Abby Rosmarin's Blog, page 18

What If, As a Model, I Have No Interest In “Breaking Into” Anything?

About a month or so back, I was lucky enough to do an interview at a fairly popular New England morning radio show.  I had written about the Market Basket story and how an upheaval like this was exactly what America needed.  They had me on the show to elaborate on my essay, discuss my views on Market Basket, and finish up the interview with a talk about my modeling career — specifically, about my collection of essays about the modeling world (available where all ebooks are sold, hint hint).

It was a great experience.  The DJs were incredible, the interview went smoothly, and I got a chance to shamelessly promote my writing.  But I noticed something that stuck with me long after the interview wrapped: in the promos as well as in the interview, they described my book as the story of me “trying to break into the modeling world.”  Now, I can understand the confusion: the first words of my book description have me facetiously asking if you want to learn how to break into the modeling world.  Granted, a sentence or two later I say that I will not be answering that in the slightest, but still, I can see someone giving a passing glance at the book description and believing that that’s what my collection is about.

I think what has stuck with me, even though the interview is now nothing but radio waves in space (and digital files on the internet), is the fact that this type of description runs parallel with a common school of thought when it comes to models, actors, and the like.  Whatever we’re doing, we must be trying to “break into” the industry.

But what if, as a model, I have no interest in “breaking into” anything?

I’m interested in getting work (cue Khia’s, “Get money bitch!”), but I have zero interest in trying to become a supermodel.  Aside from the fact that the term is about as antiquated as a model’s “polaroids” being shot with actual polaroid cameras, I really have no aspirations of “making it” as a model.  I’m perfectly content finding work, meeting new people, experiencing new things and places, and walking away with a few more paychecks to pay the bills with.  Would being a big name mean more of said experiences and paychecks?  Sure, but it’s not my goal in the modeling world.

To bring it all the way back to my book (still available for purchase, by the way): I actually discuss this in one of my essays.  For every superstar A-list actress or jetsetting supermodel, there are thousands upon thousands of working actors and models who do what they do completely under the radar from mainstream media.  And while some are urgently wondering when their “big break” will be, many are simply grateful that they can do what they love and get paid for it.

Yesterday, I had back-to-back go-sees, coming less than 24 hours after event #1 in a 5-part wedding expo series.  Today, I have absolutely nothing modeling-related on my plate (unless you count putting away all my impractical high heels model-related), but I am teaching three classes in the afternoon, two of them back-to-back as well.  I’m not trying to “break into” the yoga world outside of finding a nice, steady group of students and a variety of classes to teach.  I’m hoping to sell a full-out manuscript or two — and I’d love for them to sell fairly well.  But I recognize that fretting over superstardom is a fruitless task.  I’m just enjoying life for what it is, even (and especially) when it includes quelling nerves just before a radio interview.

Why I Hate Writers Who Actively Disregard Grammar

I’ve talked about this many times before, in other platforms and in various & sundry formats.  But it seems like I can never really get it out of my system.  Every time I hear a writer-friend talk about how they don’t need to understand syntax because, “that’s what editors are for,” I feel the need to rant well up inside of me.

(Sidebar: That’s not what editors in the modern age are for.  Trust me on this one.  Unless you’re an A-list celebrity, of a B-lister about to publish a tell-all, an editor isn’t there to be your proofreader.)

This has nothing to do with grammatical or spelling errors.  Heavens knows I’m probably the biggest culprit (fun fact: I read over some of my writer’s bootcamp posts and was downright in awe at my English-as-second-language grammatical skills at certain points).  No one is perfect and very few people know every single rule when it comes to linguistics (and even then, some rules are obsolete, others are on the cusp, and new ones are gaining traction).  My frustration is not directed at people who love to write, but seem to fall short in their technical skills.  My frustration is directed at people who not only don’t know the technical rules, but don’t want to know them — and think it’s silly to spend any time or energy learning them.

