EMPATHY IN THE EXTREME

The other day a fellow yoga teacher looking for coverage during her maternity leave asked if I was interested in picking up more classes. Though grateful for her offer, I turned it down. I recently realized that I’m right at the perfect number of classes to avoid reaching empathy fatigue.

I want to be there for my yoga students. When a student tells me she has stage IV cancer, I want to be there for it. When another asks me why his wrists are bothering him in the poses where they really shouldn’t be bothering him, I want to be there for it. I want to be there when a student asks how he can stop hating Warrior 3. I want my best insides to be available when a student starts crying about his recently passed mom or another one tears up about her divorce. I’ve learned that yoga students expect their teachers to hear them and respond. And I want to. Many times—many, many—I have been on the receiving end of that kind of yoga student/teacher relationship. It left an enduring impact. Physically, time-wise, and mentally, I could teach more classes, but if I took on more right now my ability to give a damn about my students in the way I want to would suffer.

A couple weeks ago one of my regular students brought her husband to hot class. I’m always a smidge fretful when I get a new student in those hot, hot, sweaty, hot, humid, hot classes. They’re hard; “extreme” might even be a proper descriptor. It can happen that the heat and mirror-fog scares neophytes off their sweaty mats. So a couple days later, I asked my student if her husband and I were still friends, if I’d see him back at class. She assured me I would, “He said he could tell that you really cared.”

I do! I really do care! I care about my students’ experience in my class. I care about how their other yoga classes go. I care about the actives they do. Because I believe so strongly that what goes down on our mats can serve to upgrade our many other hours, I care about the things that happen to them outside the studio walls that end up influencing their time on their mats.

However, if I teach too many classes, I don’t have the energy for the empathy I need in order to be the yoga teacher I try so hard to be.

Hold my Diet Dr. Pepper. 

Is it, like, the fall air or a post-summer slowness that leads to verging-on-irritatingly-self-indulgent introspection? Or do I just have a little more time on my hands of late?

I moved in with Jason while we wait for our house to be complete. (When will that be, Megan? Don’t ask—makes me tetchy.) That gifted me two hours less of drive time every day. It’s fewer audiobooks—which: bummer—but it’s more time for doing and thinking things. That’s nice, but it’s nicest being with Jason more. The more of him I get, the more I want.

But this here’s huntin’ season, Dead Reader. That means something to me now. For obvious reasons I eschew the term “hunting widow,” but dude, fauna starts rutting or whatever the hell it’s called, and these animal murderers are straight gonzo. I was never going to end up with some casual, shoot-from-the-truck rifle hunter. No, no—evidently lazy doesn’t turn me on. Instead the man I love disappears into the Canadian bush for two weeks to emerge with nearly-gone toenails, distended ankles, alarmingly bruised thighs, and a massive dead mountain goat. Mercifully, my pride on his behalf serves to significantly offset the nuisance of missing his handsome face and pleasing bod.

For his next feat Jason heads to some Inuit territory with his trusty bow and broadheads to end the life of an unsuspecting musk ox. This go ‘round however, I’ll be gone too. While he carves up a prehistoric cow, I’m going to go carve up human beings in effort to get a better handle on what’s inside my students. That’s not a cryptic figure of speech. I’m making for Yoga Medicine’s cadaver dissection lab. It’s the latest step in my efforts to get the best grip on human anatomy so I can be better at teaching yoga. It sounds extreme, right? It feels extreme. Somehow though, that exactly fits.

GOOD GRIEF

If it’s true that you can judge someone by the people that populate their life, I’m the most terrific person in human history. I told Jason that before I took him to meet my family he needed to be certain that he was in love with me because once he met them he’d never want to let me go. My friends and family are the good thing about me.

Today, I will have been a widow for two years, and while it was the worst happening of my life, that event served as kickoff for two years of overwhelming kindnesses.

I called my parents from the RV park where Jim’s plane went down, and they were in the car within minutes, driving the nine hours from Elk Ridge, Utah, to my house. Supportive is their norm, so at 3:30AM on August 31, they found me tear-drenched in a bed I no longer shared, and at 5:30AM, my dad accompanied me and Dustin to Victory Woodworks to meet with Jim’s employees. In my family, being available to each other is a top-down thing. I don’t know who all took their offspring, but my sissies dropped everything and rushed here too, even Mal from Denmark.

