When I used to teach public yoga classes I would coach my students not to carry anxiety from a difficult posture into the next one. I didn’t teach flow. I taught occupation of individual poses held for a length of time. When a difficult posture was concluded, we ended it and cleared any struggle with it before we began the next one. I’d guide them through a movement and advise them to “exhale and let Alligator Pose go; it is finished,” and then we’d move on.

I wanted to cry last week but I kept fighting it. Every time the tears welled I conjured a reason not to cry. There were good reasons. I was at work. I was driving. I wasn’t alone and didn’t want to cause a companion any distress. I just kept holding it in. I kept carrying the stress forward into the next activity. September was a month-long exercise in not practicing what I preach.

Friday I drafted yesterday’s Work Release and scheduled it to post. Friday night I made a fire and sat in quality time with The Chef. The half moon wore a silver stole around her bare shoulders like a Hollywood starlet in the 1940s. The tears welled again as the fire lifted and my dog licked my shin. I held them back again, not wanting to ruin quality time.

But then I unexpectedly dropped my drink. It was a full one. It doused me as it fell and the glass hit the stones surrounding the fire pit. The glass didn’t break but I did. I cried and cried and cried, for reasons I explained in my post and things I still haven’t shared. The Chef waited it out until I went inside to change my clothes. I sat down on the bedroom floor to don dry socks and cried harder.

Then I went back to the fire. The Chef brought me a new drink in a fresh glass and tossed more wood on the fire. I explained again that a “good cry” is one of the ways women release stress and that it is magic and medicinal. He had heard this before but I said it again in lieu of an apology. We should never apologize for tears.

October 1st is finally here. I wait for this all summer. My season. October to February. My time. Queen of Cold. Queen of Socks. Of scarves. Of capes. Queen of Shivers. Sitting here now in the morning chill of the first day of my jubilee I can acknowledge that my Work Release was a good cry. I needed to get it out.

I live in a place where most people have convictions that are opposite from mine. It is hard to have a soothing or therapeutic conversation on the ills of our current events, so I talk to myself a lot. Before I turned this into a wellness blog I would rant it all out and feel better. Although I still value that process I’ve outgrown my younger soapbox and use of this blog for reactionary tantrums. However, when holding it all in shuts down or closes off all other expressions of wellness, the practice needs to flex with my needs. I don’t feel right apologizing for yesterday’s morose post any more than the fireside tears even though I recognize that neither of them were particularly uplifting or helpful to anyone but me. Wellness works that way sometimes. Emphasis on the work.

Home remedies have such simple allure. The appeal is the peel. The pitch is potency. Purging the pose. Lunar lumens. Soot on stone. Dry cotton socks. A good cry. Clemency for needing what I need. The first of October.

— Mercy