I finally realized that my issue is twofold.  The first is one that I’ve gone over a million times before: being a writer who disregards the rules of writing is like being a musician who disregards the rules of sheet music.  Could you imagine a violin player rolling her eyes and going, “Well that’s what a composer is for”?  A writer is someone who loves the intricacies of the written word — and you can’t expect to get anywhere with your writing if you only respect the broad, basic formulas.  Being a writer means playing with sentence structure like an architect plays with a building layout — or discover new ways to use words the way a dancer discovers new ways to move.  Being a writer means respecting the rules and breaking them only when the situation actually calls for it.  It means recognizing that e.e. cummings had a firm grasp of the English language before creating his abstract poetry, the same way Picasso was first a classically-trained painter.

But there is a bigger issue at hand, and this one applies to more than just grammar: when a writer blatantly flouts spelling, grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation, all the while proclaiming, “Who needs to learn this anyway?  I am a writer!  An artist!  I don’t need to be technical,” they really mean, “I don’t get it, therefore I will find any reason to excuse it away.”  Instead of taking the time to actually learn something that might not come naturally to them, they find a way to make it seem frivolous.

This is a problem we see everywhere these days.  People are so quick to call themselves intelligent or witty that they’ll actively disregard anything that they might not yet know.  I mean, what is easier: to call yourself smart while regurgitating what you’ve already memorized or to challenge yourself and potentially realize that you’re not as smart as you thought you were?  I see this all the time in politics — from both sides — but it’s absurdly prevalent in the intellectual world as well.  It’s just easier to label a concept as unnecessary — or to label a different way of thinking or a new vocabulary word as pretentious — and continue to consider yourself a smart person, a worldly politician, a good writer.

And why not?  The media loves to make us feel smart (the reasons for that we’ll save for another entry).  We have online IQ tests that tell everyone taking it that they have IQs of 130 (Fun fact: if the person on Facebook who typically posts inane/incoherent shit, the person who always shares chain letters, and the person who thinks every user-made someecard is *hi-liarous* all get a 130 on the same online IQ test, the online IQ test is not actually an accurate measurement of anything, aside from the gullibility of dumb people).  We have websites from all corners of the world with people who will gladly tell you that your opinion is the only valid one.  We can choose to listen to TV shows, broadcasts, podcasts, and so on and so forth that only agree with what we believe — that either pander to our level of intelligence or make us feel intelligent by comparison.  Why challenge ourselves and confront what we don’t understand when that might mean we’re not the mega-geniuses we’ve decided that we are without merit?

It took a while, but I realized that my supreme loathing of writers who stay willfully ignorant of grammar stems from my supreme loathing of people who stay willfully ignorant of anything that might force them to reevaluate their intelligence.  There is no growth for mindsets like that — and it makes it harder those who want to learn and expand (and aren’t afraid to realize their level of stupidity in the process).

So, for the love of God: pick up a damn book.  Learn a damn thing or two about grammar or chemistry or economics.  And — for the love of God — stop taking those stupid online IQ tests.  If it doesn’t qualify you for Mensa, it’s suspect at best.

A Year Away From Life

“Make sure you have that week off,” I remember Casey* telling Melissa. “It’s always important to take a week to yourself before switching jobs.”

I was in the backseat of Casey’s car as she gave Melissa that advice.  Melissa had just put in her two weeks notice at the childcare center we all were teachers at.  Like many people in the field, she was setting up to leave ECE to become a nanny.  I was week three or four into my two-month notice, giving the director as much time as possible to find a replacement before I left as well.  I was desperately afraid that all the work I did with my students (which included a child with autism, a child whose parents were going through divorce, and a Chinese immigrant who had just started learning English and just stopped being afraid of the world) would be undone by a string of temporary teachers.  I would later find out that it took them all summer to find a replacement for me once I was gone.  Apparently very few people want to lead a packed Pre-K class filled with extenuating circumstances for less than what a full-time Hobby Lobby cashier makes.

