Something about a massage brings out all my insecurities.
It’s weird, right? Here you have a practice that is (mostly) fundamentally designed to help us feel good (or at least better). You go in stressed and achy; you leave full of Zen. Massages are meant to be blissful, relaxing, our ticket to floating away on a happy cloud.
This is not what happened at the massage I got the other day.
It took place at one of the local lounges — you go in and share a quiet room with several people. Clothes stay on. It tends to be a touch less expensive than a massage at a spa, and this one was within walking distance, so off I went with two goals:
1) Chill the hell out with a nice massage, and
2) Pay someone to dig through the mass of knots masquerading as my back.
I admit #2 was really what I had signed up for. Apparently this place did well with back stuff.
It was dimly lit. Soft piano music and a convincing-looking artificial fire created a welcoming and yes, relaxing ambience.
It was all bliss and Zen until my masseuse reached my feet.
Like billions of other people on this planet, I have two little toes. The left little toe is usually the one that attracts attention; I dislocated it some years ago, and while it healed, most therapists can apparently feel something amiss in there and they poke at it a bit gingerly while asking questions. I’m used to the left little toe being a point of discussion.
This guy went for the right little toe. And I don’t mean he massaged the skin, or the pad. (Well, he did do that.) But he stayed there. He kept digging in to the space between the little toe and the toe next to it, which according to various diagrams is “the fourth toe” or “ring toe” but whom, for the purposes of this article, I will call Frederick.
I discovered something about myself in that moment: When someone spends an outlandish amount of time on and between my toes, I begin to feel something I can only describe as dread.
The questions formed:
- What’s wrong with my little toe? That’s the working one!
- The toe is broken, isn’t it?
- Is he scraping…?
- OH MY GOD I HAVE TOE JAM DON’T I?!
- I am the grossest person to come to this establishment in all of history.
- Don’t be stupid, you don’t have toe jam; you clean your feet and you just saw them when you put on socks earlier and THERE WAS NO TOE JAM.
- This is PB. There are way grosser people than you walking around and probably getting massages right here.
- Where do I fit on the hierarchy of grossdom? Am I mega-gross or just mildly gross?
- For fuck’s sake you don’t have toe jam and you’re not gross.
- Holy shit they disinfected this whole setup before I got here right?
- Is it toe jam or toejam?
And so on and so forth.
Believe it or not, I’m actually way better at controlling the Terror Spiral than I was before my years of therapy.
“Find anything interesting?” I finally squeaked out.
He laughed. Maybe he gets that question a lot. “Just stretching,” he said.
He evidently didn’t find me too gross, because he kept working on my feet. I took deep breaths and attempted to steer my thoughts to other things: happy parakeets. Meadows filled with flowers. Pocket-sized Cthulhus.
And then it happened. He had me flip over.
My back’s day of reckoning had come.
Before I go further, I should probably mention that every massage therapist I’ve ever had has been somewhat disheartened by my back. This is largely because:
1) My posture is questionable at best most days, and
2) All of my stress hangs out in my back.
Some people carry their stress in their stomach. Some in their sinuses. My stress goes straight to my back and it stays there. And builds. My knots have knots, and those knots have acquired pets.
A couple of massage therapists have told me they can tell a lot about a person from their backs (and I assume the rest of the body in general). They see who hunches over a laptop all day (guilty); they see who’s on their feet all day; they also see if we sleep on our side, our back, our belly, or upright in a coffin.
They’re really kind of like Santa Claus:
They see just how we’re sleeping
And how we stand when we’re awake
They know if we slouch over our phones
So get an ergonomic desk, for goodness sake!
So, my massage. My back as a whole needed work, but unsurprisingly he really dug into the right. This is standard for me — no right toe freakout this time. Most massage therapists have found more problems on my right than my left. “You’re keeping something there,” one said to me. “Lots of emotion.”
“My exes.”
Hey, they gotta live somewhere.
“Hmm.” Perhaps my current masseuse did not expect such a challenge. “This OK?” he asked, his elbow wedged into my intrinsic muscles, rending a terrible end to a series of knots that were probably largely connected to my last relationship. “I can go lighter.”
DON’T YOU DARE, I almost screamed. EXORCISE THESE DEMONS FROM MY BACK, GOOD SIR, BANISH THE MEMORY OF THESE GENTLEMEN TO THE UNHOLY REALM FROM WHENCE THEY CAME!
But that would have been too much, even for PB, so I kind of wheezed out, “It’s fine!”
Bless that man. He put his whole being into those knots.
When it was over, I staggered back into daylight, exhausted, jubilant, and mildly confused. I wanted to go home and nap, but I still had a good chunk of the day left, and work to do besides. My back felt incredible. I believed I could do a cartwheel, which says something, because cartwheels are one thing I never managed to master, even before I let my exes take up residence in my back.
I got home feeling lighter, more at peace. Not exactly relaxed, but still pretty damn happy I went. My back felt a lot better. Maybe — if I concentrate on my posture —those exes er, knots will stay evicted.
I did, however, immediately peel off my shoes and socks to examine my feet.
There was no toe jam.