What there is now

9:29

Contentment.  An old CD (redundant by now) is playing in the background, part of the soundtrack of my college days, reminding me of great music.  The memories of the bad boyfriend who took me see all the great music have both softened and sharpened over time. I realize how bad it was, but it matters less.

I made cookies tonight — short pause to take them out of the oven and put on another CD, this one part of the soundtrack of college and high school, Dire Straits. I started with Money for Nothing in high school, worked my way backwards courtesy of the album-oriented rock station I listened to, much to the surprise of some of my classmates.  I looked like a Top 40 girl.  I knew that.  I knew how I looked, and I kept trying to twist away from that, a little bit (classic with a twist!).  So album-oriented rock, and cheerleading, and advanced chemistry and a bunch of other things that weren’t supposed to go together.    And Espresso Love and Tunnel of Love and Roller Girl in the background.

The college bad boyfriend used to request Portobello Belle on the jukebox at the pub where we’d drink pints (Harp for me, Guinness for him), and throw darts.  As if we were somewhere in the UK, rather than the middle of the US.  He’d play Telegraph Road while he was falling asleep.

My memory sifts and sorts unreliably.  Often generously.  We took a vacation to Spain about a month after giving up on fertility treatments.  We’d planned it well in advance, but it came to be something of a consolation tour.  Not that Daniel would ever ever ever have conceded that there was anything (ANYTHING) to be consoled about.  At the time, when we posed for smiling pictures in Barcelona, a city I love, I thought, this will always remind me of the crushing sadness I feel right now.  This vacation will always be tainted by the pain of the end of this dream, the irrevocable end.  But a few years later I was surprised.  What I remembered mostly was the nice family vacation, and swimming in the Mediterranean with Milo, and driving to Girona.

But sometimes it’s not generous at all.  I remember college as mostly a disaster.  Well, not a disaster, but as not particularly fun or fulfilling, although I had some exquisite moments with the commenter-known-here-as-Sister, including trying to distract her parents from her painful and obvious hangover at brunch the morning after her 21st birthday.  Her mother was and is a gem, and played along so beautifully.  But college overall looks like a lack.  I describe it as “not the right place for me… a bad fit,” and then I concede that my education in English/American lit was quite solid… but I choose to portray the whole experience as sub-standard. Yet when I last visited the campus, I felt uplifted.  And at an alumni event years ago, I said, “Wow, my college experience was pretty good.”  A friend added, “Yeah, it was. I was there.”

I’m reaching for some conclusion about regret, and self-blame, and how that shapes memory, but it’s elusive.  Something towards shaping my memories of college based on what I think I should feel about the school I went to, given where I live now and who I spend my time with (not Daniel).  No one where I live now aspires to send their kids to the school I went to, which was the flagship institution of the state I’d grown up in.  But if I’d stayed there, I might have an entirely different cast to my memories.  I might remember the intellectual experience, rather than the gaps.   As for the rebalancing of the vacation memories in the summer of 2010, for that I am just grateful.  There was enough suffering.

And I lingered long enough reading old posts to hear Romeo & Juliet play on the CD, and it’s one of my favorite songs ever.

10:04 (but with lots of breaks for the cookies & re-reading)

 

 

Now is the time (again)

I’ve felt the need, or the urge, or the itch to write for a few weeks now, but have pushed it aside.  It’s easy to do that during the run-up to the Jewish holidays, or the four week endurance test of the Jewish holidays (maximum observance version).  But three weeks in, I’m going to write now.  Writing here is associated with so many things: comfort, discomfort, risk, clarity, observation.  And I’m in the middle of all of those states.

What first made me feel like writing was the dawning understanding that intentions can take a very long time — years and years — to manifest themselves, but eventually many of them do.  How many years did I say I intended to meditate in the coming year?  And after not doing it, and not doing it, and not doing it, I started last year, and now I sit and meditate (poorly) for 30 minutes each morning and arrange my schedule around it.  Similarly, for months if not years, I’ve intended to get control over my spending, and after a particularly binge-y summer, this month I’ve managed to observe the impulses that drive my spending and think harder about what I’m trying to buy (efficacy, ease, confidence, pleasure, excitement, comfort) rather than actually buying things that are just things rather than achievements or states of being.  I find this time lag so comforting.  We’ll get where we need to go, where we intend to go, but in a wending, winding, sort of way, when the world inside and the world outside are congenial and supportive.  We are not failures, we are just not successes yet.  I never before appreciated how things can unfold in time.  I thought I had to bring about changes or states of being instantly (which is why shopping was so seductive, especially online; I wasn’t seeking instant gratification, but rather instant efficacy.  I wanted to make something happen, and I did — I clicked and a whole machinery came to life just to satisfy me).  But many things happen when we aren’t trying, when we aren’t looking.  I used to find this invisibility, this occurrence without extraordinary effort discomforting because I believed I could control what happened to me, that I was able to control things through extraordinary effort, and that I could control all the people who were part of the happening.  Well, no.  I held on to that illusion with all my might (a lot!) for a very, very long time, and this blog is, among other things, a record of why and how I began to let go.  I expect there is much more letting go that will happen in the future.