My last day at that job was three weeks before my wedding.  I spent that time packing up an apartment, finalizing a wedding with a whole bevy wrenches in the machinery, and filling out the paperwork for my new job in my new state.  I would get married, fully move to the new apartment, spend two weeks abroad, and go right back to the rat race — with, of course, that one-week break in between.

Since my senior year of high school, I had always prided myself on doing it all.  Yes, I can handle taking all honors classes — five of which happen to be writing-intensive English courses — while working a job that occasionally likes to give me more hours than is legally allowed in the state of Massachusetts for someone my age.  I’ll do all that while getting my volunteer hours in for the Honor’s Society in, applying to college, and doing write-ups for every scholarship within a 40-mile radius.  In no way will this have a negative effect on my health, causing me to have a nervous breakdown in April — which would stretch through until the end of May and really only dissipate once finals week was over.

In college, the deck of cards changed, but the game remained the same.  Sure, I can handle taking high-level classes with professors who are bitter that they are not teaching at Harvard or Tuft’s.  I’ll do this in two subjects — and I’ll maintain my GPA in order to keep my scholarship through the school while serving as a content editor for the school’s literary magazine and working an on-campus job at inconvenient hours and being perpetually in a state of job searching thanks to the requirements needed for the co-op program.  Just ignore the part of the story when I turn 20 and have a complete & total life crisis.

The height of my Do It All lifestyle came when I found myself planning a wedding while working (more than) full-time as a solo Pre-K teacher, taking two night classes, single-handedly creating and implementing a graduation ceremony, packing up the apartment to move to another state, and interviewing for a new job in said state.  I felt victorious when everything finally came into play, only to find myself in tears from pure exhaustion the morning before my first day at my new job.

I know I could blame a lot of what went down during my time as a teacher on so many external factors: administration, large classes, catch-22 policies and no-win situations.  But, at the heart of it, the most damage created during my time as an ECE teacher was due to myself and my stubborn inability to realize when enough is enough.  I refused to take a step back and say, “It’s not normal or healthy to burst into tears the second you get home — or when you’re on school grounds.  It is time to put me back into perspective and walk away.”

Eventually I did.  It took a lot of high-stress and downright toxic situations for me to finally go, “Enough really is enough.”  At that point, I was so checked out and unhappy that I had transformed my school calendar into a makeshift countdown.  With a big Sharpie marker, I wrote over the scheduled meetings and school plays with a set of numbers, counting backwards from the very last day of school.  It was something I maniacally checked, crossing off each and every single day and noting just how many days I had left.  Eventually that number dwindled down to, “one,” and I finished the school year with essentially a pat on the back and my husband waiting for me in the parking lot.

For the first couple of months, life was still too busy to really soak in what had happened.  My husband and I went on a two-week, cross-country roadtrip, closed on a house, and spent all of July and August playing amateur handyman.  We moved into our new place and closed up the apartment we called home for the last two and a half years (which involved a lot of spackling and scrubbing).  I then had two weeks to magically unpack and set up the house for our housewarming party, because timing was allowing us to have the party on one date and one date only.

But things quickly settled.  Somewhere in the midst of all that, I got an email from my tai chi instructor, asking if I could take over a potential class for her at a yoga studio.  Nothing crazy: just an hour or two a week at a studio in Merrimack.  I wasn’t working at that point, and the gig wouldn’t start until after Labor Day.  Would I be interested?  

Suddenly, the idea of having to meet the yoga studio owner for a whole thirty minutes and travel down to the studio twice a week sounded like the most onerous of tasks.  I knew in my gut that I needed to take this, but I treated this position — which would take maybe 5-6 hours total out of my entire week — like someone had asked me to randomly go to law school.  That’s when I knew how deeply necessary it was for me to take a break from life.

