Y - The Shape of Yes to Self
Y doesn’t offer answers—it opens the gate to something more alive.
Storytime
"Mrs. Schmidt, may I see you in the hallway for a minute?"
(no one calls me Mrs. Schmidt anymore, it’s a dead-name since my divorce, and feels really weird to even type right now)
WTF - I'd already been pink-slipped, what could she need from me now?!?
All I wanted was to soak up every last moment with these high school kids before turning in my teacher’s badge.
Three years here, and ten years I'd given this profession, and I found myself at a cross-roads.
Enter the application/interview game again, or start something entirely new and unknown.
For over a week I had been dancing the tightrope between major life choices. On the one hand, job security, familiarity with what I knew I could do and do well, but having to start over, another 3-year probationary period, proving myself to the bureaucracy, jumping the hoops, all out of love for teenagers who often swore in my face. On the other hand, the complete unknown of becoming an entrepreneur with thrill, adventure, and all the insecurities of how-the-fuck-am-I-gonna-do-this?
"I just wanted to say that you are an excellent teacher, one of the best I've ever seen. It would really be a shame if you left the profession. I'd like to write you a recommendation to wherever you decide to apply next."
This came out of the mouth of the woman who had just fired me last week, telling me that I wasn't a team player, using my own desires to improve as a teacher against me as reasons I wasn’t qualified to stay on her staff.
I wish she had just spoken the truth, my Master’s Degree and ten years experience was too expensive. She wanted to trade me in for a younger model.
Why?
Why would I trust her to write a recommendation for me?
Why would I continue in a profession that has burned me time and time again?
Why would I keep teaching as the job kept stripping me of my agency and autonomy, expecting me to teach to the test and follow standard lesson plans?
WHY would I take the path more traveled by towards safety and security at the sacrifice of my passion and my soul?
I didn't say a word.
When she finished speaking I simply said, "may I go back to my kids now?" and she nodded.
As I walked back into my classroom, my legs didn’t feel like they belonged to me anymore. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, too bright and too loud. The kids were tossing pencils and hollering across the room like nothing had changed.
But something had.
It was a subtle shift in gravity. . . crack in the floorboards. I wasn’t the same person who had walked out just a few minutes ago.
Because in that hallway, something clicked, a knowing that slid in sideways and didn’t ask for permission. I didn’t want her recommendation letter. I didn’t want another teaching job. I didn’t want to beg for another three years probation so that I could squeeze myself into a system that never wanted what I actually brought.
I wanted something I couldn’t define, something unsafe, something that could unfold into something I couldn’t even imagine.
And somehow that wanting had the shape of the letter Y.
That’s how my yoga career and my entrepreneurial life was born.
I didn’t have a five-year plan. I didn’t even have a one-month plan. I had some yoga certifications, a few hundred bucks, and the deep pull that if I just kept listening inward, something would grow. More than anything, I had this aliveness inside me, this tug from my core that I had to follow.
Lesson
Y is a trailhead that doesn’t come with a map. It just shows you two directions and says: Choose.
Y lives in the body like arms outstretched—open to something you don’t yet understand.
Y is the trembled voice before the yes takes form.
The letter Y is
a yawning YES.
a fork in the road.
a slingshot.
a wishbone.
river splitting to find more room.
Y isn’t elegant. It’s cracked and uncertain and shaped like someone standing at a cliff edge thinking, “Fuck, okay, here goes.”
It’s the arms-up moment. Right before the leap, after the heartbreak, and into the breathless middle where the future is still fog.
I said YES!!! With my teeth clenched, my throat burning, and my feet moving before my mind could catch up. Y was the only thing I could trust. Because it didn’t offer answers. It just asked the right questions.
Y is not a decision.
It’s a declaration.
Y doesn’t require you to be certain.
It asks only that you be honest.
Y doesn’t show up with answers.
It arrives as a feeling in your gut, a flare in your chest, a whisper in your bones.
When you speak the letter Y, your lips pull back like a smile, your tongue lifts toward the sky, and your voice rises with possibility.
🌱 Homework: Practice Saying Yes
1. Stand in a Y-shape.
Literally. Like a tree or a child calling to the stars.
Feet rooted, arms stretched wide.
Feel what opens when you become the shape of Yes.
2. Whisper “Yes, thank you.”
To small nudges.
To unexpected invitations.
To the little pulls of aliveness, even if you don’t yet understand them.
3. Journal Prompt:
What question has been living quietly in your chest?
Write it down—beginning with “Why…”
Then write the next line beginning with “Yes…”
Let the shape of the question become the beginning of your answer.
If this post helped you turn a Y-shaped question into the beginning of an answer.