My mom says our family is kind of like the mob. When you’re in, you’re made, but if just one sister decides you’re out, a couple of us will watch everyone's kids so the others can team up to maim and off you. My first husband is an example. When I brought him into the family, everyone accepted and loved him. They supported our marriage right up until the second I informed them we were done with that cheating idiot stick. Immediate pariah. The virulence they felt and spewed at him was inevitable once they were given direction.

Just missing Whit. The Sixchix are incomplete without her.

The fam came to town again this last weekend. To ease the weight of anticipating today, I threw a big party Saturday to celebrate Jim, and my team came in full-force. At the end of the night, one of the catering staff told me, “Next year we need more vegetables. We’ve got some chicken left, but we ran out of veggies.” I laughed and told her that every other person at the party was either a yoga teacher or yoga student, and those people tend to do vegetables in a big way.

So many of the best things in my life have come by way of yoga. Yes, perspective, physical health, a marriage proposal, and a job I love, but it’s the yoga people that bowl me over. My bosses, my students, my fellow teachers—they’re my best friends.

I got Cameron from yoga. We started as students together. Now we teach together.

Three days after Jim died—and you guys, I still can’t consider this particular anecdote without crying—Cameron came over, and in part of some conversation, he mentioned that he hadn’t slept or eaten for three days. Stupid as shit and concerned for him, I asked why. He looked at me like, “Hey dummy, it’s all this.” He wasn’t messed up because he lost Jim. He was messed up because I did. Over these last two years, he’s listened when I need to talk, usually while at the gym lifting heavy things, and he’s lightened the mood in a way absolutely no one else can.

I got Jason from yoga. He was my student. Now he’s my boyfriend.

He might not appreciate my discussing this, but I want that man to get more credit than he does. Being with me is really damn hard. Yes, because of who I am, but also because of Jim. Jason makes it look easier than I know it is, and he makes it look easy for my sake. He has never pushed me to leave Jim behind, and it’s not because it’s painless or he doesn’t care. He cares a lot, and I suspect it hurts. Yet I believe that he cares more about my progress being genuine than he cares about his own comfort regarding my late husband. I think he believes in us enough to do hard things, and I think it means that for Jason our relationship can feel like a steep but pretty hike with a sharp rock in your boot. In his situation, I wouldn’t be selfless, patient, or resolute enough to deal like he does.

No one in my life forgets about Jim or our relationship. That’s important to me, but it’s becoming even more meaningful that my people encourage headway. It’s easy to pigeonhole a widow. You are a sad thing. I tell you that I want you to be happy, but glimpsing you doing well actually makes me uncomfortable, so stay sad, mmmkay? Fortunately, that hasn’t been my own experience. My people are the best ones, so they coddle me when I need it, they welcome not just Jason the person, but the concept of him as my someone, they listen to my same stories about a dead guy, and they hold Jim’s memory close, even when the memory isn’t their own. Hell, Hilary never met Jim, but on his birthday she made lemon cake, his favorite.

Who just does that type of thing? My people. I can take today, the two-year anniversary, as something to be sad about, or I can take this day to be more of what I already am: grateful. Grateful for the memories. Grateful for where I am now. Grateful for my people. Jim was cream of the crop, and from him on, I made that the only kind I keep.

FOR A PSYCHOPATH LIKE ME, YOU’RE PERFECT

I want to paint you a picture of a man. As I’ve written him on this space, Jason hasn’t been able to be much more than the guy that bravely dates a widow. It’s wrong. That isn’t the way we live. To him, I’m not widow first, girlfriend second, and to me, I’m not Jim’s wife first, Jason’s girlfriend second. That is the chronology but not the right way to think about a relationship. Sure, our past relationships shade the one we have now, but we are us by ourselves—Jason and Megan. We’ve been together for about a year, and it occurs to me that you haven’t really met my boyfriend.

Jason is exactly what you see. He doesn’t fake or posture and is as real as one can get. His filter is faulty but that leaves him honest and plain.