And that’s exactly how things were for four straight months.  My “job” was teaching two classes a week.  My husband would call me up in the evening and ask me how my day went.  On more than one occasion, I would reply with, “Well, I taught tai chi … and that was kind of it.  I was really unproductive after that.”  And he would always reply with something encouraging, like, “You taught tai chi today.  I’d call today pretty productive.”

In some subtle way, I was experiencing a nervous breakdown that had been nearly four years in the making.  All my can-do attitude was good and gone, my tank was on empty, and I was more than happy to be the proverbial car at the side of the road.  I spent a good chunk of time in perfect silence and solitude, diving headfirst into my writing and only begrudgingly coming up for air.

For Christmas that year, my husband gave the gift of a yoga teacher training that I had been considering, but had nixed almost outright because tuition was expensive and I was barely bringing in any income.  In fact, at that point I was bringing in no income, as the yoga studio I was teaching at closed its doors just before Christmas.  But I was in a much different place than I was in September.  I had already returned to the modeling world and was enjoying the occasional go-see or gig — which I took with irrational exuberance, if only because everything was temporary.  The go-sees were barely over 10 minutes and the shoots only lasted a day.  No set schedule, no commitment.  I was getting into a productive rhythm with my writing, even winning NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row.  When I opened the unassuming brown box and found the new student questionnaire alongside the required textbooks, I was already starting to feel the itch, like there was something more I needed to be doing, something more I needed to put into place.

Me leading my first public class for my yoga practicum

I devoted the next 8 months to all things yoga.  I did my “yoga homework”, which included an online anatomy course and enough reading to satiate any English professor, and practiced teaching to empty rooms in my house.  I taught tai chi once a week at a new studio, usually with the same students from the previous place, and went on the occasional go-see.  I wrote in ways I never thought I would, even stumbling upon a few viral essays here and there.  I was spending a lot less time in silence and a lot more time being social.  But, in many ways, I was still slightly disconnected from the rest of the real world.  My “to do” lists were the tiniest fraction of what I used to have on my plate.  But the days where I admitted that I taught tai chi and did nothing else were gone.  In May, I started to search for potential yoga jobs.  I even applied for a few front desk positions at local gyms.

Come July — just a little more than year after I had finally left my job — everything suddenly fell into place.  I landed a volunteer job at a homeless services center to teach yoga to the homeless.  I met with a few other places about potentially teaching yoga there as well.  Those eventually fell through, but I was soon approached by the owner of my favorite studio, asking if I would like to take over for a Sunday morning class in the fall.  A few weeks later, I landed an interview for a front desk position I had applied for months ago.  I started subbing for another yoga studio, with the understanding that the subbing might eventually graduate up to a rotational teaching gig.

In August, I completed my yoga teacher training, with a lot of tears and smiles and brand new friends.  The transformation during training had been a slow burn and, on graduation day, I thought I was going to spontaneously combust.  But I walked away feeling like a brand new person with a brand new outlook on life.  It took a few weeks for me to realize that I had graduated from teacher training around the one-year anniversary of when I forced myself to agree to taking over my instructor’s classes.

The day after graduating was all the proof I needed that I was starting a brand new chapter in my life.  When I wasn’t emailing the owner of my favorite studio about scheduling, I was on the phone with the studio I teach tai chi at.  In the middle of that phone conversation, I received a text from a fellow trainee telling me that a studio owner we both knew wanted to get in touch with me about potentially starting a class at her studio.  I found myself creating write-up after write-up: class descriptions, teacher bios, potential workshop drafts.  That night, I tried kickboxing for the very first time and the instructor’s eyes lit up when she found out I taught tai chi.  A few days later, I found out I landed the front desk position at the gym, starting in the fall.

After this Labor Day weekend, I’ll be teaching Tuesday afternoons, Tuesday evenings, Friday afternoons, and Sunday mornings.  By late September, I’ll be manning the front desk three mornings a week at the gym down the street, with the potential for me to teach yoga there as well.  Starting in October, I’ll be adding in a Saturday morning class as well.  It’s the busiest my schedule has been in a very, very long time.  But, it’s still nothing like I used to do. 

