Roque's Healthy Boundaries. A Personal Message

*Content Warning: brief mention of vehicular violence

*The following is a letter from Roque, co founder of Suryaside Yoga. For those of you that don’t know, Roque and 6 other people were hurt when a woman who drove her car through a crowd of people at a protest last December. This is the attack he is referencing in the letter. 

“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.” -Resmaa Menaken ‘My Grandmother’s Hands’

Hello Beautiful People. The above quote and book hit me so hard and is an idea I have been wanting to communicate for some time with great difficulty. I don’t know what to say to people. I’m not sure how to feel. I am tremendously grateful for my physical existence. I am grateful for the overwhelming abundance of love and support that I was shown by so many people from different communities and walks of life. I am grateful for the opportunity to go to the weddings of loved ones, forge profoundly impactful friendships with amazing humans, and to one day hopefully see the birth of my child. I am grateful for all of these things most days. 

Some days I struggle. I feel like my body betrayed me. I feel like my people failed to protect me. I feel like the wider community was complicit in what happened to me. These aren't my conscious, balanced, grounded thoughts, this is how I feel in my body. I feel under attack. The trauma from the day I was attacked is still in my body. It is still having a literal and tangible physical effect on my range of motion, strength, and flexibility but beyond that the feelings from being violated in such a direct and impactful way are still in my body. 

I share all of that with you to say that it is triggering for me to engage with people who ask me how I’m doing, look down at my leg, and then proceed to comment on how it seems that I am “healed” or “all better” now. I receive the comments with the love that they are intended so I don’t want you to be mortified if you are one of the people who has said this to me. I know that you love me and are relieved to see that I can walk and move and talk and smile and I share your relief. 

In addition to that relief are invisible physical limitations, waves of overwhelming rage, debilitating bouts of depression and anxiety, and all of the same struggles that many of the people reading this are familiar with or currently dealing with as well. 

My therapists has helped me to understand the value of creating healthy boundaries in my life. Historically, I have been challenged by this but I am embracing growth. As a younger person I crated a pattern of unhealthy boundaries cutting people off entirely, hiding in my home, not answering texts and emails, and limiting my engagement with things and people I loved. 

I would like to create a new pattern for myself and am asking for your help with it. If you come across me at the yoga studio or in the street and you want to ask me how I’m doing physically or otherwise, ask me the way you would ask anyone else. Sometimes I am having a good morning, feeling positive about life on my way to the grocery store and someone who may not have seen me in a while will stop me, look at me sadly and say, “ I’m so sorry about what happened to you it must have ben awful I’m glad you’re better.” 

This is a loving and kind sentiment but it also then brings the ideas, feelings, memories that I experienced in the aftermath of the attack back in to my body. I was embarrassed to even say that before but am taking more ownership of my healing process and humanity now and can say with confidence that it is ok that I have not completely healed form this yet. There is no timeline for healing. It is not a linear process. All I can ask is if we have not seen each other since my attack that you please resist the urge to specifically reference that attack(or the healing of my leg) when you see me if I don’t bring it up first. If you do, that’s not something I can control and I understand that. The act of writing this letter is me practicing creating healthy boundaries for myself and ultimately practicing humanity. 

I again want to thank everyone deeply and sincerely for the delicious and love filled food that people prepared and brought to my home; for the teacher trainees that came together to my house with a homemade gift basket full of extremely thoughtful items(a memory that still wrecks me); for my friends that put together the gofundme; for the overwhelmingly generous sums of money people sent that helped my pregnant wife who was working full time and taking care of her laid up husband not have to cook or walk the dog every day. I hope to live in a way that is worthy of this love, generosity and kindness. I am trying to practice being the truest version of myself and living a life that is aligned with my intention and purpose. Thank you all so much for supporting me in doing that. I can never express my gratitude enough.