"So what?"

When I was little, my mom enrolled me in swimming lessons.  As the story goes, I walked up to my teacher who was sitting on the edge of the pool and he instructed me to jump in.  Allegedly, I refused, looked at him and said, “This is bullshit!” and ran away.  I don’t remember this moment, but I absolutely remember the feeling I had.  Fear.  My 5 year old self shut it down and walked away. 

I have done that so many times in my life.  I seem so confident and free spirited.  Sometimes I am.  Most times I hide behind fear, make it no big deal, and make a different choice or fall into what comes easy to or for me.  I was very involved in Student Council in high school.  I only ran for an office that I knew I could win.  Perhaps it was to stay involved (what I told myself), perhaps it was to play it safe.   Maybe it was both.   I’m not a competitive person.  My sister was.  My big sister wanted to win at everything.  I would back out of the competition completely.  Perhaps it was to let her win, perhaps it was to keep the peace, perhaps it was because I was afraid to fail.  Being an introverted extrovert, I think the fear can take over and manifest itself in different ways, sometimes as this outgoing vibrant person.  And sometimes I am.  A lot of times I would rather just observe & compare myself because “they” are so amazing and I haven’t done anything great yet.

My life has been one flowing transition into another, without me thinking ahead or considering the future, really.  It was easy to take opportunities that were presented to me, some of these things were amazing things actually, but some of them were the easy out.  I am grateful for my past, all of it, because it shaped me and here, on the other side, I feel pretty good.  But it took me a really long time and through some really devastating things to get here.

I am a yoga teacher.   When I first started teaching I wore rose-colored glasses and thought everyone and everything was inspirational and amazing. I was early in my process of self discovery but thought I had it all figured out.  I would theme my classes around facing your fears.  I thought i could do this because I faced my fear of teaching yoga, I faced my fear of ending a (well many) bad relationship, I faced my fear of getting on my bike and riding on the busy Chicago streets, etc.  I wasn’t wrong, I had done those things, but I still hadn’t faced the big guys.  Those looming fears of putting my writing out for the world to read and criticize, challenging myself mentally & getting a Master’s degree, truly becoming the person I wanted to be meant that I was going to have to get dark and deep with myself.

Then my sister’s cancer took a turn for the worse.  Two months before she passed she was in the hospital again.   I was trying to distract her by showing her my Facebook feed & on it was one of my yogi friends doing a really difficult arm balance transition.  I was like “watch this it’s so crazy!  Right?”  She said, “Yeah.  Why can’t you do it?”  I said, “Because it’s really hard.”  She said, “So what?”  That moment will be forever with me.  When she said it something clicked inside of me.  It would not come to fruition for a while but it forever changed me. 

My sister dying was the worst thing that has ever happened to me.  Fear took on a whole new experience for me.  The fear of what comes next.  Many days it would take me playing that moment back in the hospital over and over in my head as I woke up just so I could get out of bed.   As time passed, I didn’t know just how bad it could get until things got really bad.  But here I was, moving with my waves of grief, knowing that I needed to be there for my parents & my nephews.  I had the luxury of living 45 minutes away so I could take my time grieving and being alone, conserving my energy for them and what they needed.  But I knew that in order to move forward I needed to change. 

A big part of this change needed to be strength.  I needed to become stronger so I could gain confidence in myself to move forward in a meaningful way.  I remember my friend, Katie telling me that mental fortitude often follows physical strength.  I began taking high intensity classes.  I would look at myself in the mirror and tell myself “SO WHAT?!” in order to get through the workout, inspired by my instructors to keep going.  I lost my job.  I amped up my training & joined a Cross-fit challenge (something I NEVER thought I would do).  With inspiring women members & coaches who pushed me through, I finished feeling stronger than I ever thought was possible.   Throughout my physical training, I finally made the decision to become stronger mentally.  I applied and was accepted into a pretty killer Master’s degree program in Counseling.  It was a calling I had when I was 14 years old but I too fearful to challenge myself in college and pursue it, although I believe its now happening at the perfect time.  This doesn’t change the fact that I almost cried when I saw my syllabuses.  (Thank god for my high school friends group chat & their support & humor). 