I fully recognize that I was able to do something a lot of people cannot: take a year break from life.  Even with a new house under our belt, we were in a position where I could take a step back and not necessarily worry about a steady paycheck.  I had run myself into the ground and was given an opportunity to dig myself back out.  It was a chance to go off autopilot, do a factory reset, and figure out where in the hell I was going from there.  I needed a year where I did the absolute minimal to offset the years where I swore I was Wonder Woman.

I haven’t talked to Melissa since she left her job, and Casey sadly passed away last year due to a heart problem.  The last time I saw either of them, I was a strung out 24-year-old, a baby in many ways and old before her time in others.  I’m weeks away from my 28th birthday, a birthday I’ll hopefully be celebrating with people from all corners of my life, from my hometown friends to my new yoga buddies.  I’m going into this new school year completely different than I did in 2013.  While the events leading up to my year-long hiatus were less than favorable, they were exactly what I needed to get me to where I am supposed to be.  I am so incredibly grateful for having that time to do the necessary soul searching and soul replenishing.  And as busy as my schedule is about to become, I go forward with a keen eye on keeping myself happy and energized — and with the understanding that I cannot do it all, and that’s perfectly okay.  My life is better with fewer things on my to-do list.

 

 

*all names changed

 

Writer’s Bootcamp, Bonus Day

Sinking Ship: You realize the boat is sinking, but that’s not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing happened last night.

We stood there at the bow of the ship, our hands clasped around the railing at the boat careened to the left, the port side slowly sinking under water.  We were surrounded by miles and miles of quiet, dark emptiness.  The emergency rafts had already been deployed and were starting to float away from the boat with only a handful of people in each of them.

“We’re doomed,” the guy next to me said, his voice quiet with resignation. “We’ll all drown before the rescue boats ever find us.  This has got to be the worst thing to ever happen to any of us.”

I shrugged my shoulders, my feet already started to slip out from underneath me.

“It could be worse,” I replied.

“How so?”

“Last night I finished day fourteen of a two-week writer’s bootcamp, only to learn there was still one more day to do.”

“Oh, wow.  You’re right.  That is way worse.”

I would’ve replied to the man, but at that point that ship tipped completely onto its side.  I hung from the railing for a moment before plunging into the icy water below me.

Writer’s Bootcamp, Day Fourteen

Matchup!  Write a story featuring a Ouiji Board, a search engine, and a self-help book.

A man came crashing through the lobby area of our office, Ouiji board clutched between his hands.

“This has to be divine intervention!  This is it!  I know it is it!” he cried out.

“Can I help you with something?” asked a fellow front desk rep.

“My entire life was spent in misery.  And then — and then! — I had a moment of clarity,” the man hollered. “And I have devoted every waking moment for the last two years writing the perfect self help book.  Others need to know what I have learned!”

“Sir, this is a realtor’s office…” I began.

“Exactly!” he replied, eyes wide. “This is exactly where I need to be!  The Google search bar told me so!  And I’m going to use his Ouiji board to learn the name of my future agent!  This is where I need to be!  This is intervention!”

“I completely understanding sir,” my co-worker said slowly, surreptitiously pressing the red button underneath the desk.

“And I will need you two to help me — to help me figure out the next step in this incredible path!” he declared, slamming the Ouiji board box down on the raised edge of the counter.  Just then, two security guards came marching through the side door.

“Sir, I need you to come with me,” said one of them.

“But, but you don’t understand — this is divine intervention!”

“Well this is security intervention,” the other replied.  With a security guard hooking a hand under each armpit, the man was lifted up and out of the building.

“Wow,” said my co-worker.

“Yeah, wow.”

“What was that about?”

“I don’t even know.”

