What My Shoulders Told a Stranger

I hadn't told a soul. Not my friends or family or even the mirror. Then a stranger I'd known for all of thirty minutes pressed her thumb into my shoulder and read out aloud what I was hiding.

This was supposed to be a sports massage, booked for something that I'd managed to convince myself was 'over-exertion' (of my tired muscles) from too much walking and hiking on my last holiday.

I'll introduce you to the stranger properly. We'll call her 'Angie' for this blog. Angie is a London-based masseuse. Slavic. She's probably in her late fifties or early sixties. Well tanned arms. Chestnut hair. She speaks English with a heavy and beautiful accent that makes her every sentence land like a verdict. Angie has also spent the last twenty years of her life reading human bodies the way other people might read newspapers. There's no small talk with Angie. No "busy day?", no "any plans for the weekend?" Angie puts her hands on you and then listens to the part of you that never learned to lie as well as you did. Then she'll read you and decide if she wants to simply complete the massage in silence or tell you what your body's been saying regardless of whether you want to hear it or not.

As Angie worked along my shoulders, she went over a couple of knots once, twice, then a third time and all of a sudden stopped like someone going over an equation that didn't add up. "This isn't workout fatigue," she said. "You're holding something heavy. Emotional stress, perhaps?"

"Possibly," I answered. I was still negotiating with a truth in my head that I was trying to suppress. Saying 'Possibly' was the most honest lie I'd told.

The more unpalatable truth was that I'd been carrying that 'weight' around with me for a couple of weeks at least. And as far as I knew, I'd chosen to bury whatever it were between God and myself. As far as anyone else outside of that duo was concerned, I was 'fine really'. Until of course there I was, face-down in a cushioned hole and badly exposed by my own trapezius muscle.

Angie delivered her next life lesson with the calm of a woman who has never lost an argument at a family dinner: "In this life, you have to choose what you hold onto. When you hold onto pain and grief, it consumes you. It shrinks your life."

"That's easier said than done," I quipped back, with the reflex of every person who's been told an uncomfortable truth about themselves to their face. But Angie didn't mince her words. "Then you remove the sources of the stress from your life. That is the only way."

I've thought about Angie's words every day since that exchange. She's mostly right. Some sources can be removed. The job that drains you. The friend that only takes. Or the habit you've kept only out of politeness. You give notice and then you walk away.

But grief or trauma from a betrayal doesn't work on those same terms. A loss cannot leave as easily because you've asked it to. A memory never hands in its notice. It doesn't 'pack a box' or 'hold the door' on its way out. They all linger.

Which leaves us just one thing that we can still remove: the silence around them. Because silence has a way of turning pain into weight. The people who love us the most might ask how we are, and we'll say "fine," and expect them to believe us, because we're excellent at it. But, this way, they never get to be what they would have wanted to be. The ones who help us carry the grief. Instead we find ourselves, like me in this instance, giving the truth to a stranger with strong thumbs, when it really belonged to the people who would have held it for us gently.

Truth is, Angie didn't put those knots in my shoulder. Neither did the person or the experiences that started it all for me. I tied the knots myself, one unsaid sentence at a time and then pulled them even tighter together, every time someone asked how I was and I answered "fine." The pain may have been done to me but the knots were all mine.

What's even more interesting is that in hindsight, we can be geniuses at rehearsing the perfect speech in the shower and then delivering it to nobody. Because 'nobody' dies from a sentence they never said. Not all at once anyway. People tend to die in instalments.

When we treat emotions like a thought or as something that you can file away or postpone or talk yourself out of, that's usually the start of the downward spiral. Emotions aren't just like thoughts really. Anger for instance, will first arrive and announce its presence in the jaw. Like I noticed once I'd been clenching through an entire dinner without hearing much of a word from the other end of the table. Peak. Grief will sit in the chest like a wet coat that you can't take off. And then fear will begin and live in the stomach for a while before moving on to the limbs. These are all real emotional events and the thing about events is that they will always need somewhere to go. You refuse them an exit and they never leave. They'll relocate and then come out sideways at the most inopportune moment later. A snapping at someone who did nothing to you. A sleepless night staring at the ceiling. A shoulder that won't unknot. A laugh that's slightly too loud. In the past, I've caught myself with all of these. The cues are always the same. Suppressed feelings cannot be deleted. They have an uncanny way of always knowing where you live and then resurfacing unexpectedly.

Every 'troubled' relationship has a graveyard. You can't see it directly because it's made of mostly things that nobody said. And unsaid things don't stay the same size. An unspoken apology hardens into a wall. The "that hurt" which you swallowed at the beginning of the year or the "I'm scared" which you wrongly translated into "I'm tired." The "please stay" that you dressed up as "do what you want." All small burials. Done mostly quietly. Over breakfast. Dinner. Or as you brush past each other in a tight corridor space.

So I'm choosing to be more open about expressing my emotions to the loved ones around me and I hope that you can too, reading this, especially if you're also in the business of relating to people. There's a name in my head too. I won't put it here. But I know whose it is and I know how long it's been waiting. This blog is me starting to say it.

I'm also learning to ask myself different questions. No longer "what's wrong with me?" but "what happened and what did I have to become to survive it?". What's the knot protecting? It probably has an answer and more often than not, the answer is much older than you might've thought first.