I over give.

I can’t help it. It is in my nature to give and I feel the pain others feel. I am ruled by the Scorpio moon and the Virgo Sun. The Scorpio in me is the intuitive+sensitive side, that feels e v e r y t h i n g. The Virgo is the endless helper. I feel the pain, and I want to help. The problem is, the way I do this is often looks like taking on the actual pain of the other person, without thinking or even trying to. It just energetically happens. I’ve learned that this happens for me, and I can avoid it a lot of the time. But not always.

It’s really tricky to avoid taking on the pain of young people.

I am a teacher of young humans. I love them like they are all my own children.

When they are hurt, it hurts me. And 2020 has been a clusterfuck of emotions.

This year has been so much to integrate and make sense of.

Imagine being eight years old. You’re 100% old enough to keep these memories into adulthood. We all remember 3rd grade. You take in the energy of the stressed out adults around you that aren’t handling the pandemic very well. You don’t go to a physical school for at least 5 solid months and you are sequestered from your peers in the interim. There is no outside world for you to be a part of, because the stability of your daily school experience has been taken away. You may be hungry. You are definitely attention starved.

Now it’s fall of 2020, and it’s been 9.5 months since the world changed, long enough to gestate a human child. You’re doing the best you can, at 8. You have “normal” life happening all around you, but you really just.can’t.deal. It was all too much.

Remember. YOU ARE EIGHT.

Nothing makes sense. No one in your family tells you the real truth. No one is calm, ever, because your adults are stressed AF all the time. Loss of jobs, marriages, partnerships, careers, insurance, vehicles/transportation, HUMANS, has been just way too much to figure out.

Now you go to school every day. You try to hold it together. You have to wear a mask and your teacher doesn’t hug you because of Covid. But you have so much trauma and no one touches you. Before the pandemic you had trauma. Perhaps you lived with the trauma of sexual abuse, food insecurity, mental abuse, physical abuse or neglect. Now the pandemic has amplified this experience a thousand fold.

Your life has a new trauma hit, and you really can’t do any more to keep it together. You throw shit in class. You swear. You attack the teacher that has loved you from the beginning with verbal abuse, or you create chaos in the classroom with your neediness and hysteria.

Enter me the teacher, one that that loves everyone unconditionally. I love the student that is acting out from trauma. I give them space and love and a part of my heart to make it through the day. But every time I give a child a part of my heart, I lose part of myself, a part that keeps me centered. Eventually I have over-given to the point that I become a shell of myself. I am brittle. I am like the yucca seed pod, fragile and thin. If someone were to poke me with the head of a pin, I would shatter like a thin glass orb.

I cannot go on this way. I have to give more energetically to myself. Yet I don’t know how to do this.

I say Namaste. I say I love yoga. But honestly, I have done yoga 2 days this year. 2/340 days I’ve done yoga. That does not make me a yogi.

I am not fully evolved. I am at risk to absorb the emotions of others.

Right now, I am not at full capacity. I am barely scraping by.

I am full of air. A glass with only liquid on the edges of the glass, droplets that are ready to evaporate.

I am about to evaporate.

I cannot give more to my students right now. I am depleted.

I have been trying to live like breast cancer is not a reality for the last 3 weeks, when it is absolutely the reality. I start radiation treatments next week. It’s still my reality. I can’t really look at my breasts naked. The cancerous one is lumpy and bumpy and weird and disfigured. The other looks cartoonish and large, disproportionate. Unreal. Unreal it its normalcy.

But I want so badly to be “normal,” whatever that means, and to show up for my students.

But why can’t I show up for MYSELF with the same urgency?

I feel the urgency of a neglected body. A neglected soul.

A wounded heart.

Tonight I feel empty. Also tonight I feel full with the ghosts of other children’s trauma. But somehow I can’t reconcile my own childhood trauma. I just want to prevent theirs.

I can’t hold it anymore.

It’s not mine to hold.

I need to heal myself.

I need to keep myself…for myself.

Before I disappear.

I will love them. I still love them.

But I vow to not give them my soul again.

I will vanish if I don’t save myself, first.

Saving.

Myself.

For.

Myself.

Namaste.