I am not ok.

Consider this my answer to the call from a recent explosive Ashtanga blog asking “where is the darkness?” First, it’s nice to know I’m not alone in feeling like I’m drowning in a cult of online okayness (if not insta-fantastic-Induce-FOMO-’cause-My-Life-Is-So-Awesome-Ness). Or as I call it in my own instalife:

Artifice so well practiced it feels true.

Because we are ok; indeed I am ok, sometimes– but there is so much not-okayness corked up in this human skin barrel I inhabit. So, for the record:

I am not ok.

I suffered a trauma this fall, and I am so not ok:

A rare ectopic c-section scar pregnancy (my sixth!), requiring (once bleeding to death and losing my sexual organs failed to surface— a scalpel cutting my belly button to stuff a camera inside, the inflating of my torso with gas, my veins with anesthesia). I did IVF to avoid a D&C (I have been pregnant six times, five times naturally and I have one child.). This last one, it was supposed to be different, it was created unnaturally via runaway successful IVF, embryo picked because genetically sound and ensconced into me (where i’d always held onto things so well)– so what could go wrong, when I did everything right? (links herein show my story on insta and on my IVf blog).

A heartbeat flickering onscreen, doomed.

Aren’t we all.

Everything reminds me of everything: March, a year ago I made the first appointment. April, the many calls to nurses, prescription orders, insurance, the peeing on sticks; May, ultrasounds, blood draws and the IVF stimulation shots; June, the good news of multiple incredible normal copacetic embryos. I suffer today from June’s good news.

Today, medication vials live in my fridge, syringes stuffed in a closet, biohazard containers in a high cabinet, embryos in a freezer, bills for the surgery that ended my dream– here comes one for 11K! Here comes an EOB from the insurance company— because hey! Congratulations on that baby you never had, that suffering! It ain’t fucking free.

I learned the the worst thing about success:  It can hurt more than failure.

Oh and that belly? It’s disfigured now! Yes, you didn’t even get a baby out of it, but that’s what happens when they cut a hole into your belly and stretch your skin out! Count your lucky stars you still have your sexual self (I do):

I still feel violated and robbed.

May: the anniversary of my IVF shots. It’s the final stretch of March and May is already killing me. I don’t know how I’m going to get through it. I dig my heels against the inevitable riptide of time.

I am not ok.

I have days where I feel hungover– life feels so much more than I can bear. Normality bangs on my senses; I had to come back into my body and make my debut in the world in the height of the holidays, ski season, visitors, tourists, traffic. Hop to Jean! Be ok!

I am not ok. And yet, I am, kind of.

Because I feel more open to moments of beauty and joy. The aliveness of terror. The sublime heat of heartbreak. And a newfound permeability to what is good, perhaps because of the horror that cut me. The humor I post? No lie. The joy in returning to practice? It’s true–

But not all of me. Facing social media candyland, everyone is pregnant and birthing like it’s the new contagion– people I knew back when in school to now, first to third time pregnant, bumps galore. I don’t hate for what they have. But it reminds what hasn’t happened for me, of the dream I saw, my would-be instastory, a picture of my belly bump with a funny hashtag we know I’d conjure up.

I did everything right–

The universe could give a fuck.

I’m told I might have PTSD because I have an anxiety attack every time I drive to Salt Lake (for Mysore no less, the same route as the IVF clinic), or need to get gas. I have to reteach myself to do these things using, yes, my ashtanga experience with facing obstacles and my mindfulness tool belt: breath and aliveness. I dragged someone with me while I filled my car up with gas last week so I wouldn’t have to face it alone:

It’s fucking embarrassing.

But here’s the thing: not being ok is the only way I’ve felt better. To allow myself to feel shitty even though I don’t like it, to not push it away but investigate it. To look close and see the patterns: oh, it’s anxiety every time I drive to SLC. Oh, it’s panic every time I’m need a doctor’s office (I’ve canceled and rescheduled a regular check-up for three months now). Seeing the patterns in my life as I do on my mat, I’ve been able to seek the aid of acupuncturists, bodyworkers, physical therapists and now, therapists trained in EDMR.

I’m a goddamn group art project. Because I am not ok. But this is the best not-okay I’ve ever been.

Whenever I see these professionals– these rare moments someone bypasses traffic-laden small talk to acknowledge the abyss inside me, the fried nervous system, the elephant of sorrow: Grief uncorks tears.

I’m so tired of pretending. Because I am not ok.

It may be because of ashtanga that I can fall on my face and while splat on the floor say hmm, how are we going to get to the other side? Now what?

So that’s where I am:

The ante way upped. This fall into an abyss, my life. I’m not okay:

Now what?

And it’s shameful and embarrassing to cop to my lack of okayness because as a yoga teacher as an Ashtanga practitioner as an Inta-chick I’m supposed to fly the banner of love and light. I’m supposed to post “what’s not to like?” harmless, heart-able posts.

But I’ll be damned before I teach that we are supposed to be idiot “ok” all the time. One of my first Buddhist books by Sylvia Boorstein spoke to her meeting up with other Buddhist teachers– how everyone would say they were doing allright– despite dealing with loss, grief, divorce and, well, life:

She calls it “managing gracefully.”  I’m at least…managing. I imagine online okayness as akin to “idiot compassion,” the idea that sometimes compassion looks like raised voices, slammed doors and walking away, the drawing a boundary in the sand–versus giving the person what they want.

I wonder if we live in a cult of idiot okayness that refuses to acknowledge the pain.

Maybe being ok means feeling pain and grief, just as it does falling on your mat, engaging with the fear of handstand and struggling with the next pose. When I was new-ish to Ashtanga, I wrote in Elephant Journal about how this practice doesn’t let you say, “pass.”  

Life is no different.

Since my heart has been left alone to beat, I can feel the herd of sorrows in the room when I teach. My suffering is not special. There is a warehouse of hurt, heartache, still-struggling addicts in recovery. I don’t believe we get “better” or “cured” –maybe not even “enlightened.”  I wonder if it’s all just a daily dance, never an “arrived” static place. Some days are breezy and others I cry on my mat. Being “not ok” is progress for me in itself, part of finding my balance again. What rests beneath your hands in those downward dogs?

Some days the world only makes sense when I’m on my mat paying visits to myself, because there I embody my loss-disembodied, disoriented self. I feel my heart–

Something in me, is me.

The rest of me is bullshit; grief iced with fluffy pretense meringue.

What’s authentic when all day long you practice pretending?

I’m completely ok! And that’s not ok when you’ve been gutted by grief, left to untangle the inner minefield of shrapnel from your dream’s explosion.

I’d like us all to stop pretending that we’re ok.

Can we make that ok?