How To Ruin a Massage in 22 Carefully Plotted Steps

It's a unique gift to ruin self-care practices with your own thoughts, you guys.

Hey, friends, it’s another Monday, and I want to give an enthusiastic “Welcome!” to all the new subscribers who popped up here since last week. So, “Welcome,” complete with spazzy hand-clapping, squealing, and maybe a hug if you consent. Since there are a handful of people who are brand new around here, here are a few little bits of housekeeping and updates and exciting happenings. And, oh! One big announcement, which is new info even for my longest, most loyal, and without a doubt favorite readers.

• Last week, my HerStories Project partner Jessica and I were honored to launch Midstory Magazine right here on Substack. This is a publication where we explore love, loss, and friendship at midlife. Gen X-ers, I’m looking at you. You can read my welcome post here, in which I share the role my own divorce has played in our focus on relationships, specifically coupling and uncoupling, at midlife. For our paid subscribers, I share a much grittier look at the reality of single parenting in this new era of my life in this essay, Solo. Writing friends, our paid subscriptions also feature subscriber only calls for submissions, bonus columns, and other resources for writers.

• If you’re new around here, I am working on my first memoir! You can read a few excerpts here and here, and I am collecting guest submissions about childhood homes—whether or not you consider yourself a “real writer,” I would love to feature your stories about what your childhood homes have meant to you. Details here.

• I am so grateful to all the amazing people who reached out with comments and private messages after last week’s ADHD column. I’ll share a follow-up column soon, and ICYMI, you can read Can We Talk About Adult ADHD? here and weigh in in the comments or through DM.

  So speaking of neurodivergence, today’s column is a little glimpse inside the busyness of my brain—I’m genuinely curious as to whether anyone else has the unique habit of ruining like, every fun thing, with their mind chatter. A large part of my memoir is based on my penchant for retracing my steps, and how I can’t seem to stop doing that. See below. 🙃

How To Ruin a Massage in 22 Carefully Plotted Steps

Lying face down on the warm table, the scent of lavender and ylang ylang wafts around me. I’m fairly confident my massage therapist has only been working on me for about eight minutes. Which leaves 82 delicious minutes remaining! I will not ruin this appointment by talking. But I will ruin it by thinking. 

For years I have crafted a special practice of sabotaging body care treatments with tendencies that may lie outside the realm of the neurotypical. First I began with the backwards countdown. You’re still lying on your stomach, which means you’re in the first half! The majority of your massage is still ahead to enjoy. Now stop talking about your Easter weekend disaster. Shut the fuck up and savor every second—nobody cares about the ham.

Inevitably, I’ll console myself after flipping over: It’s ok, there’s definitely at least 40 minutes left. Think about it—that’s so long! And then, I know this is the last body part, but it’s your favorite part of the massage, so just really enjoy every minute. You have at least 12 left. I hope she doesn’t skip massaging your scalp. Finally, as I anticipate the inevitable devastation of my serene practitioner gently grasping my feet as a last moment of grounding and positive energy to my already re-tightening body, I reassure myself: Don’t worry, you have a piece of chocolate to eat as soon as you get in the car. It will be so great! You can turn on the seat warmer and listen to your Epic Road Trip Playlist even though you aren’t on a road trip. You’ll love it. It’s ok. 

I long ago discovered a compulsively hedonistic need to swing from one pleasure vine to the next. The cup of coffee I imagined before drifting off to sleep. The flannel sheets I gently caressed as I walked past my bed whispering, “I’ll be back in less than three hours,” as I bid it farewell on my way out the door. The afterschool cocktail, the facial appointment, the vacation in 22 days, the sheer ecstasy of merely falling asleep at night. I constantly gave myself these vines to grab so I didn’t fall into a pit of alligators, e.g. anxiety, paired with the tedium of daily minutiae. But that post-massage chocolate was next level: I needed to know I had a reason to live after the backward mental countdown ended and I got dressed again.

This is not me, you guys.

Once I force myself to stop perseverating on how many minutes of massage I have left and its correlation to my overall level of despondency, I begin playing other mind games.

Today I contemplate how many massage therapists I’ve had since my first ever massage, gifted to me on my 21st birthday by my boyfriend whose workplace she visited. I’d woken up to an envelope on my pillow with directions to her apartment, where I would drive following my grueling work day at an underfunded inner city daycare center, and after which I would order a screwdriver as my first ever legal alcoholic beverage (such an offensive choice that I haven’t consumed one since age 22) at a fancy restaurant on the water called “Pieces of 8.” I remember little about the massage itself, except that it must have signaled my entry into adulthood, or alternatively, my entry into preoccupation with vines of hedonism. 

