I share my feelings once a week with my therapist in a small room I already wrote a little bit about last week. The old therapist has gone for good and the new one hasn’t started yet (we’ll meet next week), but luckily I am currently receiving TWO KINDS OF THERAPY so I still have something else to write about.
I tried to write something about one of my jobs, my full time job as a barista at the university, because I want to believe that something about it is interesting and worth reading about. In attempting to do this I have only become dead certain that forty hours of my week is absolutely wasted life. This makes me feel sad.
Cue the denial… and back to therapy!
For the past two months I have been going to massage therapy. I had surgery to donate bone marrow five months ago (as of today; in exactly one month I am able to find out what happened to the lady who received my body juice. Power up, bitch.). This surgery involved the drilling of four holes into me, which involved my insides repairing themselves in the form of messy scar tissue that creates pain. Stand up sit down I need an ice pack and a heating pad pain. Pain as a constant part of life makes me feel like I am aging very rapidly, like I am suddenly becoming my grandmother, whose hands were gnarled by arthritis long before I was born. Some day I am going to become a woman who cannot even knit to soothe herself. I will have to settle for chain smoking and slot machines and other activities that do not require manual dexterity. shit.
The solution to this pain is massage therapy (along with not working in a job that involves standing up 50 hours a week, but the marrow donor program insurance doesn’t really know how to deal with that one), the idea being that we can pay a nice person to dig their extremities into me and knead out the scar tissue into something more closely resembling the smooth soft tissue that was there prior to the introduction of heavy machinery four inches from my asshole. This process in itself involves quite a lot of pain, but it is a sexy kind of pain that involves me getting naked under fancy cotton sheets and getting rubbed all up in my giblets with lotion by a large man with sinewy arms. Bring the pain, I say.
I find myself in a very soothing closet-sized room filled with massage doodads an hour per week now, naked with Colin, my massage therapist. God I love saying that. My massage therapist. My masseur. My man. Hot dog.
Colin has a chiseled smile and a degree (perhaps a certificate?) in touching others. We spend an hour a week focusing entirely on my body, an activity that does not at all resembling the focusing I do on my own of my wiggly pastiness in the bathroom mirror in the time between my morning poo and my morning shower. This is much more productive and glamorous focusing.
The last and only other massage I had ever had before now was a one shot wonder with a woman at the Aveda salon in Lorain, Ohio. My hour with her was a 20th surprise birthday present from a few friends, who pooled a week of their work study salaries on my being rubbed down by an Ohioan. ‘Its the thought that counts’ my ass.
Massages, pedicures, any services that involve people touching parts of you as the principal activity make me queasy. I don’t like it, and I squirmed the entire time I was receiving my birthday massage, utterly pissed that my friends had ambushed me.
The massage therapy I am receiving now feels purposeful, and it is interactive, and the bottom line is that I am not naked most of the time and Colin can do things with his toes that I cannot even dream of and I feel not conflicted or yucky about our goings on.
We do a lot of stretching. Some of it is yoga inspired poses; I do a variation on pigeon pose a lot that we worked out together. We spent a few sessions moving my body into different stretches and holds that do things like lengthen me and open me and make me feel like I am doing something with long term value for my health. This is good. I enjoy stretching with Colin because I am a bendy person; I have always flexible in the party trick kind of way, and I live for Colin moving me into a pose only to find that I am too flexible to get any stretch out of it. I don’t have many skills. I have to get it where I can. And man do those boy’s eyes light up when I open up into a v-sit. Mm-hmm. Damn.
The stretching has been a welcome improvement to my life. I have begun to incorporate weekly stretching routines into my life at home, so now my housemates can look at facebook and listen to me breathe extra deeply and contort my body in ways that make me moan uncontrollably. I have caused more than one roommate to excuse herself from a perfectly enjoyable afternoon in the den with a book or a puzzle (yes, a puzzle. we are a broke and easily amused people) to get away from my public display of grunting and twisting myself into nearly all the letters of the alphabet.