Yes, time.  Before Rosh Hashanah this year, I was thinking about self forgiveness. I was thinking that I was probably ready to forgive myself for never having had that second child.  It felt like time.  Among the other things this blog is, it’s a record of a giant tangle of sadness and blame — and the connection between thinking I could control everything that happened, and should control everything that happened, and the subsequent step into blame, first of Daniel but more fundamentally and durably of myself, for what didn’t happen.  So this year, I went back and read what happened on Rosh Hashanah four years ago.  I felt drawn to that accounting because, I guess, I needed to measure the distance between now and then.  Four years is a long time, but not really so long.  It’s how long it’s taken.  And I was so grateful to have the record of the starting point, even though it’s very painful to read even now.  And so grateful to have people like Nicole, Tracey, Sister, Mali, and everyone else who were there for me in a way that no one who was physically near me was or ever could have been.  How ever many words I ever write in my life, here or elsewhere, I’ll never be able to capture what that meant in that time, and how precious and necessary it was.

And, still, time.  I’m about to accept a new job.  An imperfect job, but the perfect job for me at this time.  I think being on the verge of this new job, a job in which I will really create something, called me back to the blog because it, even more than my book, was a powerful, sustained, creative effort.  I was creating… words are failing me here… I was creating a self that could withstand being disappointed by God, myself, my husband, medicine, the universe.  I was creating a story that enabled me to make sense of the place I was in.  I was creating a loving and supportive community.  I was creating myself as a particular kind of writer.  I did that, with help, word after word, one post at a time.  So now I can do this new thing, and then the thing after that, and then the thing after that.  It is time, again, to create.  This time publicly, with my own livelihood at stake.  I think it will work out.

Daniel is a brilliant writer, but he hates to write.  He makes himself miserable over most of his speeches and his larger articles.  I think it’s because he worries they will never be good enough.  They will never accomplish his true aims.  This morning I told him, “You don’t have to try to be Daniel D_____.  You already are.  You woke up that way.”  And a few hours later, during a deep twist in a yoga class, I realized, me, too. I don’t have to be anybody more spectacular than I am to do this next thing.  I woke up with enough, at least with enough to get started.

At every holiday, we say a prayer called the Shehecheyanu, in which we thank God for having enabled us to reach this occasion, with the sense that we are grateful to be back at this occasion, this place in time, once again.  I am feeling that intensely now.  I am back at this occasion, the occasion of building a path forward for myself.  It has taken a long time and a lot of intending, a lot of trying and lot of wandering and not trying, to get back here, which is also somewhere very far forward from where I started.

Hello again

So.  Hello again.  I’ve been thinking about blogging.  I didn’t intend for that last post to be the end, but it did have a nice, round finality to it.  But now, sitting here after some three and a half months away, I realize that the point of the blog was that infertility and that particular loss would not have final word.

And I’ve been reading this book (the link is actually to the author’s TED talk — the book is a mighty hill to climb.  As my beloved Sister would say, you’ve got to really hate the Romans…) as research for the book I’m writing.  The book talks about all of the stuff that people are creating online for free and lifts up all this free creation as having moral and philosophical importance.  We are impelled by a need to create and share, whether for grand motives or base ones.  So, here I am again.

And what do I have to say after all these weeks?  Oh, not so much.  Only that, I do not look like this:

(Photo: New York Times)

But that is, I think, the direction in which I would like my look to go.  These shoes notwithstanding.

More and less

Today I am thankful for returning to this blog, however sporadically.  There is so much I could write about.  We have just returned from an amazing, amazing vacation, and vacations are always very refreshing for my relationship with Daniel.  For the first time in a long time, I didn’t perceive a chasm between the person I am on vacation and the person I am at home.  It was lovely not to feel the anxiety of wondering how I would incorporate the vacation me into the daily life me once I got back.  Of course there are small behaviors from vacation that I would like to carry over, but I didn’t feel as divided as I usually do.  I am very, very pleased about that.  I am deeply grateful that I am in a position to feel more myself to myself more of the time.  I feel generally like I am growing back into my capacities and optimism.  I’ve signed up for a language class — the kind of thing I never would have done a few months ago.  I would have deemed it impossible.  Now it seems not only possible but logical.