“Well, at least this would make for a good story,” my co-worker offered.

I looked out past the glass doors, watching as the guard plopped the crazy man onto the parking lot pavement.

“No, no it really wouldn’t,” I replied.

Writer’s Bootcamp, Day Thirteen

Breaking Down: A tire blows out as you’re in the car with someone on the verge of his/her own breakdown.  Stuck in a small town, you’re about to do something you haven’t done in years.

We were crossing the Nevada desert when she went into hour three of her rant.

“And then she had the nerve to tell me she needed extra help on the project!” she shrieked. “Extra help!  She might as well have said that I wasn’t good enough!  You know what?  She’s just jealous.  Jealous!” She paused to slap her hands onto the dashboard. “But she’s so much prettier than me!  It’s not fair!  If there were a just God in this world, she wouldn’t be prettier than me!”

I sighed and changed lanes.

“And what is that sigh for?” she shot out. “You do think she’s prettier than me!”

“I’ve never met her.”

“That doesn’t matter!  You agree with me that I’m not as pretty as her!  She puts me through all that and you have the nerve to be on her side?”

I did nothing but shake my head and switch back into our lane after passing a big rig.

“How dare you shake your head!” she unloaded. “I am under a lot of pressure and work is tough and I gained three pounds and there’s a zit on my shoulder and I can’t get this guy I’m sleeping with to text me back and my boss is prettier than me and you are not a supportive friend at all!”

I keep silent, focusing more on the tractor trailer in front of me.  I switch lanes again, hitting my blinker and checking the left lane before turning. 

My steering wheel jerked out from under me as I heard a large, “BANG!” emanate from underneath my seat.  My car began to swerve off the road; it took every ounce of my being and both hands on the wheel to get my car into a somewhat guided stop along the left side of the highway.

“And NOW the car is broken!” she cried out. “I can’t believe all these things are going wrong in my life!  Just once I would like things to go my way and I –“

“OH MY GOD SHUT UP,” I snap, shocking both her and myself as the words flew out of my mouth.

“…Excuse me?” she said slowly, cocking her head to the side.

“YOU HEARD ME!  SHUT UP!” I continued my shouting from the driver’s seat. “SHUT UP!  SHUT UP!  SHUT UP!”

She simply sunk back in her seat, face pouting, arms crossed.

“Jesus, sorry for living…”

“No!  You need to apologize to yourself, to me, to the whole damn world for your blatant negativity!  All you do is complain and find problems!”

“I’m in the middle of a breakdown over hear and you’re just –“

“I’m just saying what needs to be said, for the first time in my life!” I shout. “God, I’d rather be anyone else than dealing with you and your problems!  In fact…”

I unbuckled my seatbelt, pushed open the door, and stepped out into the Nevada desert.

“What are you doing?” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and rolling down the window.

“I’d rather walk in the blazing heat than deal with one more minute of your bitching!” I yelled.

“It’s over ten miles until the next service stop!” she yelled out.

“Worth it!” I shouted, walking away from the car and down the long, lonely stretch of highway.

Writer’s Bootcamp, Day Twelve

My Resignation: After years of unhappiness, you’ve finally had enough and have decided to quit — but we’re not talking about your job.  Write a letter of resignation to someone other than your employer: your school, your family, your favorite sports team, etc.

To Whom It May Concern,

After much thought and deliberation, I was decided to step down from my position.  I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow as a human being, but I believe it is time for move on: effective the last day of the week, aka Saturday August 29th, I will be stepping down as a writing prompt doer-thingy.

We both started this endeavor with the best of intentions, but, somewhere along the line, things took a different turn — a turn that is not conducive to how I imagine writing prompts should go.  I know this position is a perfect fit for someone else, but I believe it is time for me to finish out my obligations and hang my hat.

Also, the pay is terrible.  You should look into that.