The massages themselves are not of this world. I am already not a big fan of western medicine and openly insulted more than one hospital professional, with their ideas of ‘premedicating’ while I was hospitalized in August, but this is an exercise in taking everything you know about western medicine and throwing it out the window. Throwing it out the window and then getting naked and climbing on a table so a man you just met can stand on you and tap dance up and down your perineum.
And shit, it works. My back feels more open, and less pained. Filling with good, warmer energy. Learning to stretch and strengthen the key muscles around my back. And breaking up all of the tough scar tissue that made my back recoil at the brush of a finger a month ago.
Last Thursday Colin spent the first part of the session twisting and pulling on my legs, doing something that sounded like ‘opening up my chakras’ when I asked why I felt like I was being stretched on a rack (instead of loved on a table), but after I thought I heard that I decided not to push it and just be quiet and go with it before the vocabulary made me judgmental and stiff. Well played, Marn-o. And after that song and dance, I closed my eyes and felt this very fully grown man get up on the table and dig his heels into me. I don’t watch and I don’t ask, so I don’t know all of what goes on back there, but the bulk of massage is his feet in my back and bits. His hands do some of the work too, but by and large it is the different parts of his feet that break off chunks of whatever has fused together in me, and I swear I feel entirely less pained and yet so sore I can barely move when the affair is over. I try not to moan or make jokes, and I clearly fail at both regularly. At our last session I realized I was drooling all over the pillow and then as he put all of his weight on the small of my back I muttered ‘you must be really fun at parties’.
I know, I couldn’t do any better? I really should have just kept on drooling.
The brilliant part of all this is that even though I now have health insurance from my union job, the marrow donor program is covering this therapy entirely. I spend an hour each week in a massage I fully know costs around $100 per session, and I don’t have to talk to anyone about billing or payment or insurance. The fact that I am receiving a wicked expensive service without any red tape is practically therapy enough. My luck marvels me. I feel like Mr. Magoo.
Last week, as my therapist diddled with my chakras, he stopped, brow furrowed, and told me that maybe I could really benefit from a few sessions of acupuncture. That it might be really great for the pain I’ve been experiencing (he’d never worked with a marrow donor before, and he works in a naturopathy clinic where people swap patients and remedies all the time. like a big natural health orgy. love it.). It appears I may now receive a few weeks of acupuncture to aid in my healing process. I am over the moon and I hope the marrow donor program doesn’t raise their eyebrows and torch the paperwork in response. I am feeling awfully experimental and playful these days (and as I am not getting any, clearly this must physically manifest itself in health practitioner related ways instead), and I am fairly certain that acupuncture will make for better writing than my time in the internet cafe at the U.
In our last session, while he was entirely over and up on top of me, I asked Colin how old he was (thirty three). Colin does not like to talk about himself, and he does not especially enjoy his very talky clients (I know this because I’ve asked about these sorts of preferences). I am not very secretly in love with the fact that I can ask Colin anything I damn well please, and I don’t mind if he doesn’t answer or if he lies or if he tells me that he’s thirty three. After many moons spent only with a talky therapist, I am now enjoying the company of a therapist who is doing things to help and heal me while at the same time not concerning myself in any way with the power dynamics of the situation. There is so much to navelgaze about in talky therapy in terms of the relationship of the counselor to the client. Therapy is so blatantly subjective in ways that I am pretty comfortable with, but there are also big issues of power to negotiate and/or avoid, issues of relationship building and boundary setting and the creation of trust and oy! So much work to build this world with this person so you feel safe enough to sift through your life with them!
The work with Colin got done in four weeks. He saw me naked five minutes after we’d met; he knows where all of the moles on my back are. There are barely a dozen other people in the world with that information (okay, maybe more like two dozen?). I didn’t need to see his certificate in touching people to talk at great length with him about the innerworkings of my body before we got started. The stretching and active massaging that we’ve done has served as a great little scaffold for a relationship in which I am eager and open to trying new things in order to feel better. I can ask him things like what did he eat for dinner last night and what is his middle name (Donald) without him asking me why I want to know that, is if the answer to that question is the key to the knots in my hips. I’m not quite sure if talky therapy really could be this easy, or if it should be, but something about this has been very gentle and free and good in all of the ways that therapy took such a long time to become.