I’ve also started a new meditation practice in the morning, per the recommendations in June’s Yoga Journal magazine (no link, sadly. YJ is pretty protective of its content).  As always when I start some new form of meditation, a lot of anxiety comes up, but I’d rather know about it and face it than not (most of the time).

What brought me back to the blog was the itch of awareness that the anniversary week is coming up.  And the follow-on awareness that some of my anxiety is tied to that — this memory that comes to my body and psyche before it comes to my consciousness.  Yesterday, Daniel and I were talking and he was reflecting on some excellent and much longed-for developments that have happened in his professional life — a very big improvement that he’s been waiting for and fighting for for a decade.  And as he was sharing his happiness with me, I found myself feeling resentful and withdrawing.  I was upset that he’s getting what he has so longed for, that his life is approaching the possible perfection (that is the perfection that is possible in a life — the closest realization of the ideal that an imperfect world permits) while I feel mine never will.  There will always be this absence, this hole.

Later, during yoga class (restoratives — always a place where stuff will come up), I felt the purest and most intense sadness I’ve felt yet. Thankfully, it was very short, but it was unadulterated.  It wasn’t mixed with envy at what other women have, or resentment at Daniel, or unforgiveness, or comparisons.  It was just a deep sadness, and deep longing.  I was so sad that my second baby wasn’t here for all this good stuff.  I had wanted her to be born because I knew we would get to this good stuff — Daniel never had that faith.  Of course, one could argue, with the wisdom gained from several Star Trek episodes, that there’s no universe in which both this good stuff and that second baby exist simultaneously.  Changing one thing changes everything else.  But at that moment, I just missed that baby so damn much.  I just missed her.

So, in most ways, almost two years out, the pain of what didn’t happen, the pain of non-gain-that-feels-like-loss is much less, and the joy and fullness and depth of appreciation and human experience from what I have learned from this experience is huge.  But in other blessedly infrequent ways, it hurts even more. I am sad not only for what I am missing (and Daniel and Milo, too).  I am so very sad for what that baby who never was is missing.

Reply to all

Dear, dear wonderful commenters,

Thank you for your kind and reassuring words, your torrential rain of kindness when I was in a desert of my own making.  You don’t know how important it is to me to know you are there, and that you understand what I’m trying to do and that you support me all the way through it.  Even though I post very infrequently now, this blog means a lot to me because of all of you.

It’s now only 10 days since my spasm of shame and sadness, and things are much much better.  The things that I was extremely anxious about and busy with in my domestic life, which were sapping my reserves of resilience, were completed wonderfully and with much joy for all concerned.  I got through a business trip and some ridiculous work drama (ongoing, but I’m about to leave the country for 10 days, so I’m literally getting a lot of distance on it).

And most importantly, I’m working on forgiveness.  The events that upended me sparked a tremendous fight (row — that’s for you, Sister) with Daniel, in which he said, “You blame me.  You blame me because we didn’t have a second child.  You’ll never forgive me.”  At the time, mid-fight, I thought, “Of course I do, and of course I won’t because that’s what happened and I am correct.”  And then I realized that I needed to be able to forgive, even though I didn’t want to.  I didn’t think he deserved it, or had earned it (!) or that I could do it.  So I prayed about it.  Some people pray for forgiveness.  I prayed for the ability to forgive.

And I bought some books to support my intention.  I’m about a third of the way through this one, and have turned down dozens of pages because I found them important or moving.  I was so nervous about ordering books without seeing them first, because I was feeling vulnerable (I still am, or will, once I turn back to the subject).  But this book is very gentle.  I particularly like how it reassures the reader that whatever is hurting her really hurts.  It’s valid, even if it’s not as traumatic as what happened to some of the people whose stories are in the book. At one point, the authors write something like, “You were there, you know what you felt, and you know you were hurt.”  For someone like me, who suffers grievously from comparison poisoning, reading this was a balm.  The authors say what I knew intellectually but could never act on, which is that one forgives for one’s own benefit.  It’s a gift to oneself, not to the unforgiven person.  (It’s also that, but unforgiven people have a way of going about their merry, unforgiven way while the hurt people fume and stew.)

