Yoga - The Beginning Incentive
July 16, 2023: And so it begins.
A few days ago, I went out to have dinner and a stroll around downtown San Mateo with my first ever yoga teacher, Laura Gross*, and it was a profound shift and encouraging night for me: to be repopulating my mind with positive input about my capacity to teach yoga, even without a certificate, as most online schools are teaching BS, anyway.
I write this from the SJSU gym: unsure if I should censor what I say to maintain confidentiality, though I write this only about myself right now. Living with my parents at home, I realize it’s so important to navigate this world from a place of sovereign experience, rather than accepting every opinion that others give me. I’ve been seeking to, and have the intention to, seek to understand those around me as much as I understand myself. Unfortunately, it feels like I’ve made such a separate version of me to interact with people online — though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing!! Having a version of me that can more spiritually hold space for others gives breath and voice to the heart in me that can be everywhere all at once. So with that said, I’ve been giving gratitude to how my life circumstances are right now; I so appreciate life without technology, too, haha.
I am about to apply to jobs; I’m not sure how many I’ll be rejected from or accepted to, but it’s something I’m doing at 26, feeling a bit behind on life, having just watched Dr. K’s most recent video on brain rot. Brain rot!! My hair is cute and in a braid, and I just ate an apricot because I was so hungry after my morning flow; I realized too, after chugging about 12 oz of coffee, that I need to feel a certain level of overstimulation to function normally in the world as we know it. I wonder if that might ever change.
The salary range of the things I’m looking into are 65-120k, seeing as I’m technically underqualified for the bigger range salaries, I’m hoping that I can gain the experience through working to achieve those bigger goals. Yesterday, I had the most infuriating conversation with someone, a 61-year-old man named Isaac, a dog trainer, who approached me to compliment my looks — every aspect of it — and also just completely did not respect my space, comparing me to a cute puppy dog that you couldn’t help but touch even if they didn’t want to be touched. I said aloud, “I’m not a dog?!” but I still wonder why I didn’t step back, I just didn’t want to be “rude.” My approach to life is different today: I felt so bad for him, wished that I could say something where he’d change his mind about cross-dressing as “scary” — it’s our parents’ responsibilities, all of our responsibilities, to accept others, and yet this man was convinced that he was doing the right thing by telling cross-dressers they resembled perves. Of course he thought he was doing the right thing — it was disgusting to me, sad and painful to hear, that this kind of person existed. He had no sense of my boundaries, I was extremely in pain listening to him and wanted him to stop, but I didn’t make any greater effort to push him away. This was the kind of man that was dangerous — convinced, as he was, that everything he saw was the real world, and Christianity was the word of God for him. I just didn’t understand him. Apart of me wishes him a very long and painful death.
That sounds… absolutely morbid. I would love to be around positive influences: I might even do a cleanse of my phone today. There are so many tasks that I have needed to get done, that the moment I cross the threshold of being in my childhood home, feel absolutely impossible. I suddenly feel like I am a small child again, strapped awkwardly into a 26-year-old’s body that’s celebrated and seen and praised in this modern world in the ways that my parents could never understand and that I have reconciled with for so much of my own life that I feel… separate? Guilty? It’s immensely uncomfortable. The only silent pleasures or joys I’ve had in this house are: the hope that i’ll make it out alive; food, that they bring home; and shower times (though looking at my body in the giant mirror expanding the same child-to-adult bathroom has made me feel deeply uneasy about looking at myself, comparing myself to everything around me that holds weight and disapproval. it’s like I hear my parents’ words and cut myself with them). It’s painful to shower, only for my mind. And the fourth pleasure, sex, when Noah is over: making love while my foot was sprained, the forbidden sort of love we made when I’d just had a colposcopy. (hha)
I’m getting distracted again. It is time to offer up my skillset as a supervisor.