The talky therapist never asks much about how my physical body is holding up, and my massage therapist never asks much about how that lump three feet above my ass is handling itself these days, and I am kind of waiting for my two therapists to run into each other in the grocery store or something and get the idea that their work might have something to do with the other’s. One of my favorite activities is sometimes to sit in talky therapy and think ‘i wonder how long it would take for her to tell me to just go for a goddamn run’. Conversely, I like to lie on the massage table and think ‘I wonder if Colin thinks about my feelings’. This is my favorite hallmark of the american version of nonwestern medicine. Or westernized nonwestern medicine. We cannot bring ourselves to believe in the wholeness of our own bodies. We cannot see ourselves in terms of the messy connections that make my head and hands and back and brain all more or less different views of the same machine that broke down more often than my sister’s Hyundai did last year. I know how humorous this is, coming from a person who mostly only sees things in terms of black and white (particularly black, talky therapist would add here), but it makes me smile, and it makes me think, and it helps me heal.
Earlier this week I lost my therapist.
I started seeing her in mid-August, when I was without a house of my own, bouncing around from couch to spare room, trying to find a space I could afford on my salary (which was zero, because I had no job). I was just getting over the two weeks of invalidity post-marrow surgery. A recent major scuffle with a friend ended in “seriously, marne, you really need to work out your shit. like, in therapy.”, and I didn’t immediately feel the impulse to tell that friend to go fuck herself. I felt crumbly all over.
It felt like within moments of deciding to check out the therapy scene (Seattle has excellent sliding scale community mental health resources, holy hotsauce), I was suddenly sitting crosslegged in an overstuffed peasoup colored armchair in the “Periwinkle Room” facing the woman who would be my therapist.
I went to therapy once before: I was in first grade, and I had recently gotten my first pair of glasses. I was six, and I refused to wear the glasses. I don’t remember having trouble seeing, and I had never heard of glasses before I was in the optometrist’s office, getting fitted for a pair. I was completely unaware of what was going on until we left that monochromatic office with my new tortoiseshell glasses. I held my new glasses case with my glasses in them in my hand, and I held onto my mother with my other hand as I skipped towards the car. “So when do I wear them?” I asked, as if I had forgotten. “All the time”, my mother said, “starting right now.” (my dialog punctuation is terrible. I know. I’m okay; you’re okay).
I froze. I remember thinking that my life was on the brink of changing forever. For six blissful years I had just been Marne, unadorned in my own body, save the ever-present scrunchie. And now, a new addition to my face. Forever. I was horrified, and I flat out refused.
Eventually I caved and wore them at home, but I refused to wear them at school. My first grade teacher made me put them on my desk at all times, and she oversaw several schemes my mother came up with to get me to put them on. Example: My mother offered to buy me the snack food I coveted the most, Dunkaroos (those little kangaroo biscuits that get dipped in frosting? part of this complete early onset diabetes yeah!), in exchange for wearing my glasses at school. I ate the Dunkaroos but reneged on the glasses, and my teacher informed my mother, who grounded me for a week. This is one of the few times I ever got caught doing anything growing up.
The therapy thing was a last resort, and it involved a lot of coloring my feelings for a therapist who had no chance at figuring out what the fuck was up with me. I was an outcast in the making, reading five grades ahead of the other boys and girls in my class, already singled out for academics a few times a day. I had short hair, a weird name, and I was the only Jew on the first floor of Holbrook Road Elementary (my sister was the only Jew on the second floor). At six, I had already figured out that the glasses were overkill.
The end of that story is that the therapist gave up, I didn’t have to go into her supply closet of an office and color my feelings anymore, and when second grade started I decided to grow up and accept my drippy destiny.
