I had a massage practitioner in personal-life-meltdown who unburdened herself during our weekly sessions, and eventually I had to quit her practice. We had begun as friends, and she was a wonderful, tuned-in practitioner before her personal crisis, but increasingly I found myself leaving our sessions more uptight than when I arrived: the stress energy in her hands, the weight of her information and the effort to respond to her kept me from giving myself over completely to the session and reaping its full psychological and muscular benefits. She eventually pulled back from active practice, took a few years off to nourish herself, and is back providing wonderful, tuned-in bodywork to a fortunate clientele (which unfortunately no longer includes me; since starting my own biz my disposable income is exhausted by one trip to 7-11).

Thanks for this novellita, Kel. I love the part about finally letting go and letting the river wash over you, and finding a surprise pathway there. That rings very true to my central belief about life and other people, and in fact I have a post — as yet unwritten — about this very thing happening to me in Morocco, of all places. I’ll get to it someday.

I have a love/annoyance relationship with my hair designer (the term on which she firmly insists and with which I have no quibble) and Sheryl Crow doppleganger, whom I would follow from her current Gasworks Burke-Gilman Trail’s edge condo/salon to the farthest reaches of a 20-mile radius because she gives my wispies the loveliest delusions of grandeur. I leave her chair knowing that on any given day in the next five weeks (when my next cut or perm – oh dear, now *that* cat is debagged – is scheduled) I’ll be able to coax my best look out of my graying hanks with only a few moments effort (I don’t always give it even those few, but if you ever see me looking like I just decamped from Whoville that’s down to me, not her).

She was referred to me by someone whose similarly-structured follicular output I have frequent opportunities to assess, so I was sold before ever shaking her smallish hand.

I’ve been tipping my head trustingly backwards into her shampoo sink for oh, five or six years now, and while I am a slave to her work I have found her type-A, non-stop, self-centric conversational personal style a tad stressful. In this aspect she is one of those people in my life who is, because I choose to make her so, one of my greatest teachers. In her chair I’m not really a contributing speaker, but a substantial rock around which the river of her words sluices, continuously, tangential eddies tugging for assurance and/or validation.

For a long time I splashed fretfully upstream, wanting equal time in the conversation, wanting her to hear me, finally wanting her to just zip it for pity’s sake. Finally, in about year four I’m ashamed to admit, I flopped back, exhausted, and just let the stream wash over. That’s when I actually started hearing her with my compassionate inner ear, not my “here we go again” ear, and understood with what bravery and intrepidity (did I just make up a word?) she traverses a life path riddled with more than its fair share of potholes. I have a front-row seat for 45-120 minutes to her earnest quest for decency, meaning, love, affordable healthcare and reliable motorcycle parts. I see her valiance, her tenacity, her compassion, her fierce passion for tolerance and equal rights. She’s well on her way to being one of my heroes, and I think that at current doses of 10-11/yr she’ll stay that way.