Social Anxiety Ruined My First Professional Massage

Alright my lovelies, for today’s magical journey through my social anxiety, we will see how that social anxiety ruined my first professional massage. Come along with me.

My Social Anxiety

Ok, so I am over 30 and I have never had a professional massage. I feel like that really isn’t that weird, but thought I’d mention it.

Anyway… a little backstory, for over a year I have had these horrible shoulder/neck/jaw pains that have felt like I went head-to-head with an MMA fighter, and desperately lost. My jaw would throb for seemingly no reason at all. I literally couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t workout, lift anything, do anything that would piss off those muscles.

So one thing led to another and I find my self with a massage appointment.

Side question: Who thought it was a good idea to have strangers oil you up and rub your body in the first place? Asking for a friend…

Aside from that, I knew from the get-go that this was a terrible idea. It’s one of those things that I say I want to do, but I never actually do it in real life… for a reason!! One of those, “better in theory” kinds of things.

Apparently, my husband didn’t get this memo and decided to make me an appointment to surprise me. Which I know is super sweet and he was only trying to help me, but the moment he told me… panic mode set in.

For anyone that doesn’t have social anxiety, or is an extroverted person, this may not make much sense. The best way I can describe the feeling is when you have that dream that you are in school, you know you are supposed to be there, but you have never seen this class in your life. Everyone is acting like it’s a normal day, you have to move from class to class, but you have no clue what you have next or even where it is. You try to keep it together, try to act like you know what you are doing, but on the inside, you are in turmoil. Panic envelops you and consumes you… On top of that, there are tests you have to take in these classes that you have never been to a day in your life. More panic.

Like that…. Completely out of control.

So back to the story… leading up to the appointment, I seemed ok. Then, the day of the appointment got here. Like most people, when I get stressed out, my body becomes very tense. I get so tense that my muscles knot up and start to feel like rocks. Probably not very healthy, but c’est la vie!!

Now I have my usual tense body, and my newly stressed out tense muscles on top of those, all mixing together to create this massive muscular hell. I know I don’t look like one, but when my muscles get like that, I feel like one of those really ripped bodybuilders.

The Journey Begins

So I am driving to the appointment and trying to keep from talking myself out of it. Wondering what kind of excuse I could come up with that would justify me not going to this appointment. Obviously, I failed at coming up with anything good…

I get there, get through the lobby, sign in, and then I have to do paperwork. They take me into this little cubby hole behind some doors to fill out my info. The “relaxing” music is already going, and for some reason, it is having the opposite effect on me. Each high-pitched squeal coming from the girl’s mouth is setting me more and more on edge. BUT, I power through!! Go me.

Paperwork is now done, and I feel like I am walking to my doom… In reality, I am headed to the massage room where I now have to undress and lay down on this table. I have so many questions at this point.

“What do I do about my mask?”

“How undressed should I get?”

“Is there going to be a lot of talking at this point?”

“Should I say something to her, or just wait for her to ask me a question?”

“What exactly goes into a full body massage?”

“Is she going to rub my butt? Do they lift the blanket for that?”

Then she starts talking to me about what I filled out on the paperwork and pulls me out of my never-ending inner monologue.

We talk about the areas I need the most help in, areas to avoid (my feet), all that.

She leaves, I undress, get on the table, nervous as anything. I try to figure out the best place to lay. It is at this point that I realize my small head/face is going to have a problem here.

Try to picture this. I have a mask on, you know… coronavirus and all that. My small face doesn’t quite fit into the opening in the table. My head keeps basically falling into the hole. So I have to try and scoot up so more of my forehead is resting on the top part of this donut. Is this where I’m supposed to be? I dunno. But I go with it because at least my head isn’t dangling through the donut.

She knocks on the door to let me know she is back… at this point, I am wondering, do I answer vocally? Or do I just let her assume that since I didn’t say ‘wait’ or anything that it is ok to come in… obviously I didn’t say anything and just waited until she came in… the less I say, the better.

