for most of my life, i was allergic to cats.

one christmas morning, a cat came into my parents’ cat-free house as a christmas present for my youngest sister. i didn’t see the cat arrive, but i knew as soon as it was there; within seconds of its arrival, i couldn’t breathe.

cats and not-breathing were familiar.

when i started practicing reiki, my cat allergy began to heal.

eventually, with only one exception, one house, it had vanished.

when i moved back to michigan, atlas and i moved in with my parents.

my sister is here. so is her cat.

the last time i visited my parents, i brought steroids, just in case, but i never needed to use them. as a result, i was excited about the prospect of living with a cat for atlas’s sake and i wasn’t worried about my breathing at all.

the day after i arrived, my breath left me.

i was devastated. i thought i had healed my cat allergy, and it felt like i was right back where i started.

i was also worried. i was going to live here for a while, and now i couldn’t breathe in the house.

atlas and i slept in a tent in the backyard for more than a month.

i spent most of every night coughing until i thought my lungs would burst.

when the cold rains came, we moved inside, into a cat-free room. i spent most of those nights coughing too.

i remember going to the beach one day to take pictures. the pictures made it seem idyllic. it was. but the thing that the pictures didn’t say was that my lung capacity was so limited that i was at the beach because it was all i could do. i couldn’t even walk up the tiny hill that led from the beach to the parking lot without wheezing.

slowly, slowly, my breath came back.

now, most days, i don’t cough too often and i don’t breathe too shallowly.

i was wondering how to circle you in tenderness when this story came to me.

i think this is why:

most of the time, i really was ok with an iron band across my chest, with wheezing, with not being able to catch my breath.

healing had taught me – and meditation reminded me – presence, and acceptance, and how to relax instead of panic.

but i realized that the rest of the time, when i wasn’t ok, the problem wasn’t so much that i wanted my breathing to come back as it was that i wanted to know why.

why.

i think that if i know why, i can change something.

i think that if i know why, it will make something easier to bear.

(why can’t i breathe? why did they leave? why isn’t this working? why did i fail?)

but we often don’t know why (at least for certain), or can’t know why, or maybe there isn’t even a why at all.

i remember the moment other than in deep stillness when i felt the most relief.

i had left the dinner table because i couldn’t breathe and i thought that my sister could tell i couldn’t breathe and i was worried that she would feel bad because it was her cat and i didn’t want her to feel bad so i went upstairs and i sat on the bed and i cried.

my mom came upstairs to check on me and i told her that i was just so frustrated that i couldn’t breathe and i cried.

i sat on that bed and i felt all of the frustration and the fear and the sadness and i cried.

when i was done, i went downstairs and ate the rest of my dinner.

maybe that’s what we need most of all.

to let it out, to let it flow, to be witness/ed.

to be with the frustration and the sadness and the pain and the longing and the loneliness and the grief with all of the love and tenderness and compassion we can muster.

and when we can’t, to be with that too, with as much love and tenderness and compassion as we can muster.