Best regards,

Abby Rosmarin

Writer’s Bootcamp, Day Eleven

The Stranger: You’re walking home from work one night and taking shortcuts through a labyrinth of dark city alleyways to meet someone on time.  Suddenly, a stranger parts the shadows in front of you, comes close, and asks you to hold out your palm.  You oblige.

There is one main rule anyone who lives in the Fenway/Symphony Hall area of Boston knows by heart: you never go through the Fens at night.

The colleges in the area beat it into your head at Hour One of orientation.  Neighbors will warn newcomers the first chance they get.  It’s just not a smart move.

But sometimes you find yourself coming home late from work and the idea of going around an entire park is exhausting.  Sometimes you want to cut through.  And that’s exactly what I did one night.

I had been stuck at work for way later than I wanted to and I was already running late to meet some friends by the Northeastern Campus.  I had two choices: go all the way around the Fens, only to essentially backtrack by the Museum of Fine Arts, or just cut through the Fens, well-meaning undergrad OLs be damned.

I wove my way through one of the running paths, past the community garden, and through a labyrinth of bushes.  I made my way through a clearing and was just steps away from the footbridge to the main road when a man stepped in front of me, blocking my way forward.

“Hold out your hand,” he said.

“What?” I spat out, taking a step back.

“Come closer, and hold out your palm,” he said.

I looked around.  Not a single other person was in site.  Running in the opposite direction wasn’t an option — I already had a tough enough time walking the gravel paths in heels — so I took a deep breath and a step forward.

“If it’s crack, I don’t want any,” I said tentatively, slowly opening my palm up to him.

“It’s not safe to go alone,” he recited. “Here, take this.”

He pressed something into my palm, closed my hand up, and darted away.  When he was lost to the shadows, I darted as well — only I was going over the footbridge and into civilization again.  I kept my fist tight until I was safely by Huntington Ave.  Under the shelter of a street light, I opened up my palm. 

Resting in its center was a folded piece of paper.  I swallowed, unfolded the paper, and brought it up to the light.  Inside was a map of the neighborhood, including multiple paths around the Fens, drawn out in colored markers, with the estimated length of time to take each path written out beside them, along with Xs in the park area to show where drug deals typically take place or homeless people sleep.

I couldn’t help but chuckle.  I silently thanked the man — most likely a former OL reinforcing the rule about walking through the Fens at night — and went on my way to Northeastern University.

Writer’s Bootcamp, Day Ten

Dollar Message: You’re at your favorite department store buying a birthday present for a friend.  As the cashier gives you change, you notice a message with specific instructions scribbled on one of the bills.  What do the instructions say?  Do you carry them out and, if so, how?

I didn’t get it at first.

The cashier deliberately handed me back a folded five when I was at the department store.  I watched her take the five out of the cash register, fold it in half, and hand it to me with my receipt.

“Here’s your change.”

I cocked an eyebrow at her — for fuck’s sake, I paid with credit card — and tentatively took the five with my receipt.

With my friend’s present in one hand, I pulled out my wallet.  I slipped my credit card in one slot and proceeded to unfold the five to place it in another.  But two words written in chicken scratch with permanent marker caught my eye.  I held the five dollar bill with two hands and read what the chicken scratch wrote.  After a few tries, I realized what the scribbles were trying to say:

“Specific Instructions”

I sighed and rolled my eyes.

“What is this?  A sophomoric stab at a writing prompt?” I grumbled.  Thankful at least for the free five dollars, I returned my wallet to my bag and left the store.

We Now Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Adulting

So this writer’s bootcamp is turning more into a writer’s reserves — y’know, one weekend a month, called up when needed.  I can’t help but take in the prompts with a bit of a silly attitude; I mean, really?  You want me to write an obituary for a character?  Or talk about a house’s past?  Maybe if I were in a high school English class, or had never written anything before.  And while that has resulted in a lot of facetious entries (which is great for the wannabe comedic writer in me), it has also resulted in an extreme lack of impetus to carry them out whenever life gets busy.  And life got busy.