So things are better.  I’m tired and wrapped up in getting everything together before our trip abroad, during which I won’t be blogging.  But I wanted my dear, dear commenters to know how much you helped and how grateful I am.  You gave me steadiness when I couldn’t provide my own.

When the universe is in on the joke

(Only frenzied people do three posts in 7 hours.  I get that.)

Daniel and I went to a big lively cocktail party this evening.  The first person we said hello to was a friend we haven’t seen in years.  The first words out of his mouth: “Hey, how many kids do y’all have now?”

Even I, in my utterly crazed state, realize that this is funny.

I drank rather more than was wise at this cocktail party.

Un-everything

I want to un-publish, un-send, un-write, and un-feel all of that last post.  Other people’s happiness makes me sad?  I am ashamed.  I am also ashamed of where I am in my career, and ashamed that I am ashamed.  I want to write my way into a place where I can be sure you think well of me, and not poorly because of what I just wrote.

In short, I am in a giant spiral of freak-out.  Can you imagine what I’d be like if I hadn’t been doing yoga 3 days a week for the last month?  Daniel says he can tell I am in frenzy because of the way I walk from room to room (which makes it very hard to walk normally in his presence.  Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks comes to mind, but I’m too frenzied to pause to find the link.)

I will get through this.  The things that are really stressing me out are good things.  Nothing bad is happening to me or to anyone I love — in fact, there’s a surfeit of good things.  I’m just finding it challenging to manage the details of those good things.  I am starting to feel tugs of shame for not being able to manage the details of the good things, but that’s just gratuitous spinning into the freak-out, and I will resist.  I will find my center again.  I am grateful for this space and for your patience while I do that.

Trying to stand tall in a stiff wind

Warning: This is one of those yucky inside-my-mind posts in which I reveal my worst and smallest self.  I’m not erasing it because of my feelings about blogging honestly, but I’m not feeling good about it.  I ought not be blogging at work, but I can either think about this blog post and not work, or write this blog post and not work, and maybe if I do the latter, I can salvage more of the afternoon.

So… on Friday P, the woman I wrote about in this post,  delivered a lovely, perfect baby.  I started my career as a writer, wish I wrote more, and am struggling terribly to write a book that I believe will be widely ignored.  P’s first book won a major award.  I work on policy issues that I hope may make a difference.  She works on policy issues and her work has quite demonstrably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives.  When Daniel and I struggled to become pregnant, he resisted strongly because of his age — “I don’t want to be driving carpool when I’m 70!” he would say.  Her husband is roughly Daniel’s age, and although he’s not the sort to drive carpool, could be doing so at age 70 because he just couldn’t tell his wife no when she wanted a second child. 

I know that comparisons are rotten, but boy oh boy, the divergence here is challenging, very challenging indeed.  Every point at which I feel vulnerable, she looks very very strong — every single one.  I’m struggling.  I wish I weren’t, but I am.  I thought I was doing okay.  I had a good reckoning with myself this afternoon on the way to one of my sanity-saving lunchtime yoga classes.  I said to myself, “Okay, P’s life is not going to change to suit your emotional needs.  The only thing you can do is make your own life better.  You are in charge of that.  If you are bummed about writing, well, act.  If you want to write a great book, then make that happen.  That’s your field of action, so act.”

That’s great advice, right? And I gave myself other great advice too, this weekend and today, when I was sliding toward despair.  I thought, pitifully, “I don’t know where to start.”  And I answered myself: “Start from where you are.”  So Zen!  So meditative! So correct!

Then, just a few minutes ago, one of my closest friends just told me via email that his wife will have their 3rd child late this year.  (One of my other closest friends will have her second in the fall.  Thus, of the four friends I hold dearest in the universe, half are expecting.  All have or will have more than one child.) I expected this news, because I’d seen my friend and his wife a few months ago and thought something was up.  But my friend was lamenting how hard it is to get any work done, and how he’s trying to get a burst of writing completed before the new baby comes. 

And that is a hell of a stiff wind in which to keep my steady footing, dear readers.  Why?  Because I have neither the family I had dreamed of (although my family is a dream… Milo especially lately, and Daniel and I are getting there — terrible quarrels but some valuable reconciliations) nor the career I had hoped.  P looks to me to have both, which is to say, to have everything.  My dear friend has very clearly made a tradeoff, choking off some professional ambitions in order to have a robust family life in which he is very, very engaged, so he has one but not the other.  I feel like I’ve lost on both counts.  I can’t look at my career and say, “I’m am doing so well here, and it takes so much energy.  I couldn’t be such an ass-kicker, I couldn’t be flourishing so much here if I had the family I thought I would have, so it’s balanced out.”

