I haven’t been up to writing lately because my life has felt so visceral all I can do is to just…process. It’s been a trainwreck and dumpster fire over here, and there have been rainbows at the same time.

My love relationship has ended. I can’t write about it. But it happened. It happened and it was the opposite of what I hoped would happen. And it was kind of holy and bittersweet how we said goodbye. And it hurts a lot. It’s gonna hurt a lot for a long time.

My classroom has some friends in it that have learned they can get to me. It doesn’t matter how many trainings and years and professionalism I have. I am just flat not my best with them right now. I have to step into the hallway. I have to walk to the next teacher’s classroom and ask if she can cover my class during her prep for a few minutes. It’s that hard.

So, I step out and walk to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and stare at the walls. And then the realities hit me and I do a little crying jag right there on the toilet in the teacher bathroom at school. While I should be teaching.

My breast is still healing from radiation. In the last 3 weeks the skin has started tightening and tightening more. I thought it was the increase in physical activity with stretching and yoga, but I don’t think that anymore. It makes me scared for my surgery in the end of June. I worry that my cancerous side will keep shrinking, and I’ll just be lopsided again, and what was the point of this third surgery then.

We all have Alexander days. You know. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, Awful, No Good, Very Bad Day? Yeah. Exactly.

The thing is. It’s never always horrible. Unless you are a victim of human trafficking, or fleeing a military coup, or trekking through the dessert as a refugee with your 3 young children or crossing the border into the US from Mexico on the Arizona border. Those days are pretty horrible.

But for me, and all my privileged worrying and sadness, really…I am fine. I know it’s ok to grieve the ending of a relationship that brought me so much joy with a person I still love. But I also think the only way I’m getting through this is if I try to find silver linings.

I don’t know if the exhaustion that Covid has brought to all of us is going to go away without purposeful and directed energy at stress release. I can be as zen as F, but if everyone around me is still stress balls, well, I’m not Buddha or Krishna or Jesus. I don’t know how to be chill while the world is falling apart for me emotionally.

I also don’t know how to NOT take on the pain of those around me. I know my most challenging students have major traumas. I know what some of them are, and yeah, those things make life HARD.

I can’t give more than this today. This is just a check-in. I’m still breathing. I hope you are, too. Notice your breath. Notice how it moves through your body. Send some of it to the hurt parts. Let your breath be a moment of healing.

Namaste.