In my early twenties, there was Lily, who worked on my tennis elbow and later became the first regular “self-care budget item” as I routinely booked appointments even though I couldn’t afford the $45 fee. She massaged me the morning of my first wedding and told me that the reason I felt so awful was not because I was filled with regret at marrying the wrong person and hungover from my desperate attempt to ignore that knowledge at my rehearsal dinner, but rather because I was wearing black and absorbing other people’s negative energy. Hmm. 

There were the fancy day-spa massages generally saved for my birthday, including one man named Michael who made me wonder why I never got massages from men and Tanya who acquainted me with “pressure points,” of which I had many. There was the inexpensive membership place where I had the herbalist-in-training who introduced me to the slightly cloying word “tincture,” the one I referred to as the “Pied Piper of Necks,” the Boomer who talked way too much, the first prenatal massage therapist who inappropriately told me all about her pregnancy losses, the second prenatal massage therapist who came to my house with her table and tolerated my concerned, yapping dog standing on hind legs to protect me from this unusual attention, and of course the fancy fancy day spa massages I got once a year on my kid-free getaways, one of whom graciously received my unusual compliment: “Your hands are like Mary Poppins and I’m Jane and Michael Banks.” 

The massage therapist working on me as I ruin 90 minutes by writing this essay in my head laughed when I told her the knot she found was the “Wardrobe to pain Narnia,” thus prompting me to revisit every other massage metaphor I’d ever blurted out, thus prompting me to reflect on every massage therapist I ever had. . . and oh! Karen, in Mexico, maybe the best massage of my entire life, decadent to the point of delirium, and of course my regular therapist, to whom I refer as my “guru,” as she always knows what to do, about everything. 

Self-care is so relaxing!

After trying to retrace my massage therapists over 23 years, I move on to my sexual partners, a tried and true repetitive exercise that always feels incomplete. Surely I’m missing someone between numbers 7 and 8? Or maybe I’m just thinking of the boy who either gave me mono or received it from me, who spent the night with me that one time when our ancient apartment building heater got stuck on, causing him to evacuate our bedroom around 3 a.m. and my roommate to sleep on the porch to avoid cooking to death or going insane. But we didn’t technically have sex, so he’s not on the list. I always think I’m forgetting someone. I never am. 

Oh! I should count how many homes I’ve lived in before I take the actual pilgrimage to visit them all this summer as research for a book I’m writing. Starting with the home I was too young to recall, meandering through my school years, incorporating a handful of apartments over college summers and my frequent relocation during my first stint as a single parent, there are 18 homes in all. If I created a bedroom for more than a few months, it counted.  

I continue to work busily inside my head, sharing aloud with my therapist that my neck is like a “rent-controlled apartment for my neuroses” (after dismissing my initial quip of “Section 8 Housing” as potentially offensive and un-PC), and decide I should become a stand-up comedian with these massage-inspired gems (or maybe a lie-down comedian. . . no good?). I have such great ideas on the table, and no place to put them.

I try to do the thing where you envision your thoughts as clouds that pass by, but I dismiss that immediately and instead hold on for dear life; I clearly don’t want to lose these thoughts, hence the clever trail of breadcrumbs I leave myself. I wonder if a massage therapist would be horrified if I requested she take dictation for me, or maybe I could clutch a mini-recorder under the sheet and record my thoughts as they tumbled out, Faulkner-style. 

It dawns on me that perhaps these breadcrumbs are actually a built-in system of loss prevention. I leave myself a trail to retrace my steps so I don’t get lost.

Kind of like I gave myself a mnemonic device to remember that body part I like to have worked on and love to stretch, the one whose name I could never remember until I made up a clue psoas not to forget. I remind myself to share these thoughts with my children afterward, with my usual addendum of “Do you like my joke?” which my teenager says ruins the joke, but I disagree. 

Do other people have great ideas during massages? Is anyone’s mind quiet, aside from those rare creatures who actually fall asleep? I feel a flush of shame that I’ve ruined yet another massage by getting lost inside my own head while this angel guides me through Pain Narnia and back out the wardrobe again. Not lost, I remind myself. I’ll write it all down later, thanks to the trail of breadcrumbs I left. But first I’ll eat the foil-wrapped dark chocolate heart I left in the car, lest I plunge into regret and despair until I grab the next vine. 

• Locals, grab your tickets to Listen To Your Mother Denver at the Oriental Theater on Tennyson on Sunday, November 5th at 5:00 pm. You can get home in time for dinner and bedtime if you’re consumed with guilt (hey, no judgment, I get it) or hit Highlands for dinner with your BFFs or partner. This is an alumni show, and the pieces are some of our beloved audience favorites, so you don’t want to miss it! Plus, you can hear me read “Main Character Mommy,” which was published recently in Motherwell Magazine.

  

  Tickets here