If I could be anything in the world right now, I would be a yoga girl. I would sashay into a yoga studio (or maybe hurry, I think yoga girls hurry because they are a little late because their boyfriends dropped them off outside and they were busy "making out" good-bye.) Anyway, these girls are lithe and thin or maybe both those words mean the same thing, but at any rate, I want to be one of them and not me.
You know how I said I was going to do anything and everything to get out of my down-in-the-dumpers? Well, I'm starting to get to the task at hand. What are the things that make me feel good that I need to do in order to feel like the old way I felt when I felt really, really good?
I did yoga.
But yoga is for lithe and thin girls who either sashay or hurry into class. They can hold poses forever and a day, do downward dogs, hold their butts up with no big butt shame shame and NOT have the general expression of someone who looks like they are going to have a heart attack in the first ten minutes of class as I'm sure I would.
I scanned the class schedule. Flow Yoga. Ashanti Yoga. Where was the Chunky Legs & Thighs Yoga? Where was the My Ass Has Spread Faster Than a California Wildfire Yoga? Mmmm, this looks interesting. Pre-natal Yoga. That's where the pregnant ladies go. Probably not a lot of big expectations about what they can do. Probably not a lot of big butt & belly shame in there.
What if I took that class? How would anybody know? I pondered this, I wondered: Could I be that desperate and that well, ashamed of my body and ashamed of the things I think it can only do now after over 100 days in bed and I'm sure partial rigormortous has set in, that I would fake a pregnancy just so I could go to an easier pregnancy class?
Yes, I would. But then I would feel like I wasn't doing what I set out to do. Which was anything and everything and challenging myself and all that stuff I wrote in the "Hello World" entry after two glasses of sparkling Zinfandel and figuring out even a computer moron like me can open a Blogger account.
So I went. To Lithe & Thin & Unbelieveably Model Perfect Body Girl Yoga. Okay, the class wasn't really called that, I just imagined it was. That's the thing, I always imagine things so much worse than they are going to be. I am Queen B of the "psych-out." "You're going to be so embarassed at that yoga class, just stay home. In bed. Napping is your friend." But I fought back on the "psych-out" and I went and I won. Sure my face turned beet red ten minutes in. And yeah, I couldn't hold every pose the whole time. And I might have sweated like I was about to have a massive coronary. But I tuned out what I thought everyone would be thinking about me and my broke down body and I just did what I could which was what was good for me.
And I got through it. And I was freaking proud of myself which I might have not had if I went to a prenatal class and pretended my belly had a baby in it instead of the truth which it was won by a year of grief and sadness and not really moving and not doing anything and everything or challenging myself in anyway. So now when I think I can't do something and my psych-out voice comes on, I'm going to think of me, sweaty and yoga-y, in my last pose, joyfully shakin' my butt in the air, like I just don't care.
