on remembering.

Today I went to dinner with two dear friends of ten years who have never met each other. To be honest, I was sort of dreading it. I was tired and burnt out from another week of clients, and unprepared for the social effort of introducing and connecting two people for the first time. But if there's anything I have learned from past lean seasons of loneliness, it is the importance of leaning in when seasons are full. 

So lean in I did.

We met at an Egyptian restaurant in Astoria, passing by the counter with all the fresh fish, making our way to a small back corner and into our seats. Small anxious exchanges, oh you can sit there, I'll sit here, do you prefer the left or right side? Whole fish or half? Do you like scallops? Oh, me too!

I never know what to do in these situations. How much do I need to pave the way and make it smoother? What can I say that might make two strangers feel a little more like acquaintances in the shortest period of time? I feel my own uneasiness, the knowing of two separate people so well, seeing the intricacies of their personalities gently weaving in and out of the space between them. Really, it's a lesson on my own codependence. 

I try to relax a little, reminders to myself that I do not have to be the emotional chaperone of this visit. And sure enough, they find their way, as to individually amazing people do. I learn new things about each of them, seeing them in this new environment. When you've been friends with someone for so long, you forget that we are all a little different depending on who we are with. The familiar patterns are there, but with a little more depth than before.

I call this the miracle of three.

Relationships are funny like this--that more of us can be found in greater numbers. That community enhances our connections--individually but also in tandem. We get to celebrate the meeting of the  person in this particular moment, as well as honor the history already present and well worn. 

Something new is born.

And with it, something blooms.

A path is forged in this moment, a joining of strands. It feels like a symphony. 

So although I went in weary, I left anew. A reminder that sometimes connection, though effortful, is also in essence effortless. For in communion the burden is indeed light. 

on birthing pain.

 I think I met God today. Or something close to it. 

I went, as I do maybe once a year, to get a massage at the same place I always go in Flushing. It is the first of the year, and I wanted to start on a good foot with my body. This is something I've been working on, being more attuned to what is both physically and emotionally housed within me. Or, as my therapist puts it, more connected. 

Massages generally fuck me up. I always leave feeling sore and somewhat flu-ish. But my tolerance for pain is high, and I never go down without a fight. Especially if I know there's something good happening in spite of how it feels in the moment. So I went in with this general knowledge--that it would hurt, but that it would also clear me out. A perfect New Years recipe.

But I was sorely (literally) unprepared for the experience that was about to be bestowed upon me. The man who massaged me might have been an archangel come to exorcise the pain out of my body and into hell itself. He started normally, working with a towel covering my body, warming the muscles up. And then his attention turned to my neck. 

He started needling his fingers into the side of my neck, seemingly attempting to excavate the knot that had formed there over years of stress and poor posture. I heard him above me. "Waaaaaaah" he kept saying in concerned exclamation. After a few minutes of this, he prods me to look up. He holds out a translation on his phone, asking me if my neck hurts when I turn it side to side, if I have a lot of pain there. I convey an emphatic yes, and he nods reverently, as if I just told him a holy prayer. 

He continues to massage this area, really getting into the crevices. I can hear my knots clicking, as if my joints were coming apart. I am trying to breathe. I am trying to not yelp in pain. I am trying to unclench my butt cheeks. 

He notices it all. 

I hear him above me "hee-hee HOO, hee-hee HOO" coaching me to breathe into the pain like we are practicing Lamaze. He feels my body squirm under the pressure and gently but firmly holds it still. He makes noises along with me--little acknowledgements of what I am feeling. He is feeling it with me, breathing with me, ushering me from one release to the next. We don't speak the same language, but we know what we are experiencing together, this commitment to working with what my body has to say. 

He doesn't let me feel it alone. Every time he works out one area, he sighs with me in relief. Every grimace or laugh I make at the ridiculousness of how much it hurts, he knowingly laughs along with me. I do not suffer in lonely silence. The physicality of it all is at once humorous and tender, a silly little experience human of connection in the most vulnerable but professional experience. 

At the end he gives me a little pat and bows. I sit up, born anew, with an understanding of my body that wasn't there before--where the pain points were, yes, but also how the pain had been transformed by  experiencing it with another. 

Everyone deserves to have a pain doula just once in their life, to be held and brought forward in tenderness and strength. To have someone witness but also work with your burdens in a tangible way, to feel into it with you, to be with you and not turn away but usher you forward, breathing you into the new.

That's the true miracle I say, that holiness of connection, that sacred birthing of pain.