Well, technically, I’m not allowed to do a spinning back kick yet. Geeze. This week was bad. I can’t believe someone hasn’t found me laying on a sidewalk hyperventilating. Thursday things already suck, because I drop Ben off at school Thursday mornings and don’t see him until the next night after work when I pick him up from his dad’s. But this was a Thursday that should have sucked even more.
I get a call at work. (In my cube right? So I can’t really talk, which people on the other end of the line don’t know, so I always sound more like an idiot than usual.) It was my therapist (who honestly I haven’t seen in months). She just called nonchalantly to tell me she was retiring.
“Sooner than I expected,” she said. “I’m having some surgery so hopefully I will feel better, but I decided to go ahead and retire.” She’s only in her mid-sixties, I’d say. I thought therapists work until they are in their eighties. How can she be retiring?
All I could think of to say in cube-world was “Oh.” And then I mumbled something inaudible about how I hoped it wasn’t serious. Lame, right? But she’s the therapist here, how the hell am I supposed to know what to say?
She said she would still be seeing clients through the next month but that would be it (. . . so that if I wanted to get in . . . .hint, hint. . . ). Obviously she thought I might need to, based on my utter lack of verbal response. I didn’t feel compelled to make an immediate appointment or anything even at her prodding, so I guess that’s a good thing, right?
But still, whose therapist retires? And who would I pay to listen to my whining now? She recommended another woman in her practice she thought would be a good fit for me. Which I took to mean is desperately looking for new clients because her husband just left her and the four kids for a Scarlette Johannson look-alike. Then we said our awkward goodbyes, and that was it. God, I wish people would stop breaking up with me, I thought. I know my whiny little problems don’t amount to much, but I already suffer from abandonment issues. How is one expected to take this sort of thing?
Then after work I went to the yoga class I’d been attending every Monday or Thursday night for about five years, and my yogi tells me she’s leaving after her Thursday class next week. Their house sold 4 hours after they put it on the market (just to see what would happen) and they were leaving immediately for North Carolina to live on the beach for a while until she and her husband found where they wanted to land for good. Who has karma like that except a yoga instructor? I’m just a somewhat normal person, how do I compete with that in this crazy universe?
So you see why normally I would be breathing into a paper bag at this point? Wouldn’t most people? But for some reason I wasn’t. I didn’t know what to say to her. So I didn’t say anything. I just did my down dogs extra good her honor, and walked out like I was gonna see her next week, as usual. How could I just do that? Every class something amazing happened. I saw purple when we practiced yoga nidra. I nearly levitated following her Savasana, and best of all, nearly every time l left that class, I floated home feeling as if I had just gotten laid. And let me tell you, for a single woman, that is no small deal.
Her class got me through quitting my job to take back some power in my life, then two years later losing my highest paying client when they decided to do all their writing in-house, then a period of employment in crappy part-time jobs, then reemployment, my mom’s illness, my divorce (when she told me not to get that tattoo until I was a full year out from it), neck pain, a family wedding, some more neck pain caused by the family wedding, my dad’s illness. You get the idea.
Whatever I thought I would say, I thought I would just wait and say it next week. Then on the way home I remembered Ben had a program the next Thursday and I’d never see her again. But still, I feel okay with that. I know they say when the student is ready the master appears, but I think it might be true for me at this time. I think I am ready to let both my therapist and my yogi go.
Maybe part of that reason for that might be because I started taking Tae Kwon Do classes recently. Not for any spiritual, martial artsy, find myself reasons, but more for shallow, flat ab, find my ass again reasons. Because honestly the ass I saw in the mirror the other day was not mine. It belonged to some lady who hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in years. Holy crap. That would be me. And all the Mary Kay targeted-action firming lotion in the world wasn’t going to bring my old ass back. So, I called Ben’s Tae Kwon Do Master and explained to him that I wanted to join the class, and not for any other reason than to get into better shape, and he was cool with that.
Hell, I thought, it all pays the same no matter why we join the class right? So why would he care? Besides, I had some awesome self-defense training growing up with three big brothers, so I might not be too horrible at it, anyway.
You know what happens, right? I’ve been walking around the house kicking the crap out of everything and crying a lot. Sometimes because I hurt my foot, and sometimes because like I’ve heard him say a million times in the two years I’ve been sitting on someone else’s ass watching Ben take his class, “Taking a punch is a very emotional thing.” Don’t I know it, Master Song. Don’t I know it.
DIY Recovery 