Every Day is Marne Gras

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.