Reach Out and Touch Someone

I recently started seeing a massage therapist regularly. She's an older woman who plays the clarinet and went to college to be a band director. I'd describe her as a grown up band geek who never realized how beautiful she is. She has this insecure eagerness about her that sort of bubbles over when she gets nervous, which is always. She says I make her nervous because I have such a beautiful energy and on the mornings of my appointments she gets excited to work on me. This is exactly the opposite of what I assume any intuitive healer might feel about me. Actually, I would assume that they can sense that I'm full of baggage and tension and that I deeply embody a shit ton of pain and that any healer who doesn't run away from me must lack intuition. But with this particular woman, that is not at all what is coming up.

At the beginning of each massage, she clears the space by opening her arms wide as she whispers something to herself. Exactly what she says, I'm still not sure but it makes the corners of my mouth reach towards my ears and I gently place all my shit on the floor for her to fold into neat little piles. She gravitates towards pain I never mentioned and she finds pain I didn't yet know about. She doesn't make it go away but rather, she makes it feel better. She brings it to my attention and it's like she's saying, "you know this stuff right here?..here is where that came from and here's why it's okay." It makes it easier to carry it all around until I'm ready to let go of it. And all that shit on the floor? I don't always pick all that up at the end. I'm not sure what she does with the stuff I leave behind but the stuff I do insist on leaving with, is now perfectly organized and far more manageable than when I walked in.

Today when I left, she said that she saw my wings. They weren't bird wings but more like angel wings, blueish green and they were gigantic. She said that they were sort of coming off at the bottom so she was trying to reattach them. I guess I have been called an angel once or twice but I'm still not sure what to make of that. What I am sure of, however, is that human touch is a necessity. We need that shit, even if it's from a stranger and you have to pay them to touch you. If you're like me, you prefer to pay someone because long hugs from friends and family always felt more awkward than comforting. Either way, from a loved one or a masseuse, it's magical stuff. Babies who aren't held, suffer greatly in terms of health and development. I think adults do too. I just spent a year of my life laying in bed next to someone who wouldn't touch me. Someone who thought hello and goodbye hugs were intimacy. Someone who told me he loved me all the time but never cuddled with me, never had sex with me. I forgot what it felt like to be touched. I still can't remember what it feels like to be held. I wonder if that's why my wings have begun to detach?

I'm still not sure what this shit is about....

So I started a blog ya'll. I'm still not sure what it's about. I do know that I will use quotation marks and the word "shit" way too often and I probably won't want my parents to read most of the posts. But, they will because I decided a few years ago that they deserve to know me, the good and the bad. I have the kind of parents who don't really have much going on besides what's going on with their kids. Despite this, when I was young, I lied to them constantly and intentionally shut them out of my life. I was a terrible kid. (I'm sure I will share exactly how terrible I was in later posts.)
I feel really really bad about most of the shit I put them through. So I guess now, I try to make that up to them by giving them an all access pass to most things in my life. Hi Mom and Dad👋 Welcome to my life and other silly shit!

Here's my first terrible kid story... When I entered high school, my English teacher pulled me out of class after the first week and expressed that she didn't think I belonged there. If you knew me in high school, you know that there were many reasons why I didn't belong "there" but Ms. Koenitzer was specifically referring to her English class. I think maybe the eighth grade English teacher had made each student a portfolio of all of their writing and given it to the teachers of all the incoming freshmen. Or maybe Ms. Koenitzer had specifically asked my eighth grade teacher for samples of my writing. Either way, she insisted that I had a really special talent and if she made me sit through her English class with the rest of the kids, she would be neglecting my potential. I think she even specifically said, "You aren't going to learn anything in my class." Truth of the matter is, I thought that sounded great! I loved an easy A. In fact, throughout high school and college, I proceeded to make sure that I got the best grades possible with extremely minimal effort. But Ms. Koenitzer didn't recommend AP English. She recommended "independent study" and that sounded more effortless than your average English class. The deal was that I would spend the year trying to get my writing published. As far as I remember, that was my only assignment. I checked in with her a few times a week to show her what I was working on and to go over the submission process with various publications. I always had work to show her every week and I did end up getting a poem published. But at the time, all I cared about was lusting after snowboarders at the local ski hill and driving around with my older sister finding cool skate spots, chasing cute boys on skateboards. And my sister was a writer, still is actually. So I just stole one of her notebooks and copied one of the poems she had written. It was my favorite one, so it was no wonder that it was the one that ended up getting published.

I never wrote much...not then and not now so I don't know if I'll type anything worth reading on here but it's come to my attention lately that I am way better at writing than I am at talking. (I'm also way good at run-on sentences)  Now is the perfect time to start writing since I don't have anyone to talk to anyway. Five months ago, I moved to rural Michigan from Northern California. The only person I know here is my business partner. He and I don't talk much since I quit drinking and he found a girlfriend. Most days I only speak to my dog, in my super baby doggy voice nonetheless. So here it goes... here's all the shit I think about that no one gets to listen to.