The Perils of the Massage

oday I got a massage. I was in dire need due to the excessive amount of stress that I've been under for the last two months or so. What amazes me about massage is that it's supposed to aid in the relief of stress; however, I find it can be incredibly painful!

Now, I know plenty of you are sitting there with furrowed brows wondering why massage is painful to me when it probably isn't to you or, if you've never had a massage, pain is not what you imagine when you think of massage. I think my difficulty with massage comes from some anomalous anatomy. Recently I've come to understand that the position of my shoulders is naturally somewhere in my ear canal. I realized this when I noticed that, every time I went to get a massage, the therapist would push down on my shoulders as if she were pushing a stalled car uphill. I couldn't actually see the therapist pushing on my shoulders in this way. But I imagined from the pressure and power of the massage table being propelled away from the therapist that there was quite some momentum behind the massage strokes.

I have no idea when my shoulders took residence on the outside of my ears but it might have something to do with being a native New Yorker (NNY). On a daily basis, just to get to your destination, you have to get low to the ground when you walk in order to weave in and out of all the tourists, who stop out of nowhere just to stare at the skyscrapers. Being lower to the ground also allows you to dodge the walking cell phoners, who zigzag their way through the streets. So in taking this lower position to the ground, somehow I think my shoulders decided they needed to move closer to my ears. This is a survival of the fittest mechanism to protect any wayward swinging elbows from other low-to-ground-walking New Yorkers.

Another reason I think my shoulders have been trying to take a permanent vacation on top of my head is that they are incredibly irritable. Irritability comes with the territory of being a NNY. We have no patience for strollers (either way you look at that word), long lines, inefficiency and bureaucracy. The worst enemy of them all is the elevator button. How many times have I witnessed a bright red elevator call button get pushed 16 extra times? The NNY thinks that continuously pushing the elevator button will make the elevator become an express elevator. Hello! When did Mr. Otis write that into the users' manual? I don't remember ever seeing that, but then again, I've never read the elevator users' manual. Even so, I suspect it's no where in there. Not sure why I think that.

Yes, yes, I'm guilty of the occasional extra button push--but, the elevator has never gotten to me any faster. So, I decided to abandon the activity. I wasn't getting any satisfaction from it.

Another thing I'm not so sure I'm getting any satisfaction from is the pain I get when I have a massage. It's supposed to be relaxing--but it never is to me because I am an avalanche of stress. If there were some way to get rid of all this stress, I know I would actually enjoy massages more. The point of this little article is that stress is painful: it hurts your body (realigning muscles to places they shouldn't anatomically be), it hurts your finger (how many times can the index finger poke into a button without making you very mad?), it hurts your mind (you want to beat the crap out of the smallest things that normally wouldn't even phase you).

I am hoping that no one else has to feel like a broken-down car being pushed up the steepest hill in San Francisco. The only way to do that is to reduce the stress. Take a hot bath, go on vacation, drink some warm tea and watch people go by. Take a moment for yourself.

Although I try to do all that via massage, apparently, I'm never going to feel the stress relief until I can keep the other stressors under bay.

--M.G. Deporte