I want to be an example for my nephews.  I now know that my sister should’ve been my inspiration my whole life as she was always pushing me to be stronger but I never realized it until now.  Fear resides in my mind but it no longer lives in my heart.  My relationship with fear has evolved as I imagine divorced parents have with each other, sometimes I can manage it just fine and it’s okay, I realize why we were so close in our past & I have respectful feelings.  Other days I have to talk myself off the ledge because I'm so frustrated & angry & consumed by it's selfishness.   Fear has become part of the waves of my grief.  I know it will always be there, some days will be worse than others, but I realize that it’s just temporary and the life I want is totally worth getting over that fear hump.   My mom says that the worst thing that could ever happen to us already has, and while I know this is not exactly true and don’t want to even think about what that could be, I see what she means.  Feeling like you have nothing left to lose, knowing the value of life can help you reach deep down for that force of energy that shows up as strength & a burning desire to live fiercely.  I have seen a warrior look at fear and punch it in the face to live another day.  I am finding the same strength & know that I need to do this on a daily basis.  

First,  I had to learn how to punch.  

The End?

I’ve always been really bad at endings.  Well, now that I think about it, I was pretty bad at middles too.  I’m talking about relationships.  Like all of my relationships from best friends to lovers to co-workers, and even some situations were not always clean and clear about the way they ended on my end.  Not that all of them could be clear, life doesn’t work that way, but there was a lingering of sorts of some of them.

I didn’t realize that until my sister was dying and even then it was more in my body than in my conscious mind.  When I knew that my time with Kris was limited, I knew that I couldn’t let my sister leave the physical existence of our relationship in the same way other things have ended in my life.  I couldn’t avoid this ending.  It was going to happen and I needed to be really conscious about the moments we had left together.  My sister had breast cancer that eventually spread to her brain, so 6 months after intense radiation, she was in and out of lucidity.  It was a side effect of the radiation.  This is around the same time her body started to shut down as the cancer made its way into her liver.  “Too many lesions to count” was noted on her last PET scan.  I didn’t know what that meant, I just knew it was bad.  I got the text from my dad and got in the car for the 60 minute drive down to see them all.  I called my friend Natalie on the way because I knew she would know.  She lost both her parents to cancer and she was my “cancer guide”.  She told me it was bad and that it was about to be the end, in so many words.  She said it without saying it but making sure I knew what she meant, the only way a best friend could. 

I was the one to tell my sister about her liver.  My mom told her earlier in the day but she wasn’t totally with it , had just taken her pain meds and fell asleep.  I took second shift that day.  When she woke up from her nap, she immediately asked me “what did the doctor say?”  I read her the report.  She said, “Is that bad?  It sounds bad?”  I said, “Yes Kris, It’s bad.  Really bad.”  She started to cry.  She didn’t want to believe it.  She called her husband who assured her that she should wait to talk to her oncologist before she reacted.  I sat on the edge of the couch, hunched over, clutching my toes.  Having an out of body experience (which would be the one of many) and trying to keep it together.  A few tears streamed down my face, without me blinking.  She looked at me and said she wasn’t ready to die.  I said that I wasn’t ready for her to die either, none of us were.  We cried.  She made me promise to take care of her boys.  “Promise me Kari!  Promise me that you will make sure the boys are okay.”  I promised.  It was the promise of a lifetime.  I told her I was angry with her for leaving me alone with my parents. She said “You just have to be a big girl now, Lovey.” ("Lovey" was what she called me since I was a kid.)  I didn’t know if that was her falling back into her haze or if she meant to say “big girl”, it seemed so out of context, so "big sister/little sister" but when we were just little kids.  Now I think it was a little bit of both.  I was her little sister.  She may have been waiting to say that for years.  And she was right.  It was time I grew up. 

