I am really struggling with how to continue on with my day-to-day life and work responsibilities while feeling so sad (and so many other feelings) on the inside. There’s like this blurred filter between my inside and the outside world.
When it comes to teaching yoga, 50% of the time I feel grateful to be teaching and for the love and support of my students. The other 50% of the time I spend the whole class convincing myself to stay, keep teaching and not to bolt out of the room. My yoga community has really gone above and beyond with hugs, shared tears, cards, flowers, books and just being amazingly compassionate.
The marketing work for the studio is easiest. I welcome the distraction because I can shut off some of the feeling stuff for a period of time.
Blogging is the trickiest. Finding the balance between authenticity and business-as-usual has been a challenge but blogging is also something that I love to do and look forward to every day. I am finding myself wanting to write a lot more in general…but not necessarily things that I want to share yet publicly. But maybe one day.
The reality of the situation is that as much as I want to stick my head in the sand, I can’t take a hiatus from work because…bills. I also need the distraction to a point and teaching and writing through my grief has been an amazing exercise in opening my heart, trusting myself, trusting others and becoming more vulnerable.
I saw my therapist yesterday and the first thing she asked me was how I was doing with absorbing my brother’s death. I took a moments pause at the word “absorb” because I had just shared this poem on Instagram on Monday with the commentary that I was stuck on the absorption piece of it. She told me that I needed to give myself at least a year to absorb the reality. And that my grief will never go away. It’s just something that I’ll learn to co-exist with. That helped me a lot to hear.
This week has pushed me to my edges. I called my mom last night talk and hear her voice and share how I was feeling. Near the end of our conversation she told me that they had finally received my brother’s ashes. It hit me like a punch in the stomach. We are trying to figure out a date for a service and how to best honor him.
I sat down on the couch last night to take a breather and we turned on Parenthood. We’re on season 4 and good lord is it ever so real and so gut wrenching. I wept through 30 minutes of it before finally turning it off and getting in a hot shower. I woke up this morning with a headache and what I can best describe as an emotional hangover.
I’m doing my best to stay at these edges and feel whatever it is that I feel. The only way out is through.
Today was a better day. I received some good news about my body and running, made it to the gym to lift, wrote a post that I’ll be sharing next week for Legacybox and taught one of the best feeling yoga classes that I’ve taught since this all happened tonight. I spent a few hours this afternoon going through pictures from happier times. This picture in particular reminded me that my brother would want me to be happy and to do big, fun, amazing and scary things.
Thank you for letting me share the happy and the sad times here in this space.
All my love,
Jen
