only I can do my own backbends

I could have written the first two and a half paragraphs of this article. It’s a notion about sex that’s very near and dear to me – the hilarious, messy reality of actual sex that is extremely difficult to accept if you’ve been raised on a lifetime of Hollywood sex.

The rest of the (somewhat long) article is good too, funny and sweet, but the first page was what really got me.

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Yesterday I went to a fairly meh yoga class. There wasn’t much in it that I felt was remarkable. I was also disappointed by my inability to lift up into a headstand on abdominal power (attention was drawn to me in front of the rest of the class while I was struggling), and I think I need to work on that at home. There was a woman two mats down from me who is a new teacher at the studio, and she’s the kind of woman who makes my self-esteem plunge. She makes easy all the stuff about appearance that I find difficult – she’s slim, with unblemished legs, and she wears dangly earrings even when she’s doing yoga, and her hair is never in her face or lank with sweat, and her face doesn’t get flushed when she’s working. I also saw in glimpses yesterday that her yoga is extremely lovely, and she has long hamstrings that allow for perfect forward bends. She is also the woman who snubbed me out of a conversation I tried to join several weeks ago after class.

I was not feeling very charitable towards this woman by the time we got into savasana. (Very, very, very long savasana yesterday, too. Like ten minutes. After several minutes of a restorative I disliked. Boo.) I was jealous of the stuff she could do that I couldn’t, and I tried reminding myself that in a few years my hamstrings would loosen up all the way, and I’d be able to hold crow as steadily as she did with enough practice, and so on. I was feeling peaceful again, and one final sniping thought crept in: “Well, I’ll bet her backbends don’t look like mine.”

It occurred to me suddenly that of course her backbends don’t look like mine. The thought was meant competitively, but I realized that even if her backbends are deeper and better-looking than mine, they are executed with her body, not with mine. And no one else’s body looks like mine when I’m doing yoga; what I do is completely unique to me and the flesh that I inhabit. In this light, competitiveness (and imitation) is mu, and the point is to make one’s own poses as refined as possible. I find this freeing, and I only hope I can hang on to it in the face of all those enviously flexible hamstrings out there.

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My letter to Dear Margo was published today. I am not remotely surprised to hear that everyone on the planet, including Margo herself and all the Wowowow commenters, believes that I am wrong about this situation. Rather than making me angry that it doesn’t matter when my wishes are trampled on, at this point it just makes me sad that social anxiety is so poorly understood. I’ve tried to write a post about what social anxiety feels like when you’re inside it, and I think I’ll publish it this weekend.