The next two weeks were painful and amazing.  We had great talks when she could talk.  I taught her a breathing exercise that was able to calm her down and provide her some comfort.  The best thing for me was that she allowed me to help her.  It was a true bond between sisters.  It was evident that she trusted me. 

One night, after helping her out of the tub and handing her Q-tips as she laid on the bed while I put lotion on her legs she said, “Oh I LOVE cleaning my ears.”  We laughed.  Then she said, “I’m not afraid anymore, lovey.  I feel like, at peace.  Like my aura or something is peaceful.  I used to make fun of you all the time, talking about stuff like this, but now I know what you meant.”  I was relieved to hear that she was experiencing peace among all the pain.  I was happy to hear that she finally understood me.  I was grateful for these moments we were sharing.  I was finally at peace too.  Becoming peaceful with endings.  The most difficult ending of my life so far, but I was grateful I got to experience it.   To be able to have that ending was a gift.

This is when I began looking at other endings in my life.  The grief I was experiencing was enormous and I wondered if I was mourning other endings too.  I was confident that I was.  I decided to pull back, to spend a lot of time alone, to conserve my energy, to be really careful about how and with whom I spent my time, to allow myself all the time and space I needed to grieve, to reflect, to decide, maybe for the first time, how I wanted to move forward in life.  Who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do, what needed closure and what needed resolution in my life.  I began to evaluate where I needed healing, which relationships needed to be nurtured and which ones I needed to let go.   The relationship with myself came first.  I needed to close the open chapters of my life and heal within. 

The second greatest experience I had with endings is the one where I would start to end the destructive relationship I’ve been having with myself for the last 30 years.  Ending the external influences that create internal noise and conflict, ending the judgment and expectations, ending the stories I tell to keep me from my authentic self, ending the hurt and beginning to heal was the only way I could see out of this grief.  Because like Kris said, it was time for me to be a big girl.   It was time for me to stop hiding and start doing.  I have two teenage nephews who will hold me accountable for everything.  I need to be a good example.  I need to help guide them into being compassionate, productive adults.  I promised my sister.  I need to be a good daughter.  A good friend.  A good teacher.  A good support system.  But none of this could happen until I ended the negative relationship with myself.  It's a BIG ending.  The ending of all endings.  And while this process of healing is ongoing and I will make mistakes along the way – I have realized that some endings are truly just inspired beginnings.  And for me, that shift in perspective is changing the way I feel about endings.

xoxo, 

Kfitz

Hello World!

It took me a LOOOONG time to get here but I finally made it.  This website project took A LOT of self coaching to get up and running.  I had this idea (as I do with most things) that it needed to be PERFECT!  Ugh.  What's perfect anyway?  Certainly not me nor my life.  Certainly not my yoga practice.  Certainly not my relationships.  Certainly not this page.  It is a work in progress.  I guess it's a perfect reflection of myself - so there really is something perfect about it. 

I've been through the ringer these past few years.  I saw a meme on adulthood which said "Being an adult is like looking both ways before crossing the street, then getting hit by an airplane!"  I could not relate more.  

I have to say, however, I'm incredibly grateful to the teachings, tools & insights gained, lessons learned, each and every soul with whom I've crossed paths & the whole messy part of it.  I would not be here, sharing this site or the gifts of my experiences (which, at the time, certainly didn't feel like gifts) so that we can grow on this journey together.  It's important to connect, to feel supported and to feel part of a community.  That is my intention in my sharing.  You may not like everything I have to say, but I'm hoping it will inspire thought & reflection.  I will never be perfect but I will always be honest.  Hopefully you'll be able to find a connection here, whether it's to a thought, idea, another person or to yourself.  

I have much to say and to share.  But for now, welcome to ME! 

xoxo, 
Kfitz