That’s what’s got me wrapped around the axle here — the feeling that I’ve fallen short on both home and work fronts.  One I can’t do anything about at all.  The other I ostensibly should be able to correct, but just at the moment I’m feeling powerless to do so.  Work feels like a dead-end, a bog, a hole I can’t lift myself out of. 

It seemed better, when I started this post, to let the feelings of sadness and inadequacy out, to give them this semi-public airing.  I am ashamed to feel this way.  I have so much to be grateful for.  I had promised God I wouldn’t do this anymore.  (Long story — last week Milo was playing in such a way that he could easily, easily have been hit and killed by a car.  I wasn’t paying close enough attention.  I could have lost Milo, and it would have been my fault.  I thanked God vigorously that this didn’t happen, and told God that it was very clear to me that He had not forgotten or abandoned me, but was in fact taking excellent care of me.)

So this is just me being sad and small and ashamed, and wishing I could be big and generous — not just to others but even to my sad and small self.   My astrological sign (which I’m not supposed to care about) is Libra, and I am forever trying to balance the scales in situations in which it’s not at all appropriate or kind to myself or others.  Daniel is ferocious in trying to extirpate this bad habit of mine, which makes me even more ashamed and which makes it harder to work it out and eventually let go of it.  So I turn to my patient and trusted readers.  I am sorry, I am sad, I am ashamed.

A nice quartet

I’m inexplicably blue this evening.  Could be a lack of sleep, could be that point in my cycle (although I’m usually prone to rage, not sadness.  I prefer rage), could be any old thing.  But these snippets make me happy.

From the New York Times science section on female friendships:

“You have to have somebody to hang onto,” Dr. Seyfarth said. “A friend gives you an element of predictability and certainty, and you can use that to buffer you against all the things you don’t have control over. There’s a biochemical component to this.”

A familiar friend calms and equilibrates, mops up the cortisol spills that can weaken the immune system, and in so doing may help lengthen life — in baboons, humans and other group-minded kinds. “Yes, having coffee with friends is good for you,” Dr. Silk said, “and we should all do it often.”

This blog is my coffee with friends — and particularly fun since I get to do all the talking!

From Robin Givhan, fashion critic extraordinaire, a piece about why she finds the focus on Beyonce’s motherhood dispiriting:

I know I’m taking this way beyond anything that Beyonce said. But her comment triggered a more general thought: Having a baby is a wondrous thing. And being a parent is a terribly difficult and important job. But it always makes me squeamish when people trot out the suggestion that a truly meaningful life is defined by motherhood/fatherhood. It’s simply a different kind of life than one without children.

(In the late 1990s Robin Givhan wrote a screed about white hose on adult women that remains one of my favorite fashion columns ever.  I can’t find it online, sadly.)

From Allie at Wardrobe Oxygen, a great post about why sometimes, making a garment work just isn’t worth the effort:

The thing is… I don’t want to make it work. Making it work makes sense when you’re in the 11th hour of a Project Runway challenge. It makes sense if the only skirt in my closet is this one and I have an event to go to in an hour where the dress code is Skirts Only. It makes sense if it was a gift from my husband’s grandmother and she asked to see me in it for her 90th birthday party. There’s no other reason why I should try to make a garment work.

If a garment doesn’t work, it doesn’t deserve real estate in your closet. 

Stop trying to make it work with belts and tights and control garments and half-baked DIY projects. All that effort does is make the same not-quite-right garment not-quite-right, but now decked out with opaque tights, a skinny belt, and a weird band of fabric that sort of ruins the flow of the piece. This isn’t to say that with a bit of sewing skill one could turn trash into treasure. What I’m saying is if a piece isn’t right and you don’t have the creativity, skill, and desire to make it right… get rid of it.

I love her blog.  She’s very sane and funny.  Regular readers have noticed that I’m not writing Closet Archive posts anymore.  I think this is why — even though I can make an effort to make something work, I usually don’t want to.  I haven’t gotten rid of the closet archive items I’ve featured (except the one I dubbed “first clear failure”) — I’ll probably keep most of them for sentimental reasons.  But after reading this post, I spent 30 minutes filling five giant shopping bags of stuff for Goodwill, and another bag for the consignment store.

