Inhale, Exhale...

Ping! Ping! Ping! I break things.

from 'Loose Woman' by Sandra Cisneros

I've been reading Sandra Cisneros again. Loose Woman resides in my desk at work and I pull it out when I'm having a particularly bad day. Her words make me feel strong and her honesty always shocks me. Sharp words...I don't remember the last time my words cut like a knife. I was reminiscing about the old LiveJournal days, re-reading words from my past. I'm not sure if I could ever write so openly again, be brazen and throw all my details out for everyone to see. I look at the tattoo on my wrist: Why She Wrote. It has faded, and the irony doesn't fail me. My words have faded too. I'm open like a wound when I write. That's where the fear stems from, fear of opening up and unleashing Pandora's Box again. When I write, I think too much. Over-analyze. About the past. About the future. So rarely am I able to capture the essence and beauty of NOW. Yoga is changing me. It forces one to BE in the present. Focus on breath leaving out of and returning back to my body. I'm almost painfully aware of everything, the tightness in my back, the burning aches of my muscles and joints, and then there they are, the words creep back in. Andres says they always return in the Spring. But I wasn't quite ready for them this time.

It's still hard for me to believe my diagnosis of Fibromyalgia, even though in the back of my mind, I always knew something wasn't quite right. Truth is that I must have had it for a while but nothing had fully triggered it until recently. But still, I don't believe it at times, even when laying in bed, the pain in my shoulders and neck dragging me down, the burning joints and fatigue. I have missed out on outings with the kids, time spent with them and Andres. But nearly a year has passed since being diagnosed, and I've been pushing myself to get better. I do have to come to terms and accept that I now have this chronic PAIN condition that no one really knows much about. My family still doesn't understand. I gave my parents some pamphlets that a woman at work gave me. My dad has his own theory that the ink from my tattoos has somehow seeped into my system and is the cause of all my problems! Dr. Sosa usually knows it all. I don't know how to explain to them or to anyone else what it feels like. How do I explain that I don't want to be touched at times because my skin burns? Or that I'll get a shooting pain in my LEG when you grab my ELBOW? Or the mind-numbing fatigue that makes me want to curl up anywhere and just sleep for 12 hours? Or the stubborn muscles that make it hard for me to get out of bed in the morning? But hot showers don't help. Heating pads don't help. Advil doesn't help. The million medicines that the doctors gave me only work half the time and then I have the wonderful side effects that are worse than my actual condition! I'm so tired of explaining. Can I just accept it and move on?

The yoga instructor has us lay on our backs, palms up, corpse pose. All tension exhaled out of the body. On Sunday, I was finally able to do this. I've been so tense and didn't even realize I was holding it all in. Sunday, he must have seen the tension in my body. He came over and softly pushed me down. "Letting go," he says. "This is a pose too. You have to learn to let it go." I felt tears in the corner of my eyes. My stubborn body trying to hold it all in until all at once, everything, all of me, collapsed onto the floor. Oh yoga, where have you been? I now picture this in my mind: acceptance as an intake of breath. Exhaling past the pain. I have to accept this new part of me now and learn to let go of the fear and pain.