So these past five or six months have been my first go-around in the kind of therapy that consists of talking rather than coloring. I think I am able to write about this whole process now with some modicum of compassion and okayness (emphasis on I think, we’ll see how mean I am to myself as we progress), but I have spent most of the past five or six months self-consciously poking fun at myself, confounded by the parfait of cliche that is myself in therapy.
Let’s acknowledge that now: what part of this is not ridiculous? I pay a stranger to listen to my problems, to affirm me, to yell at me, to help me figure out what to do about shit I used to figure out on my own a half year ago (although we can all reference the first paragraph as a reminder of how well that was going). Every part of my experience in therapy has been serialized/fictionalized/memorialized in countless other works of work– the setting, the therapist, the me, the talking; you already know this story. I am now writing an essay about paying someone to listen to me talk about myself. Clearly I have too much time, money, and sense of self-importance. I have mostly moved away from internally gawking at the above facts, but you can keep rereading this paragraph if that’s where you’re at.
My therapist kicks my ass every week. She gives me useful and meaningful affirmations, listens to what I’m thinking about on a range of issues (all regarding… myself) and then totally schools me. Not in a pedagogical way, not in a mean way, not in an all-seeing-god type way. My therapist is mostly humble and joyful and very pleasant and exactly the kind of person you would want for a therapist, and she is honest, insightful, and generally present for our sessions. She tells me things I don’t want to think, she encourages me to think about how the fucked up things in my life are related, and she walked me through possible ways to change the things about myself that I would like to change. She laughs at my jokes and calls me things like ‘tough nut’, but then walks right up to the chasm-ic depth of my faults and tries to get me to come stand next to her for a souvenir photo. She is getting me to develop some very basic ideas of what more compassion and humility would look like in my life, and she just smiles and doesn’t even flinch when I confide that sometimes I enjoy being an asshole.
This is, of course, all over now, because my therapist has left the location where I get therapized, and codes of ethics (not that I have any, but those therapists sure do) state that she can’t steal clients. This means me.
I am standing in this little place right now where I could decline the new therapist that I will be offered by the lovely folks at the community mental health place that offers me lovely low cost therapy. I could decide that I’ve grown and ‘worked’ enough to be done for awhile, that because there are no glaring problems of enormous wrongity in my life that I could spend my money on something more immediately gratifying like sandwiches or sex toys. I could say fuck navelgazing, I’m taking up an east Asian martial art in a semi culturally appropriative way! No one would notice, and my old therapist, who told me her job was to hold hope for me when i could not, would probably decide to see this as part of my great big process, if word ever got to her piece of the grapevine. Not to mention the fact that none of this talking will change the fact that I, like the rest of you, am going to die alone (who doesn’t go to therapy for that?).
But I remain here, nonetheless, waiting for the introductory call from my new therapist, to schedule an appointment, to go back to the Periwinkle room and sit across from a new, forgettable, non-judgmental face, and talk some more about me. I am now a person who believes in therapy, and I don’t even need to make any qualifying jokes after saying so. I can say with a mostly straight face that it took five months of therapy to figure out that I believe in therapy, and I can mostly manage to type without laughing that hopefully later in the year this blog will contain artfully written accounts of my attempts at progress and self-betterment and all of those things that one tends to think a lot about in January. Emphasis on mostly.
I think in lists.
I am in love with words and word order in a flippant sort of way, but I am really in love with words in numbered orders with descending importance.
Example: I asked my barista coworkers at the university to rank the milks in order of their steaming preference.
I love absolutes, and that is why I love the New Year.
Celebrating the new year gives me a reason to order and evaluate every iota of my life. Moreover, it gives me a chance to overextend myself into the lives of others to see if YOU are “reflecting” on the past year as I feel you ought to be.
