students endearing instead of frustrating because I, too, am starting over. Again. Yet again! New house. New job. New beginning. And it’s scary. And it’s challenging.
Even though I can go to a bookstore and hold a copy of my novel, I still feel pretty much the same as I did when I applied to grad school and thought, I want to be a writer.
I can no longer say I'm a “new parent,” but motherhood still feels new.
I dance under the infrared lights. Maybe here is where I approach the inmost cave.
—
I’ve got a new column called The Jumpoff, a new writing prompt series for Write or Die!! The Jumpoff will be serving up bi-weekly creative prompts to get you out of your head and onto the page. And stay tuned for another column on creative process and craft coming soon!
Head’s up for two virtual classes for Lighthouse Writers: Collaging Memory, which runs on Sunday September 15th @ 9am PST & Writing the Non-Human on Saturday November 2nd @ 9am PST.
Personal Essay begins at the end of this month at UCLA Extension (in person!) and there are still a few spaces left. I’ll also be teaching Personal Essay II this Winter!
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Haven’t got to The Jumpoff yet— deadlines! Looking forward to your prompts.