The Next Bold Move – Me Vs. The World

I wrote about spinning before. The obsessive thoughts that seem to drown you in a whirlpool of self-loathing with nothing you can do, but ride the storm to the end and hope you come out okay. Tonight I hit the opposite wall. I was paralyzed. It has been awhile since this happened to me. It is far less common for me than spinning. The last time was at the Sod when a friend said to me, “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” We were arguing about where everyone was going and who was crashing where since none of us could drive at that point. The bar was closing and there were people rushing out the door, finishing last drinks and trying to find their friends. Matt looked at me and said “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice,” and I was paralyzed. All I could do was stand there. The room spun around me partially because I was drunk and partially because I was paralyzed. The only other person I had ever heard use that phrase was Vince, a friend in high school who passed away a few years after we graduated. It had been a long time since I thought about Vince and I had never heard anyone else use that phrase. Paralyzed. All you can do is keep breathing.

I went running today to burn off the ridiculous amount of energy I have on any given day. Doesn’t matter how much I have slept or how much coffee I have had. I’m a self-diagnosed, untreated ADOS (Attention Deficient…Oh Shiny!) adult trying to self medicate with running. It doesn’t really work. I think running just gives me more energy. Normal people would run 5, 12, 18, 23, whatever miles and be exhausted. Me, I finish running and I’m exploding with energy. I’d run more, but running is starting to wear down my body. My hips and muscles start to ache so I go to yoga to stretch and strengthen them.

My favorite part of yoga is the end. The last 5-10 minutes before the bow and “Namaste.” Those last 10 minutes of complete peace and serenity because your body is too exhausted to think. Except I haven’t mastered meditation so I do think (sometimes I fall asleep and it’s an amazing power nap that feels like I’ve been resting for hours).

Well, today the yoga studio is packed too full. About half way through the class I realize I hate people. All of us. I don’t know why. I can’t clear my mind or stop it from thinking how ridiculous we are in our name brand yoga outfits with our BPA Free reusable water bottles in our 95° + yoga studio. We’ll go home and eat our range free organic shit for dinner and put things in the recycling and compost containers and think we had a good wholesome day. Tomorrow we’ll wake up and do it again. Tonight it all seems so artificial. I feel like I’ve got strings attached to my limbs making my body fold and bend from a man above the curtain. I don’t know which pose is making me so angsty, or maybe it is just the heat, but I can’t stop thinking about how disconnected to the world I have become. Yet I am here with these people that I am starting to hate, doing yoga, which is a less than enjoyable feat.

It is not a stereotypical yoga class; or at least not the stereotypes of yogi’s I have. It’s an interesting mix of young and old, men and women, some conservative looking, others covered in tattoos. It’s a nice variety, but still I don’t feel like I belong. How could I have anything in common with these people? As soon as my ‘free trial’ week of yoga is over I’m not going to be able to afford the ridiculous prices to do something that theoretically I could make myself do at home if I had any self discipline at all. Maybe this is the connection I’ve lost to the rest of the world – job, money, responsibility, and the freedom to do what I want because I have money. I gave all of that up. At least for now. Maybe forever.

After an hour of different exercises and stretches in the heated room I am drenched in sweat and ready for the relaxation part of the class. I have struggled keeping my mind blank and not being negative so I hope I can relax during the last exercise.

Meditating has always been a challenge for me. I can’t not think about anything – that’s impossible for me. If I rest my first mind my second mind usually spins in all directions. I try to focus on “Om,” but when I hum the sacred syllable it tickles my lips and I get the giggles like when someone farted in grade school. Sometimes I close my eyes and let my body rest in this weird dream state that it knows is only going to last a few minutes. Other times when my mind is really active I do this weird exercise – I visualize my funeral. Who would be there, what they would say, how I died, all the details about an event I won’t attend, well not really. I suppose it’s morbid, but it keeps me living in the present and keeps things in perspective. It’s not that I fear my death. This exercise actually helps me embrace the idea of dying. It frees me from the fear of the ultimate unknown and question if I have lived my life to the fullest. Meditating about death lets me evaluate how I have lived and appreciate the time I still have.

Today I let my mind practice this exercise because I can’t concentrate on cleansing my mind and focusing on nothing. Thinking about my memorial leads me to thinking about my purpose in life (or rather lack thereof), which leads me to thinking about a conversation we had at chow one night in Iraq about a year ago.

I was reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Victor Frankyl (amazing book if you haven’t read it). I was discussing Frankyl’s assessment that meaning in life comes from 3 things. 1. To love someone. 2. To serve someone or a cause. 3. Through suffering (he used the example of a terminal illness and his experiences in concentration camps). I was having a hard time adjusting to the deployment and said that I was going to find meaning in my life through my suffering there. One man, who is no longer a friend, mocked me and my suffering.

