I stare at the Post-It stuck to my palm. There is a circle inked on it, thick and dark and empty. Across the table, the woman leading our teacher workshop describes how the shape we chose reflects our learning style. Maybe the circle means something positive, but I can’t tell you for sure. I don’t hear anything she says. Right now, at eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, I am being sucker-punched by the evidence drawn in my own hand. I have to get out of here.
“Excuse me,” I murmur, and slip into the hallway. Forehead pressed into the wall, I close my eyes and try to breathe. That simple circle has stirred the tiny but insistent voice in my gut that does a lot of talking these days: “Something’s not right!” Usually I ignore it, or growl at it to go away please! It makes me feel unreasonable, because with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, I’ve been blessed with a job that should be fulfilling, a cozy home, and a loving husband. But still. I don’t feel whole. Something’s missing and I’ve been running around in circles for years trying to find it. The overwhelming sense that my true self is a ghost in my own body won’t go away no matter how much I try to ignore it. The circle I drew today is not a symbol of my learning style—it’s a symbol of my non-learning style, my refusal to listen to myself. Well, this morning I finally get the picture. Literally.
At twenty-eight, it’s already time to change my adult life. Older friends who have transformed themselves in ways large and small suggest this is not unusual. As we approach our thirties, we finally veer off the track laid for us by other people’s expectations. This is the time to make your own plan, they say. I hem and haw and pretend I don’t know what to do, but that same insistent voice that burst out during the workshop has been telling me all along. I need a career change.
I’ve been a teacher for much of my twenties. Teachers are some of the most selfless, inspiring people out there, and my parents are educators. But that voice is telling me that I don’t want to work in a high school myself. The realization comes naturally. Actually deciding to leave my job is not so easy. I tell myself that I love teaching these kids, so I should just find a way to be happy. And besides, we can’t really afford for me not to work. There follow many months of agonizing, journaling, crying, and discussing. But I won’t find wholeness by keeping myself stuck. In the end I take a leap of faith.
I tell my principal that I will leave at the end of the school year, and I give myself two months—what would have been my summer vacation—to create new goals. I spend July making grandiose plans: I will get serious about the novel I’ve always dreamed of writing! I will apply to grad school! But August crawls by in a haze of anxiety: How ridiculous was the decision to quit? What am I doing with my life, anyway?
Then the little voice pipes up again through the avalanche of worry and guilt. “You might not have the answer yet, but for crying out loud, the world is not ending and you need to take care of us,” it says. A few minutes later, I walk by a building with the word YOGA written across the windows in letters almost as tall as my body. I take this as a sign and drag myself to a class. The studio is painted a soothing shade of green and smells like lavender. People speak quietly and smile kindly. My sharpest edges soften just by venturing into this space.
In the beginning, my inner critic still gets a kick out of torturing me. “You are hanging upside down while you should be looking for a job!” it shrieks during downward dog. “This is so uncomfortable! Why do you keep coming here?” it demands as my legs fold into pigeon pose. But slowly, as I test my body in new ways, I allow myself to absorb some lessons on my mat. I learn that it is possible and even empowering to breathe through doubt and fear and pain; to live in the present moment, thinking only of the sensations in my body; to sit in stillness and honor myself. Sprawled in the final pose of shavasana, I learn to push aside to-do lists and welcome peace to my body. One afternoon, months after I commit to this practice, I realize that my core is filled with light. I feel whole. Energy swells through my whole body, saying, “You are strong.”
I’m just starting to receive the results of my grad school applications, and haven’t made as much progress on that novel as I would like. But it turns out that I’ve already met one goal I didn’t even know needed setting, the one that proved most essential of all: I’ve learned to trust my true voice. And that makes anything feel possible.
