How To Feel Good

Why does what I look like matter? We listened intently as one person shared, then the other. We laughed, we cried, and not one of us noticed that we’d been at the café for four hours. We were present, sharing love, feeling loved, speaking our truth. Just fully expressing and listening. After that meeting, I struggled for years, but after several failed attempts, they got and remained sober to this day. Also, you needed to bring a headshot. When I showed up to my audition, there was a giant mural on the wall that read, Yoga for Everybody. The people in the class were two teachers who already taught at the studio, the studio manager, and three of their regular students. I was getting ready to pull off my hoodie when the studio manager said, You’re gonna take that thing off, right? We need to see your body. I taught my class as best I could, focusing on alignment and anatomy. During one of my college career flips, I had taken a few premed anatomy classes. I quit soon after we began dissecting cats.

Turn It Up

When I completed the yoga class, I left feeling good. After a week, I called the studio to check in. The studio manager struggled to remember which one I was before they said, Oh, the girl wearing the hoodie, followed by We’re looking for someone who’s fit, and you’re not fit enough. So much for Yoga for Everybody. This story is important for two reasons. First, it showed me that I needed to trust my gut. I knew the minute I walked in that this was not the place for me but I did it anyway. Second, it demonstrated that I had the strength to move past failing at something I thought I really wanted. I mentioned this to my therapist at the time, who was helping me with my eating disorder. She said, You are learning to ‘fail forward’ and learning how to set boundaries, and this is a good thing. It’s important to respect our failures because they give us direct feedback. Not getting that teaching job taught me that what we think we want and what is best for us can sometimes be on opposing sides.

It's My Life

My body was giving me all the feedback I needed, but I wouldn’t listen. I heard subtle internal worries, but I ignored them. I felt the same anxiety and depletion I once had as a teenager, except now it was worse. When you become aware and you practice how to feel good, your body will tell you when it doesn’t. It’s the elephant in the room, but instead of seeing it and acknowledging it, you try your best to wedge yourself around it, moving like it’s not there. My friend Andres was between acting jobs. He was taking some personal training classes and offered to train me in exchange for yoga classes. I started training slowly by walking on a treadmill while listening to music, because I didn’t like to sweat. He suggested I try running. I hated running more than anything in the world. Running was what we did when we were trying to get away from cops. It was not considered a leisure or fitness activity.

What Goes On

He felt it might be liberating for someone who was under stress. If I was going to start running, I was going to do it right. You make unsound decisions. I thought that if I could run 26.2 miles and survive, I could do anything. I wasn’t thinking about the actual training and the stress it would put on my body. Completing my first marathon was a huge feat. I wasn’t concerned with my time but, rather, with finishing the race and not dying in the process. It was a way to take my focus off work and everything else that was going on in my life. I was replacing emotional stress with physical stress. I’m a serial monogamist. The stress in my job and homelife were getting more intense and wearing on me. I woke up anxious, dreading the day, thinking, What kind of fire are we putting out today? I loved my boyfriend, but he was going through a major legal battle, and both our families needed our attention with standard issues that families go through. We were the glue that held our families together, and when something happened to one of them, it spilled over on us. The more intense the anxiety and stress, the farther I ran and the more I pushed my body. If you don’t respect your body, you will push it until it shuts down on you. I was abusing my body to avoid layering other people’s stress on top of my own. Emotion can’t hit a moving target. I understood now why so many of my friends in recovery turn to numbing. I couldn’t go down the path of substances myself, so I ran, as hard as I could. I finally quit my job, I got an earful. I told them, Because I wasn’t happy, and it wasn’t serving my ability to respect myself. A job without boundaries is a recipe for disaster. It’s not sustainable. So many of us are willing to do things that don’t make us happy. To be clear, it’s not your employer’s responsibility to make you happy. It’s your job to make yourself happy. There should never be any job that is beneath you. It’s imperative to respect every job, because every single job teaches you how to respect yourself and respect others. Often times people feel that being humble is about being submissive or acquiescing to the demands of others. That couldn’t be further from the truth. When I worked at the salon, an assistant couldn’t become a stylist until they had put their time in. Nothing was given, everything was earned. We need to be tenacious to learn to distinguish whether what we are doing is working. Whether or not it is worth our time.