I was going to stop at three, but then Allie posted this on Wardrobe Oxygen, and I found it so charming I almost forgot I was feeling droopy.  It’s annotated pictures of a 1998 copy of Allure magazine.  In 1998 I was dating Daniel, effectively living with him, working at the same place I work now (I quit in 2001 and came back in 2008), and wearing a lot of brown lipstick.  It seems quite recent, in that I was all grown up then, or so I thought, with mutual funds and retirement savings and a real job.  But oh so very long ago…

Best of times, worst of times

Today I am thankful that I’m back to writing.  I’ve been hesitant about it, and it’s time to dive back in.

I could take the last ten days and write a cluster of posts about a lot of dark, sad, and painful stuff in my life and my marriage.  Last week, in 48 hours Daniel and I had two of the worst fights we’ve ever had.  And I thought I couldn’t blog for a while, because I couldn’t write about it (still can’t, other than that) or that if I did blog I would have to say, “There’s a lot of badness in the background here, but I can’t write about it, so I’m going to write a lot about clothes and work.”

But I could also take the last ten days (well, more like six), and write a cluster of posts about how brilliantly things are going at work, how I’m making great-feeling decisions about time and money, how I took an online course on time management that might be changing my life and strengthening my marriage,  and how a $30 bracelet I bought on a whim may be the best accessory ever.  And all that would be true, too.

For now, I’m going to chose the latter path, and write about some lovely and gratifying discoveries and fruitions.

Meditation seems to be working.  I am noticing more beauty — admittedly, not hard, because my city is brilliant in spring, and this spring is the most brilliant in a long time.  I am finding happinesses.  Yesterday I thought, “This is the gift my daughter gave me” (the daughter I didn’t have) — this gift of seeing and appreciating and having more channels for happiness.  I don’t think I would have been able to get here without all I’ve been through, without the loss that made me  search so aggressively for compensations, even though they aren’t really compensations or comparable.   I like meditating — it feels good when I do it.  It gives things back to me.

Meditation is wonderfully supported by my new time management systems (ach– what a terrible and infelicitous sentence!  From poetry to base prose in 10 words. But  there’s no good or elegant way to describe this).  I took a course from my work/money guru Ramit Sethi on time management.  In five podcasts and worksheets, he recommends some very basic stuff, like blocking off time, taking intensive screenless breaks, taking note of how you feel at particular times of the day to match energy and will to tasks.  It sounds so basic, but it’s been transformative.  I have a lot of systems and schedules at home, little things like choosing my outfit the night before, or when to do laundry, and they help.  I had systems for school, and they helped.  I’ve never had systems in my work life.  It’s not coincidental that I feel much more successful at home (in terms of day to day managing the house; we’ll hold the marital aspect of home off to the side for a bit) and felt much more successful at school than I ever have at work.

I have never been truly self-directed at work.  This is making me self-directed.  I have always felt that there were basic ways of working that I never learned.  I feel that less now.  I am much less anxious.  I have more energy and better energy.  I am more creative (a direct result of less anxiety and more energy).

Because I’m feeling better about what I do at work and how much I’m getting done, I have done another good thing, which is sign up for an unlimited monthly pass at a new yoga studio 3 minutes from my office.  (One intention fulfilled!  Or, two — meditation was also on that list.)  There were so many reasons not to make this commitment.  It would have been so easy to say I couldn’t afford it, or I didn’t really have time.  But I can afford it.  Committing to yoga once or twice a week is one of the best uses of my money.  And I do have time, because if I write (or research) intensely in the morning, I need a good break at midday, and yoga provides that.  And now, yoga twice a week at midday seems like the most obvious and necessary thing in the world.  It’s not what I fit in around everything else; it’s what I do.

And when I come home in the evening, having meditated or done yoga and having had a good day at work, I am nicer, lighter, less anxious.  I don’t need to control my home life so much to make up for the feeling of lost-ness or ineffectiveness or anxiety at work.  It’s all working beautifully together and I am deeply grateful for that.

And somehow this is usefully spilling over into money and my budget.  First of all, when I’m less anxious and more energetic, I’m less likely to spend as much money for self-soothing (buying something feels like doing something I have control over).  And having less money to spend helps me focus on what’s most important.  I’m setting priorities and “affording” things I never would have thought of before.  It’s like not eating junk food — I’m doing less junk spending.  It’s still a work in progress, but things are moving in a very good direction and it all feels of a piece.

Meditating and getting my time in order makes it easier for me to be my best self to myself.  And eventually I will be my best self to my beloved.