Nonetheless

Jenny Slates, Little Weirds

I led my first session of yoga today as an independent facilitator. Things never turn out the way I imagine, but they turn out nonetheless. I graduated from my yoga training about a year ago, and the idea of facilitating seemed beyond out of reach. Today, I held that reality in my hands.

Things never turn out the way I imagine. I am no longer in Utah. I am back living at my mom’s. My job is claustrophobic. I have to remind myself that things will turn out nonetheless.

Things never turn out the way I imagine. I am 25, and I want to date but there is a brick wall of avoidance and shame in my core that I cannot seem to dismantle. I have to remind myself that things will turn out nonetheless.

I am not always kind to myself. Instead of giving myself grace and space and patience to evolve, I want everything immediately. I want confidence and I want to stop being absorbed with making sure everyone likes me and I want to be able to speak without my jaw locking and my breath stopping and I want to write words that I can share. I want to be able to say I love you when it feels right and I want to make more money and I want to be present. I feel that everything is possible for me - peace and joy and freedom - if I can just change all of these parts of my life.

But that belief robs me of my life. It robs me of my time spent in this world. It robs me of the reverence that all my past selves deserve for surviving what they have survived. It robs me of the being able to sit with the people I love and enjoy who they are.

Leading yoga today reminded me of this: immediacy and desperation walk hand in hand, and the story they weave together does not give me room to breathe. All this changing I believe to be dire is nothing but a story. A year ago, I was constantly thinking about how to be a facilitator, how to get away from my insecurity about being a terrible one, how to be a different version of myself in order to unlock a better life. None of those worries added up to anything but a dysregulated nervous system. I was robbing myself of the opportunity to watch the process unfold.

There is peace in the evening if I can put down this idea of perfection. There is warmth in the morning if I can tell myself that there is no timeline to any of this. Things never turn out the way I imagine, but they turn out nonetheless.