The Massage Starts

She starts the massage. Now that we have made it to this point, I have new fears that start kicking in.

I don’t know how often something like this has happened to anyone else but did you ever take a test in school, for example, and everything is super amazingly quiet… not a sound, then all of a sudden, through no fault of your own, your stomach decides to let out the most horrifically loud scream, as if you have just returned from a year-long survival game show and haven’t seen food for at least that long?

And it doesn’t just do it once, oh no. Once your stomach has the attention of everyone in the surrounding area, it feels the need to be an overachiever and keep yelling so not only the people around you can hear it, your stomach wants to make sure that people in another room, on the other side of the school come into the room where you are to make sure that everything is ok.

And no squirming, begging, pleading, or bargaining can keep it quiet…

Well anyway, that fear kicked in. How embarrassed would I be if my stomach started to sing the song of its people right now??

Which led to the thought of, “Oh God, please don’t let me have to fart.”

Now I am even more stressed out. I’m not even paying attention to the relaxation I’m supposed to be having right now. I then realize, she just asked me a question. But what the hell was it? I still don’t know.

Some more time passes and she is now up above my head. She starts focusing on my shoulders, the key reason I am here in the first place. She starts telling me about how tense I am… Thank you, madam. I’m pretty sure I told you how tense I was, hence my presence here.

Now as I said before, I have never had a massage, so I don’t know how these things usually go, but I always imagined that you just went in, they rub-a-dub-dubbed you and you left. I didn’t know that there was this much talking involved.

If anyone knows anything about me, talking to people I don’t know is super stressful for me. I seem to forget the human language and just nod and smile a lot. I look pretty dumb usually, but if I don’t have someone to carry the conversation, it is just going to be a lot of awkward silences for all parties involved. At least until I become comfortable enough to talk to you.

Well, I am laying face down on a table, I can’t smile and nod. I have to respond. Jesus take the wheel.

So, she is at my head, rubbing my shoulders and back and she starts pressing down from my neck towards around the middle of my back, over and over again… this wouldn’t have been a problem if my face was a normal human size and fit into the aforementioned donut.

Every push is forcing my face further and further into this hole. I am trying to keep it up, which is straining my neck. Do I say something? Absolutely not. That would be ridiculous.

I don’t know if you can picture what is happening here, but remember I have a mask on. I am also receiving a free facelift from this donut, all while this mask is being pulled so tight around my face that I know my nose is going to be flatter when I leave this place.

We continue. She moves on down, rubs rubs rubs, asking questions along the way. I do my best to answer, but honestly… I’m just trying to find some form of relaxation in this hell hole I have found myself in.

She makes it to this point around my legs, where for whatever reason, she decides to start hitting them. I’m not talking about some light love taps… Oh no. She is wailing on my legs, with what felt like a dead fish… I dunno what was really going on back there, but I just imagined her picking up some large fish and repeatedly dropping it on my legs.

You can imagine how this sudden visual along with the repeated and unexpected hitting could cause a fit of laughter.

I couldn’t help myself at this point. This was such a ridiculous situation, and now this… I couldn’t stop laughing. But did I laugh out loud? Of course not. I kept it inside as much as I could which, you guessed it, made it worse!! I tried to stop my body from shaking with laughter, I don’t know how successful I was though.

Introducing Stones From Mount Doom

So she eventually stopped and we moved on to the next part of this magical journey. That’s right, just when you thought we were done… we add HOT STONES!!

Apparently, when my husband was setting up this once-in-a-lifetime experience, he told them my issues and they talked him into adding on a hot stone massage.

Boy oh boy.

She gets these things out and places them on my back and asks how the temperature is.

Side note: I am extremely sensitive to hot and cold… my skin, my teeth, all of it. Keep that in mind.

