I just wanna twirl my hair all day long.

Day 12.  Ouch.

This morning, I could barely peel my eyes open during the first five minutes of my sunrise yoga class. Every single muscle, bone, fiber, and fingernail hurt. Even my hair felt fragile, breakable, ready to fall to the floor and collapse.  When the instructor came into the room and turned on the bright, overhead lights, I crawled slowly to my feet, my whole body twitching and my head spinning, and I looked in the mirror, and I seriously thought, “Wow. I might not make it through this class. Or this 30-day challenge.”

Then, the instructor started talking. Umm, I couldn’t understand a WORD he was saying. Babble—that’s all I heard. He had a thick accent, and he spoke very, very softly and quickly, with his lips pressed right into the little headpiece microphone the teachers wear, making his voice even more muffled and confusing.  

I started smiling a little, thinking, hmm, this is going to be interesting, I’m going to have to practice my entire class without knowing what the hell my teacher is saying to me. Then, I caught the eye of the woman next to me and saw she was smiling, too. I instantly felt better. Before I knew it, the other eight people around me where all grinning, making eye contact with one another, drawing our breaths in and out, listening for the “inhale” and “exhale” commands, following each others’ cues and movements, and just waiting for the lone word we could understand: release.

During the first posture, half-moon pose, the man to my left was sucking in and letting out big, deep, obnoxiously loud and rasping breaths. He sounded like the old, wheezing, creaking radiators in my apartment—one more rattle, and I was sure he’d keel over. I wanted to look over and tell him he was going to pop a lung cavity by breathing like that. But, I found him comical, too.

During the standing-bow-pulling pose, the woman to my right kept teetering, tottering, teetering, as she tried to balance, swinging side to side so much so that she reminded me, literally, of a one of those teeter-totters you see in park playgrounds. A slight shift to the right, and the whole of her body followed, awkwardly. She had loose springs in her hips. I giggled silently at this thought.

And when I stared forward at myself at the end of class, the end of my 12th class in a row, damn it, and saw my gnarled hair falling out of its ponytail and my bright pink cheeks and my sweaty tank top all tangled and disheveled around my belly, I thought how funny even I looked, how hilarious it was that I continue to compassionately kill myself in this practice, how absurdly easy and equally difficult it was to drag myself off the floor at the start of class, how silly all of this stress and worry and drama in my life is if I can still make it here, now, to this room, back to this strong, disciplined self.

I never once made a sound in class, but inside, deep, deep inside, I was laughing. And that laughter alone carried me and my exhausted, yoga-weary body through yet another class.

When I got to work promptly at 8:30 a.m. and realized my entire office was closed until 10:30 a.m.—for once, we followed the federal government’s schedule—and I was the only one here because I’d missed the phone call because I was already awake and sweating my life away in yoga, I finally let myself laugh out loud.