This past Tuesday, I finished my registered yoga teacher training with a four-day intensive session.  Intensives usually mean one thing and one thing only: the rest of your life is on pause.  What little not-yoga-me I had left after sessions (filled with final lessons on adjustments, our teaching practicums, and — let’s face it — lots of tears because yoga is all about being authentic to who you are) was spent going to barbecues that family and friends were having over the weekend.  This left little room for anything else.  I barely had time to properly Adult, let alone be snarky in writing prompts.

So the house is a mess, emails need sending, bills still need to be paid, and this week is shaping up to be essentially the fast-forward button after four days of pause.  And I’m perfectly okay with that.

To provide a little backstory: once upon a time in 2013, I quit my job.  No, I didn’t just quit my job: I left an entire field behind.  And the fallout from burning out of what I once thought was my calling was devastating.  I spent the entire summer focusing on my other big change, which was buying/moving into a house.  But once the dust from that settled, I felt weightless — like the very things that were dragging me down also kept me grounded.  I had some vague ideas as to what I wanted to do next, but that was it.  And I felt almost a knee-jerk reaction to devoting myself to anything the way that I had as an early education teacher.  I had given more than what I had available for far too long and was left with nothing but a resignation letter and students who didn’t remember me when I run into them and their parents in the grocery store (“What’s that Mommy?”  Oh, no one.  Just the person who cuddled you while you took your inhaler medicine after getting pneumonia…)

My favorite yoga studio announced sometime after I quit that they would be hosting a teacher training.  I looked at my current situation — absolutely no source of income, just bought a house, closing costs shot up $2000 last minute, only one car to our name/knowing we needed to be buy a second one stat — and went, “Nope.  This just cannot happen this year.”  Which was a tough pill to swallow: I went to the September teacher training info session and it just felt wrong that I was walking away from that.  Little did I know that my husband was busy crunching numbers and figuring out budgets and wrapping up some of the textbooks as Christmas presents.

The past eight months have been a blur.  It was more than just going back to school to finally learn some anatomy and maybe not suck at yoga instruction.  Going to the training forced me to confront a lot of stuff I was perfectly content keeping stored away and gathering dust (hence the crying like a baby in August part).  I knew that people always talk about how teacher training can be transformational, but I didn’t realize to what extent.

I also got a completely unique chance to connect with a group and become friends in a way that you just can’t as adults.  Somewhere along the line, friendships form with type of veneer up.  We can go years without really seeing what’s going on beneath the surface of the people we call friends.  Somewhere along the line, we decided that skeletons are made for closets and friendships are for good times only and we enter the real world accordingly.  But here we were, crying over things like addiction and divorce and the demons we all have to face.  There are few moments in my life that I felt as raw as I did on Tuesday when I cried about how it took me so long to realize that my time as a preschool teacher wasn’t a fluke: that it was just as important in catapulting me to where I need to be as my training has been.

The day after training felt surreal.  There were a ton of things on my to-do list: meet with a gym for a second interview, file the necessary paperwork to become an RYT, teach my rescheduled yoga class at the homeless services center, do my first-ever kickboxing class immediately after a yogalates class (because glutton for punishment).  There was a house that had not seen a lick of cleaning since training started and a set of cats who had not received their usual level of attention and human interaction.  But it also felt like the ultimate cliché: it felt like a new chapter had started.  It felt like somehow during the night, someone flipped through the book and brought me to a fresh page.

And if yesterday was any indication, things are shaping up in some pretty insane and incredible ways.  I can’t go into any real details just yet, but the only word to describe yesterday is overabundance and my heart is filled to the brim because of it.

Now — fear not, random strangers who have no emotional interest in the blog!  Those last four or five bootcamp entries WILL be completed.  It’s just been put on the backburner as I process possibly the most profound bit of schooling I have ever had.