On being a whole person

The other night we played D&D in our upstairs family room. Six grown adults around a table strategizing while a Spanish flamenco version of "The Legend of Zelda Main Theme" plays in the background. Snacks and drinks open across the table, a little tray of frozen shrimp defrosting in the corner. We started late (read: 7pm) and stayed up way past our bedtimes as my players debated how best to deal with an orphanage that was turned into a feeding ground for vampires.

In my work, I get to be a little weird. You know the Elena-isms: “find your gummy bears,” “grab your balls.” But D&D is where I get to be totally, 100% myself. Which is funny, because I’m not even playing a character. I’m the one running the world everyone else gets to play in.

As a yoga teacher, my goal in class is to foster a safe enough environment for folks to feel comfortable being in their bodies in a curious, “huh-my-body-is-telling-me-something” way. As a dungeon master (hehe), I get to be curious in a different way: I work to create an environment where folks can feel comfortable expressing themselves around others.

It sounds silly from the outside. It's a bunch of adults playing make-believe, while giant corporations normalize 80-hour workweeks and social media pushes hacks and optimization tools. But honestly, place bio-hacks like sunning your perineum and drinking your pee next to roleplaying a gnome wizard in a gothic horror fantasy game, and I feel like it’s a really easy choice.

But you know, this isn’t really about D&D. It’s about what it costs us when we forget to be people outside of our work.

Here’s one thing I’ve learned in my time teaching bodies: the most generous thing you can do for the people in your care is to be a whole person outside of it.

Not in a wellness brand (tm) with a 6-month content strategy kind of way, but more as a person who stays up too late on a Monday because their friends need to save some children from vampires and the playlist is really good and someone brought shrimp.

There’s a lot of overlap between how I teach and how I DM. I’m still reading a room, thinking on my feet, adjusting what I planned to what’s actually happening in front of me. But in D&D, none of it has to amount to anything useful. I get to use those parts of myself in service of an imaginary problem, a stupid joke, or making my friends feel like they’re saving the world.

It's not that D&D is better than teaching. It's that it's not teaching. For four hours, I'm not an educator or a brand or a nervous system specialist. I'm just a person who gets to fully commit to a stupid bit and be completely, overly invested in whether my players feel like heroes. There’s no algorithm or posturing for likes. It’s just real people, together, doing a thing because it’s just plain ol’ fun.

The yoga industry will tell you to niche down, stay consistent, be the thing. And sure, okay. But the teachers I’ve learned the most from were always fully, weirdly, specifically themselves outside the room. That fullness is what made them magnetic inside it.

If you’re reading this and you feel guilty for having a hobby that has nothing to do with your work, stop.

Identity with one thing, or one career, is unrealistic at best and exhausting at worst. You do not owe your work every interesting part of you.

I’m not saying D&D needs to be your thing (or does it?), but you do need your version of it. Something that has nothing to do with your content calendar and everything to do with who you actually are and what you choose to do just because it lights you up.

In other words… you are not just your work, or even what you spend most of your time doing. You are also the person who brings the frozen shrimp.

Love & Snacks,
Elena