I teach some hot yoga, and my classes are hard, often harder than they need to be. (Sorry. Sort of.) I’ve had lots of students suffer through my classes with pretty specific ire pointed at right their teacher. It resolves afterward, but while they’re sweating and struggling through another Warrior 3, they hate my guts. I’ve been that student a lot; I know how it feels, and we all suffer quietly. Not Jason though. He is the first student I’ve ever had flip me off in class. He’s the only student who, after I asked how his first hot class went, replied, Screw you. (But more, say, colorfully than that.) At that point, we’d only met a couple times. Evidently something in those frank and impolite exchanges worked for me, because four months later we started dating.

While he rebelled in a way that you’d think he hated hot class, that stuff’s right up Jason’s alley. He goes looking for opportunities to push his physical limits. He doesn’t hunt from a truck or go running when the sun is low. He hunts on foot in the snow and goes for a run during the hottest part of the day. He’s rugged and wants everything tougher.

That includes our relationship. I think he likes the challenge of being with me. Not the widow stuff specifically—he really just sees that as part of the Megan package—but the challenge of dealing with my quick extremes, rash decisions, and too-impassioned approach to basically all the things. I’ve asked him, “Why me? Why are you with me?” His response with the most resonance: “For a psychopath like me, you’re perfect.” I’m not easy—ahem—but in our time together, we find ease.

I may be the yoga teacher, but he schools me in stillness and how to settle down. He moves more deliberately than I do, and he is patient. I do not enjoy watching sports. I enjoy watching sports with Jason. He lets me ask as many questions as I want, and, even better, knows the answers. I mean, all the answers. It’s caused me to inquire if his day job is not, in fact, doing lawyer things, but instead immersing in obscure sports trivia.

Jason doesn’t talk as much as I want him to. Getting to know him has been a dogged excise in crafting questions that will get me his answers. I’m getting good at knowing him better but not as good as he is at knowing me. In his talking less, he listens more, and Jason’s memory is flawless. Along with that, he consistently hears more than I’m saying, treating his relationship with me a lot like scouting for big game. When looking for deer, Jason will sit and watch for hours, patiently accumulating information that often ends with an arrow through someone’s heart. He’s like that with me, too. He listens, observes, adds up, and despite what he’s learned, lets me live and still wants to be with me.

He only hunts with a bow, and that means we can work as a couple. I don’t so much respect rifle hunting. I know hunting with any weapon is hard and takes skill, but the bearing and specific skills required to kill big things with an arrow—and the shit he’s offed is huge—compels me. It requires persistence, a special patience, creativity, humility, optimism, and physical fortitude.

The truest way to describe how I feel about Jason’s physical strength is to call it hot. It’s hot. It contributes to his indisputable masculinity that I find irresistibly attractive. I like that from the breadth of his shoulders, to his growly voice, to the gray whiskers, and the way he stands, Jason perfectly fills the physical portrait of a Man. He tempers that could-be-stereotypical masculinity with an enthusiasm for apparel, a consistent yoga practice, and a tenderness for his kids that he often tries to hide and with no success at all.

Jason is a dad of just daughters. My dad has only girls. Those men are different from the ones that also have sons. They’re a bit mushier inside. I like that Jason enjoys his daughters’ individuality, and in the way he listens to me, he listens to them. Without saying so aloud, he delights in knowing his two girls as people not just charges.

His heart is good. His skin is thick. He’s handsome. He’s sarcastic and too irreverent. He’s canny and sharp. He wants to make me happy. He ought to know he does.

There. You’ve met my Jason.

LEANING IN

Yoga Pod, one of the studios where I teach, has been using February do an 18-classes-in-28-days challenge. When I told Jason that in the 19 days it took him to take 18 classes, I took only three, he responded, “But how many did you teach?”

“Well, 30.”

Thirty. I wasn’t kidding. I even counted afterward to make sure. I’m grateful that I spent a decade taking a bunch of yoga before I decided to learn to teach, because right now I ain’t got time to take shit. I need more yoga. Teaching doesn’t count. I’m working through it.

This story serves two purposes. I’m bragging on behalf of Jason ‘cause there’s no way he’ll do it himself, and I’m explaining why I haven’t blogged in more than four months. I’ve been busy. And, well, also, I’ve been unsure of how to write about where I’m at or even figure that out for myself.

When I think of using metaphors, I think of ‘em being helpful in explaining things to someone else so that they can better understand what I’m feeling or trying to say. Lately, however, I’ve been using metaphors to try to explain my own feelings to myself.

