fiction & caffeine

I’ll be 26.

During some recent domestic squabble with Scott about cooking, I said something about how in the last few years I’ve had to graduate from college, develop a career, and deal with my parents’ divorce—I hadn’t had a lot of time or space to get into cooking, so I’m sorry if my late blooming in that department somehow makes my new interest less authentic. I tend to place smaller issues on perhaps a grander stage than they’re worth, but this was an epiphany for me: I really have had a lot to deal with in the last four years. It’s only in the last one that I’ve settled into myself.

I feel like I’ve been rewired. It’s thanks to yoga. I’m not perfect and have had my share of meltdowns since starting to practice seriously a little over a year ago, but they don’t linger and I’m able to see and accept them for what they are. I’ve recently started to meditate, which has opened up more for me. I’ve also decided to start eating completely vegan. Though I’ve dabbled for a while and eat mainly whole grains and vegetables anyway, I want to be really committed to it, for health and sustainability.

I’ve let go of all expectations for myself and my life. It’s happening; it’s happening right; I’m approaching it all with love and joy. No effort is wasted. When I’m not obsessed with the results of writing, I can actually write. When I’m not eating shitty food, I’m not obsessing over my body. I’ve never felt better, and I’m excited to carry this forward.

The Vinyasa teacher I took today said this in class, while explaining where our Root Chakra is. Yoga teachers! They are great. She went on to say how she’d get one eventually, after being barred by her parents for religious reasons (this is a middle-aged woman). She said, “One day I’ll have the courage.” “Courage” isn’t a word people often assign to the getting-of-tattoos, but it’s the one that most resonates with me. I too put off getting a tattoo out of fear of parental retribution, so when I finally got one last November it gave me a huge sense of relief, and of autonomy. Banal “I’m a grown-up, I do what I want!” autonomy, and autonomy in the sense that I was, for the first time, defining myself. I got a skull doodle of Jeff Buckley’s because I’d been listening to a lot of Buckley and reading my teenage journals, in which there are pages and pages about his music, and his lyrics are carefully written in pink gel pen. I never want to lose that girl, and I never want to forget how important his music is. And so, the ink. The process itself is cathartic because there’s so little about your physical self that you have control of, yet there you are emblazoning your outside with some essential representation of what’s within, what’s important and valued. In the next month or two I’ll get another, and I have another planned for when I finish yoga teacher training. We come full circle, because it was this yoga teacher who was a student with me in another class earlier this week who asked if I’d done teacher training and said I’d be a great teacher (she doesn’t know how difficult it is for me to talk to people, but that’s another reason I want this challenge). I’d been doubting myself about whether this was something I should be saving for and working toward (because I want to do it in Puerto Rico), but I took it as a sign. Tattoos, teacher training, courage.