Dear Members of June 2023 Thirty-Day Yoga Challenge Group Chat,
Thank you for joining me in the thirty-day challenge using [redacted]’s videos from 2022. This was my third attempt at a thirty-day yoga challenge this year and the most successful for me. I know that your successes with the program varied, but your presence in the group chat, in commentary on the classes (I really appreciated the warnings about the particularly sucky core-focused ones) and photos of your practice spaces in different locales across North America helped create a sense of community that I haven’t felt since some time before March 2020.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you all that I struggle with care, both for myself and others. Several years’ worth of therapy pinpoint my struggle of caring for others from my upbringing—or lack of one. I’ve internalized, too, from the dominant cultural narrative that neglecting one’s own needs is a prerequisite for being perceived as a good caregiver. It was, though, being forced into a primary caregiving role two years ago (yesterday was the two-year anniversary of [redacted]) that forced me to take a hard look at those ideas.
When a traumatic experience happens, people often tell you, “You need to take care of yourself.” What does a person need who is suddenly thrust into the role of decision making for all the meals seven days a week as well as attempting to do the household tasks that two people once split, however unequally? How do you “carve out space for yourself”, as you’re encouraged to do, when not only have all these responsibilities shifted to you, but you also have to help a grown person, bereft of their independence, perform simple acts of personal hygiene like bathing, and also assist in their medical care while helping to comfort them when they are in pain? Oh, and parenting? Yeah, I could write a book about being thrown into parenting someone else’s kid.
Having experienced the pressure to sublimate my needs for my husband for weeks at a time after each successive medical intervention since [redacted], I’ll tell you what a person needs: someone to show up at their doorstep and say, “I’m here. I got pizza. You go take care of yourself.” Or “Let’s go for a walk.”
In the two years since my domestic life got turned upside down, I don’t recall my friends here doing that. Maybe it was me; perhaps I accidentally refused help or attempts at intervention and people thought I was fine and didn’t need it. It couldn’t be because I seemed like I was holding it together; being told by my boss that he’d have to serve as a material witness if anything happened to Haitch isn’t what holding it together looks like. And then I had my nervous breakdown.
Or maybe they thought that, since I’m from here and my family’s here, my family was helping out and interventions from non-relatives weren’t needed. The reality is that you don’t get to the rugged individualism that I embodied in my world travels before my marriage by having a supportive family. My family’s response after [redacted] was to ask me if I thought about paying for a caretaker to come in and help out. Even if we could afford someone, I know that Haitch would have loathed the idea. This was the “in sickness” that we vowed to each other when we eloped so long ago. Having offered that suggestion, my family disappeared, texting only every few months.
Perhaps, though, it was the timing of [redacted]—just as we were “coming out” of Covid—right when deaths spiked to their highest levels. Maybe my local friends felt unsafe “dropping by” to check up. It could be a weird cultural phenomenon too; that the spontaneous hang-out doesn’t happen anymore. Maybe how once we all became homeowners, the disparity in our incomes fractured us just enough geographically to make the fifteen-minute drives between our places too burdensome for spontaneity.
But maybe, too, they did do those things, but in the gray fog that my life became when it was turned upside down by events that I could not control—and that did eventually push me beyond my breaking point—I cannot recall their attempts. Maybe I needed ten times more what they attempted. I needed it as if they were my next door neighbors.
I wasn’t totally isolated; I was still going to work five days1 (or more) a week, and my coworkers were sympathetic to the pressures that I was under. But there, too, I felt that any care I received, patience from both my boss and the people I managed for my late responses to their requests and small crying jags, was a violation of what the workplace is and my role in it. How strange that the place where I felt the least entitled to care from others it felt the most freely given.
All of this is to say that self-care does not take place in a vacuum. You cannot carve out space for yourself amongst the competing duties of living and caring for others without people willing to remind you that you too are worth caring for. For thirty days in June, you four did that for me. Thank you.
As a token of my appreciation, I want to extend to you the invitation to come visit me in my hometown. I want you to learn why I love this place, despite the shitty family and the car-centric infrastructure that stymies neighborliness. I want to take you on hikes near where I grew up and bike rides through the side streets and barrios, grabbing a cafecito or a beer along the way. We could even cross the border, if you were up for it. You could imagine yourself living here, the real place of San Diego, not the sliver of coast that most people imagine when they think of this place.
Think about a visit. Think about thinking if you could be my neighbor here. And baring that, maybe we could do another fitness thing together. All this taking care of people has made me realized that I want to hold onto my physical health as long as I can. Have you thought about lifting weights?
Namaste,
X
Why I worked when I was entitled to take leave to take care of my husband could be the subject of two book-length autoethnographies.