Here’s one: After a person goes through significant weight loss, it sometimes happens that they don’t get new clothes right away. Their old clothes clearly don’t fit, but instead of getting new stuff to wear, they punch another hole in an old belt and cinch it tighter. It seems they’re accustomed to their old clothes and unaccustomed to a body that doesn’t fill those clothes. So they linger in an awkward stage of in-between, not wanting to be big enough to fill the old clothes and unsure of how to shed the extra material to embrace a different body.

Emotionally, I’ve been feeling like that. Grief was weight, as physical a weight as I’ve ever felt dropping onto my little soul, but it weighs less now; its mass is more manageable. Grief is even a companion that educates me and often morphs into gratitude. I’m trying to find the guts to let myself have a new wardrobe that fits rather than remaining in the garb of a different set of feelings.

That transition involves guilt. It involves fear. I don’t know if I’ll ever lose the guilt associated with forward movement after losing Jim. I do know that getting mired in guilt is counterproductive. Immobility doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t serve me or anyone I love. And I think my fear in embracing a life less grief-laden has to do with the unknown. I know what sad feels like, and while it may not be pleasant, I still know it, and that’s not scary.

Here’s the thing though: sad doesn’t fit anymore. Perhaps by way of all that yoga junk, I’m getting better at living where I’m at. Where I am right now, is—quite honestly—happy. I blame Jason.

I love having a someone to care for. I didn’t always. The evolution of my love life—cheated on in a mediocre marriage, divorced, in love, married again, happy, widowed, dating again, in love, happy—has happened so fast (all in under 5 years) that it’s easy to remember my feelings during each phase and compare them to other sections. I blew my first marriage. I wasn’t good at it because I didn’t care. That apathy contributed to a union that was weak enough to fracture. And thank heaven. It led me to Jim. Since I’d so recently reaped the fruits of dispassion in a marriage, and I hate failing, I decided that with Jim I was going to crush wifehood. I did. It made me crazy happy. Jim felt loved. I felt loved. We were in love. It was work, but it was work that we liked doing.

Then that work came to an abrupt end. I lost my one someone to serve. Well, damn. So that was just another phase?

But then . . . But then . . . Jason. Handsome, intelligent, observant, understanding, coarse Jason. Falling in love with him was unavoidable. We match. Thank heaven again. I get to have a someone to love and do for and care for, which, as I’ve already discovered, can’t help but bring me joy.

Each taste of joy is unique. The happiness I experience now does have a bit of a frantic undercurrent. There are moments where I feel like Jason and I have to do all the things and have all the experiences right now because he might die. It’s morbid, but it’s the baggage I bring. When I don’t hear from him for a while I start fretting. I know statistics say that my boyfriend isn’t going to die so soon after I’ve lost my husband, but statistics were supposedly on my side when Jim’s best friend died four months before him; that should have ensured that Jim was around for a long time. Best friends don’t die from such different causes so close together. Oh, but yes they do. Thus my unreasonable freak outs when Jason doesn’t text me back immediately because I assume he’s dead actually verge on reasonable. So that part sucks.

I’ve been concerned that I’m wrapping myself up in another person and so the happiness I feel can’t be authentic. I’ve worried about that a lot. Could it be that my infatuation with Jim left me sadder at his death than I’d have been if I’d loved him less? Maybe. But I’ll take the weight of the pain I’ve experienced for what I enjoyed with Jim. Is it bad though? Is finding so much contentment and happiness in a relationship with another human dangerous or wrong? Again, maybe. But unfortunately, that’s living.

Living well can be messy and doesn’t come without risk. I’m knee-deep in risk here and wading in deeper, because I love being in love with Jason, and he is worth every bit of care and attention I can give him. So much more, even.

Okay, but am I making myself into someone whose only satisfaction derives from obsession with someone else? Those people are irritating. No, I’m not that. I know that I can experience joy in giving my all to love and intimacy, so I am, and I’m still me. I like me. I irritate me. I get disappointed with me. I also know me. I’m tough, multifaceted, oriented toward improvement, and bright. My efforts to craft a killer relationship with Jason amplify those traits I’m proud of, making me a better me and giving Jason the best Megan I can muster. So I chuck myself headlong into the experience, knowing as well as anyone that there is risk for pain and the size of the pain could be amplified by the size of the love. Oh well. Worth it.