August Dispatch: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
Hey Galaxy, I’m taking a little time out from my fangirling over this Pommelhorse King to write your August dispatch. Our theme this month is a repeat of last year: Stories and Myths (especially of the Asanas). I was looking for a quote for our studio letterboard, and came upon this Joan Didion quote that I loved, as well as sensed the nuance and depth of:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Knowing what I know about Didion, I don’t think that she meant that story-telling was a joyful, life-giving exercise. It seemed more like she was saying that we sometimes have to narrate our tough transitions in order to keep on going.
And I’ve been thinking about epithets. Not epithet in the abusive, insulting sense, but in the Homeric sense (It always comes back around to the Iliad and the Odyssey with me, doesn’t it?).
Epithet, translated from Greek, simply means “to put on” or “to add.” It’s a descriptive phrase that is tacked onto a person’s name, or even simply to a word, that when linked together, creates a fixed association. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, we hear phrases like “black-bellied ships” or “wine-dark sea” over and over again, and these associative phrases start to almost create a rhythm and ritual to the words as they tell the story. The characters in the book also receive epithets, like “bright-helmeted Hector” or “swift-footed Achilles.”
For my daughter Helen’s birthday, my amazingly creative Mom wrote her a little mock Homeric epic poem, celebrating the day of her birth, and she created epithets for me and my husband: I was “Anna Strong-Singer,” and he was “Mike Swift Runner.” Reading it started me thinking about how I and others choose to define ourselves via words and story-telling, and the legacy of storytelling and myth in our yoga practice. A few weeks ago, I was talking with a studio member who is a regular in my OMG classes (strength training and mobility drills, if you haven’t sweat with us in it before), and I explained that one of the reasons that strength training and mobility work is so important to me is so I am less likely to lose some of the identities that are intrinsic to who I am: a person who does yoga, a person who loves to walk and run, a person who loves to move her body creatively as an expression of devotion and joy. Creating healthy habits and a balanced, strong, mobile body makes it more likely that I’ll be able to keep doing that.
But there are other aspects of who I am that I can’t protect from change, and there really is no guarantee that I won’t change and lose and gain identities. Why are there identities that we cling to, or that we eschew? That we mourn when they are lost, or that we try to revise or re-define in an attempt to smooth over a bumpy transition?
And here, dear readers, I walked away from this Dispatch and didn’t return to it for several days, because life got crazy, and I had to handle a few urgent needs at the studio. Though I’d love to tie these musings up in a neat little bow, I don’t think I can, and I actually think it’s better that way. Over the course of these days where I had to set this little studio task down, I probably asked myself who I was a million times.
I am the person whose physical body asked, then demanded that I slow down, rendering me unable to turn my head and forcing me to cancel one entire day of teaching so that I could rest and actually receive care in the form of a much-needed massage.
I am the person who has to stop what I am focusing on every three minutes, because I have a daughter who loves to be around me, cook with me, talk with me, and learn with me. And it makes me take on the mantle of “mother” in a way that makes me feel simultaneously full, as well as empty, loved and loving to the simultaneous still point of exhaustion and exhilaration.
I am the person who is learning who my son is as a young adult; as he becomes less silly and more serious, as he strives to be a little more cool and a little less goofy. I’m the one who asks question after question, filling the silence and desperately trying to remind him that I am still and always here, and interested, and amazed at all he is growing into.
I am the person who is trying to get my cats to use their Litter Robot, so I can spend a little less time scooping litter, and I am the person who combs out my cats fur mats and clips my cats nails, and I’m wondering why I always fall into the caregiver role, and who would take it on if I didn’t.
I am the partner to someone I’ve shared my life with for over 20 years - someone I met at 24, whom I chose in a way that, at the time, felt so old and grown-up and that now seems so young and impulsive, and whom I’m still learning about as our love and partnership evolves and ages in tandem and individually.
I am the person who taught 40 public classes and 20 private sessions last month, and who sometimes worries that if I stop and slow down too long, I’ll never get moving again.
I define myself most deeply as a musician and I don’t make music nearly enough.
I’m filled up by my days that are almost entirely public-facing and spent around people, and when I get even an hour to be alone, I feel guilty at how much I love it and I hoard it like a miser.
Speaking of guilt, I’m fully subsumed by Midwestern guilt, and always worried I’m not doing enough.
I’m working very hard to keep this special little studio floating, and most days it is 100% worth it, and on a few days, it breaks me down and makes me cry.
I am of the world, but I am not of the world.
I am Anna Gleichauf from Detroit, but I’m also Anna Argeropoulos from Milwaukee by way of Chicago, and I’m Annika Lei from New York, and I’m also something that doesn’t have a name, or a place, or any earthly connections.
Any of these, I could flesh out into an epithet. There are a million stories I could tell about who I am. And I tell them to myself, to help me remember that what I am feeling is both real and ephemeral - the telling helps me to keep moving, keep living, keep opening, and uncovering new versions of who I am.
So ham. I am that. So ham. I am not that. With each breath, another story. And sometimes we hear someone else’s story, and we say - I know that feeling, I’m that, too.
Long ago, on the heady cusp of a new love, I read a book by Jeanette Winterson called The Passion. This new lover and I were separated for a summer, and we knew very little about each other, but knew we wanted to learn more. We fell in love when he followed me home from a party, one late night/early morning in Ann Arbor, MI, and I invited him up to my room and he never left. We wrote long love letters to each other once he had to go home for the summer, and talked for hours on the phone. I made him mix tapes and wrote him songs. And one day, I wrote him a love letter with a line from that book:
“I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
That story came to an end a few years later, and depending on who is listening to it, the story I tell about him takes on different shapes and colors, corners and shadows, highs and lows.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
So, Galaxy friends: What's your story today, tomorrow, this year, this lifetime? I’m all ears.
What I’m Reading…
I think I’ve read it roughly 20 times, and I just finished it again today. I highly recommend the book I mentioned above: The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. It’s a story about love, passion, Napoleon Bonaparte, Venice, gambling, webbed feet, literal stolen hearts, Irish priests with one telescopic eye, murder, and more.
This book and Orlando, by Virginia Woolf - which is a gender-bending, time bending love letter from Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, are two books that I fell in love with in the summer of 2000. Both were assigned to me as a part of an Essay Writing class that I took because I had to in order to get my English degree - and wasn’t looking forward to - but I ended up absolutely loving (and consequently wrote some of the most interesting personal narratives I’ve ever written, if I do say so myself). Both of these books are about the art of storytelling and biography, and how it defines our experiences. Both also feature a hefty dose of magical realism, and both play with concepts of gender and love, from a queer viewpoint. If you read them and you love them as much as I do, please take a second to drop me an email and share a favorite passage.