My mind jogs back over to yoga and I can hear the instructor say “Namaste”.

Back to the conversation in Iraq, “Libby, this isn’t suffering, this is paradise compared to how the Marines outside the wire live.”

“You can’t compare my suffering to another man’s suffering, because you do not know the depths of our sorrows or the range of our joys. Besides I didn’t join the Marine Corps to sit in an office on an air base and fight with other officers over petty shit and watch grown men act like they are in high school, but I don’t really have a choice do I?”

In yoga, I hear other students rolling up their mats and the distinct sound of the plastic sticking to itself as they roll.

My mind flashes an image that I found on my computer the other day. It’s a picture of the boyfriend who I had to leave behind when I boarded the plane to go to The Sandbox. The picture is actually a series of pictures from a night at the Sod. We are laughing and making faces and just a happy go lucky couple of kids. I tried to love him. I tried and it didn’t work out. Nobody’s fault, just didn’t work out. But I tried and now I don’t believe in love.

In the steamy yoga studio people are starting to talk in hushed whispers as if we were in a library.

Back to Iraq with the argument of this man who thinks because he has lived longer than me he knows more than me, which isn’t true. Age does not always equal experience or wisdom. I don’t argue, because it is pointless. He is one of those people set in their ways and I do not want to discuss it with him anymore. I contemplated over chow like I contemplate in the studio now, is there meaning? In love? In service? In suffering? In death? Is there meaning? When I die nobody will discuss how I suffered to connect to belonging to society?

I open my eyes when I feel someone walk by and a drop of their sweat hits my forehead. I look around and there are students everywhere, half naked with their sweaty yoga mats and Nalgene bottles. I try to move. I try to get up. My brain fires out neurons telling my legs to bend, my torso to rise and my arms to roll up my sticky yoga mat, but my body does not respond. It is on strike. I close my eyes for concentration. It doesn’t help. My rational brain fights my emotional brain to get up. It is a civil war inside my body. I quit fighting and let my second mind take over hoping it will exhaust itself so the rational first mind can make my body function again.

My mind goes back to the picture. The happy, young girl enjoying one of her last nights with her friends and boyfriend before going off to war. It seemed so poetic at the time – young, happy, in love and ready to go to war. It’s what we are trained to believe will give us purpose – service. My mind focuses on her. Who was she? Where did she go? The girl who seemed to be able to love, understand and connect to the people around her. The girl that left for war thinking and maybe even hoping she might not come back. She came back from 6 months of suffering to the world she left behind. She came back only to realize the suffering was just beginning. She came back and left again only the second time she didn’t come back.

I try to move my body. Paralyzed. I keep breathing.

I think about the girl that I used to be and the person I am now. What is the difference? So little and so much. I am back and ready to leave again. Addicted to the feeling of going somewhere new and far away to live in a world where I’m so out of place that I feel like I belong there. That girl used to believe in the world. She believed things could get better. Believed that people wanted things to get better. Now, I believe in myself. This girl who believed in love, and believed it was what she wanted. Now, I think of the old couple in the jungle village that loved each other because that is all they know. I don’t want that. Or do I? Or did I? I don’t know anymore. The girl didn’t like to be alone, but after all the days I spent alone I eventually stopped being lonely and became at peace with myself and my deep sense of self-awareness. That girl never felt this sense of serenity.

I feel salty tears mix with the beads of sweat running down my face. What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? My rational mind asks still fighting to move. My second mind answers living living. Living. Living. I struggle to control my breathing and fear I might start seizing at any moment.

Then I remember I have to get toilet paper from the store across the street before I go home. I was there earlier and forgot. I forgot the day before too. The first mind won. My limbs recognize the signals from my brain and move back to life. I pick up my mat and towel and make my way through the crowd coming in for the next class. I avert my eyes because I do not want to have to explain my odd behavior, not even through eye contact. I go to the “locker room” that is set up with cute cubicles and community lotions, hair dryers, curling irons and more. I slide past the women stripping down to take a shower and grab my things. Still I do not make eye contact with anyone. I do not want to speak to them. Do not want to go through the expected, unnecessary small talk. I won’t likely see them again after the free trial so what does it matter?

I think of the picture of the ex-boyfriend and the suffering I had to endure because I loved someone. There was no meaning in either act. I think about Iraq and the bull shit war I was fighting. That did not give me meaning. I think about the toilet paper I will probably forget to get again as I walk through the maze of strangers. There is no meaning in detachment either. Maybe there is no meaning to the suffering, the love or absence of, the service. Maybe it’s all just acts of bravery and the only meaning is survival by any means – love, detachment, war, peace. I leave the studio and the cold air bites my skin making me feel alive and present again.

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