So she asks how the temperature is as she is placing them on my back. I said it was fine, because the 1.2 seconds it was on my back, it seemed fine. At some point, during me saying it was fine and her beginning to massage me with them, someone decided to turn the heat up on these damn things to a million degrees.

I don’t know where she had these things stored, but it felt like she had just grabbed some stones out of Mount Doom and decided to burn away every sin I had ever committed with them.

And before you ask, no I didn’t say anything… I just took it. Stupid, I know, but that basically sums me up as a person.

She rubbed my back for a while with them, and then I feel like I start getting used to the heat, so maybe the heat will loosen up all the tension I got just from coming to this damn appointment… WRONG! Time for some new stones.

Let’s scald away the sins again. This is so much fun. I am so glad I came.

We do this for a while, could have been 5 minutes, could have been 5 days. I’m not really sure anymore. Time is irrelevant at this point.

Finally the stones go away and it is time for me to flip over.

Oh lord have mercy.

I flip, completely gracefully. At least as graceful as Bambi on ice… flopping and grunting were definitely involved. I get situated, and she tells me to move down. Now I am doing this weird shimmy thing trying to move like, a foot down the table. Smooth.

Time For… Stretching?

She starts rubbing and telling me about different things I need to do to stretch out my neck and those muscles. Which I get it, I should stretch them, but anytime I do anything, the pain that would come after was so unbearable, I couldn’t take it… and I have had a kid so………

So she rubs, then starts “stretching” my neck.

I say stretching, but I feel like a more accurate way to put it would be… she started trying to pop my head off in very weird positions. My head turned in ways that are not natural. I haven’t seen head-spinning action like this since “The Exorcist”.

So once my exorcism was over, she started talking about how my time was up and how she wasn’t able to do everything because the paperwork I had to do at the beginning ran into my time.

Well Jesus, Joseph and Mary. What the hell else could she have done to me??

So she left, I got dressed and didn’t know if I was supposed to wait there, or to open the door and leave. So I waited.

After a bit, I figured I made the wrong choice, so I opened the door, and she was standing there with a bottle of water held out to me. I was thinking, “God I hope she wasn’t standing like that the whole time, waiting on me to come out.”

Then we had this really awkward interaction where we were kind of just standing there looking at each other, I don’t know what she was waiting for, but I was waiting on her to make the first move. There was also some other guy that I didn’t know just kind of hanging out in the hallway… just to add to my levels of awkwardness.

So she finally points me to the exit, where I go back past the cubby I spent some of my precious time in and back to the front desk where I had to pay and set up another appointment, yeah right.

Time To Leave, Thank God

I go, I pay, then the girl at the front desk asks me how I’m feeling.

“Super great!”

Then she starts going into this membership that they have and what I could get if I sign up that day, and all the bonuses and how my masseuse (I have one of those now I guess) wants to see me back because my knots are so bad.

Yeah, I’m gonna have to pass on that.

I leave, and as I am walking to my car, I realize, I was so tense before and during that appointment, that my levels of anxiety, stress, and tension are currently at the levels they were before I EVER HAD AN APPOINTMENT TO BEGIN WITH!!

I spent so much time stressing about the appointment, that the only thing this poor lady could do was to get me back at my usual level of stress and tension.

So I paid about $200 to stay right where I am already…. Oy vey.

Could all of this been avoided if I had just opened my mouth and said something? Probably.

Is that something I would ever do? Absolutely not.

Pin This For Later!!

If you absolutely love my rants about random things, don’t worry, I have some more. You can read all about my thoughts on people body-shaming others, or about my shower time existential crisis. It’s a good one.

As usual, let me know what you thought about this storytime. Did you like it and would you like to hear more about how my social anxiety is ruining different experiences that normal people would love?

I would ask if I am the only one and to share your stories with me… but I know that may set off some people’s anxiety so, you do you kid. Share if you want to, or just read all my ridiculous stories, no pressure.

So my lovelies, until next time,