I moved beyond “so, do you have a new year’s resolution” when I was eight. I want to know what the most fulfilling month of your year was, what your motto for last year was and how long it took for you to forget it. I want to know where you were last year and what your regrets were about that and how this night is going for you so far and where you think it will stack up to your other december thirtyfirsts. I want to know how you rank this year in comparison to all the other years you’ve fucked up. I want to know about your biggest fuck-ups, best kisses, worst Thursdays, and I want to hear about them in ascending order of how often you think about.
(As a side note, my sister was born today and I often think about what it must be like to have your birthday be on this very strange day, and I like to ask people what their feelings are on this subject every year. Having a family member with a major holiday for a birthday clearly makes me more interesting. Addy: I hope you are drowning in a bathtub of free birthday champagne somewhere and not reading my blog on your birthday vacation canadia binge. The gifts are almost in the mail).
Now that I’ve been in this city for a year and a half and I have friends who will listen to me at least long enough to tell me to shut up and get them another beer, I have learned exactly how much more I obsess about the new year than everyone else.
The week before the new year is probably the only week out of the year when I can be counted on to actually make real small talk. I could talk for hours about the ways in which we evaluate our lives. It is kind of an awkward passion, but it makes the holiday parties a little less stressful.
It is fitting that the only time I can get engaged with strangers in conversation is when we’re talking about ways you think you can be a better person. I can’t maintain eye contact for more than a minute and a half the other eleven months out of the year, but suddenly when you start owning up to not taking care of your body or writing your novel or being less of an asshole to your girlfriend, I can stay with you long enough to get somewhere.
A long string of my december thirtyfirsts were spent at home, on the couch, more or less married to the forty-eight hour Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi Network. They were interchangeably miserable affairs. I would be slumped over a big pillow in the corner of our gigantic green sectional, snuggled under a blanket, in my pajamas by 7:30pm, staring at the exact same lineup of episodes year after year. Sometimes my father would watch a few episodes with me, but inevitably I was alone as my parents and ever more interesting siblings had other plans. It was terrible, but I held fast to it as my tradition, and I proudly said that all I wanted one day was a boyfriend who just wanted to watch the Twilight Zone marathon as much as I did on New Year’s Eve.
Boy, those were big dreams.
This is the third consecutive year that I have not been in front of the television for the Twilight Zone marathon. Note that I still count this as a significant personal statistic.
Last night felt like a giant exhale, like the moment a pair of new shoes you’ve been breaking in start to fit comfortably. Or something. I spent time with some friends at my house, and at another friend’s house. I drank a beer and forced everyone to reminisce about their favorite months (June: I took two weeks off of work, watched every episode of Sex and the City on DVD and spent a week driving and hiking through the southwest. I also had a job, a place to live, health insurance, and food stamps. There were also more than four hours of daylight). At 11:30 we wandered over to Gasworks Park to watch the fireworks that set off from the Space Needle (literally, it looks as if the space needle is exploding… albeit in a colorful, joyful way). It was beautiful and mellow and simple.
I had forgotten all about the Twilight Zone until someone this morning asked me how I used to spend the holiday as a kid. I am not the sort of person that I was, which is expected, but I am more curious about the fact that I am changing with consciousness, without intentionally attempting to distance myself from that epoch. I am effortlessly different. So much for being self-aware.
I love that there is this holiday completely devoted to 1. something vaguely related to nature 2. new beginnings and 3. champagne and kissing. I love that for a minute, people really do believe in their ability to change, their ability to construct the PERFECT evening plans with the PERFECT outfit, the ability to convince themselves that next year really will be better. This night is full of so much hope (a secular kind of hope!(!!))
On the drive back from the park we attempted to deconstruct our mottoes from last year and create new, better, perfect ones for this year. Mottoes to set a triumphant tone, to manifest good sex and effortless parallel parking and other things like that. We didn’t come up with anything, but the macro way of thinking pleased me, and the company was good. Sometimes it is a lot easier to be an adult than it was to be fourteen.
At ten am this morning I found myself sitting at my breakfast table with a good friend, marveling over the fact that this 2009 was still perfect, and had not been ruined in any way by the events of the night before. It has been a long time coming.
May we all be sealed.
