scratchies

i’m sitting on the floor of “my” room at my parents’ house with my computer propped up on a pillow in my lap, reflecting on how my mom said to me the other day: i miss your liminal writing.

truth is, lately, i haven’t wanted to write. not because i don’t have anything to say. i’ve been full. and tired. i’ve been deep in logistics — font choices, timelines, emails, proposals. things with edges. things that can be finished.

somewhere along the way, i traded my morning pages for another hour of sleep. it sounds small. i don’t think it is. i’ve been wondering if the places we stop returning to have something to teach us. not because we’ve abandoned them. but because something inside us is still waiting to be felt.

not just writing. yoga, too.

there are certain kinds of heartbreak we know how to recognize. the end of a romantic relationship. a death. a goodbye. we have language for those. we gather around each other and acknowledge that something meaningful has ended. but lately i’ve been feeling something bubble up around the griefs that never receive a ceremony.

for years, yoga was home. it was where i landed after leaving the corporate world. where i found community. where i taught. where i learned to hold a sacred space. where i remembered there was a self beyond the expectations, the productivity, the identities i had spent so much of my life trying to fill.

i didn’t just practice yoga. i grew up there.

then, in 2020, we were all let go from our roles due to the pandemic.

i thought i was grieving the loss of teaching.
then i thought i was grieving the studio.
then the community.

it was all of that and more.

i kept finding new names for the loss.
i don’t think i had found the right one yet.

i kept teaching a few privates, and at the end of last year, those started to dissolve too. it’s interesting how the ground shifts before the mind has a chance to catch up.

my spiritual mentor recently suggested i begin to enjoy yoga again. 5 minutes on my mat, 20 minutes in postures, meditation — it didn’t matter. not to become stronger or more flexible, but to somatically release what i’ve been carrying and trying to intellectualize my way through.

i knew he was right. and every part of me has been resisting.

returning to my mat isn’t simply about movement. it means returning to a version of myself i had stopped visiting. for years, i thought i was avoiding yoga. i’m not sure that’s what it was.

for 6 years, i’ve tried to understand what happened. i’ve thought about it from every angle. i’ve journaled. i’ve walked. i’ve talked it out. my mind has worked tirelessly to make sense of it all. but understanding and mourning aren’t the same thing.

last week, i was in conversation with a friend and something shifted as if it were an a-ha moment in this whole situation. i realized it wasn’t just yoga that i had lost.

it was my best friend too.

we found each other through the practice. we led teacher trainings together — long weekends of holding space for everyone else, then collapsing into a puddle when the room emptied. we took privates together and spent them upside down, playing on the canes, laughing in inversions like kids on a jungle gym. we’d lie with our heads in each other’s laps and say “scratchies” when we wanted our hair played with. one word. that was the whole ask.

we changed together, inside those walls. and then life did what it does. it gently redirected us onto different paths.

there wasn’t a dramatic ending.
no betrayal.
no definitive goodbye.

just two lives continuing in different directions.

maybe that’s why i never recognized it as grief.

i’ve told myself that story for years. we simply grew apart. but “simply” suddenly felt like a strange word. as though different directions couldn’t also be heartbreaking. as though a friendship that helped shape who you became isn’t worthy of being mourned just because no one left.

yesterday morning, i went to a yoga class with my parents. it was one of the gentlest classes i’ve ever taken. nothing remarkable happened. and yet, at the end, when we were talking with the teacher, i was in full-blown tears.

i don’t know if i was crying because i missed yoga, or because i missed the woman who practiced it…maybe they’re impossible to separate.

i’ve spent so much of my life living from my mind, trying to understand my feelings before allowing myself to feel them, trying to make sense of life before letting it move through me. but somewhere between my parents, watching them participate in the same practice that once held me, something softened.

it’s not just the grief of losing people. it’s the grief of becoming someone new. the grief that arrives long after the memories. the grief of a place that stops feeling like home because we’ve become someone else inside it. some heartbreaks have scripts. friendship rarely does. nothing marks the ending of a season that no longer fits. maybe that’s why these losses stay with us so long.

every becoming asks something of us. to release the person who could only exist before. maybe that’s why growth can feel strangely lonely…not because we’re moving towards something, but because we’re also saying goodbye to some version of ourselves too.

we don’t talk much about that kind of grief. the grief that lives between.

between teacher and former teacher.
between daughter and the realization that your parents are growing older too.
between the body that survived and the body that finally feels safe enough to release.

it feels like i’m shedding and initiating all at once.

i thought i was trying to find my way back to yoga.
maybe this is the yoga.
not the poses.
not the studio practice.
but the willingness to stay present long enough for the body to tell the truth before the mind rushes in to explain it.

i wasn’t avoiding the mat.
i was avoiding the mourning.

maybe coming home was never about returning to who i was.
maybe it was about finally making enough space to thank her…
before gently letting her go.

maybe that’s the writing my mom has been missing.
maybe i’ve been missing it too.