Month: January 2019

Let me preface this with saying I debated writing this and I felt silly writing it, but I also like to go places with my writing that others may need to hear… happy reading!

Last night I got a massage. I don’t get massages very often. In fact, I don’t do most things that are considered pampering or indulgent all that often. It was two years between my most recent haircut and my last one, and I still have the “pedicure” on my feet that I got for my friends September 2018 wedding…. so needless to say, massages are pretty low on my list of priorities, though I’m trying to allow myself to partake in them more simply because I am so much more active now.

I got a gift certificate for a massage for Christmas (ok full confession: I bought it for myself for Christmas as a Christmas gift to me… don’t judge!), and finally scheduled an appointment. The last few massages I’ve gotten have been either more Sports Massage, so it ends up being all business when I go in, or one of those reflexology places where they really dig into you but I’ve had some issues with language barriers there, so there isn’t a whole lot of hot neck towels and relaxing music happening.

But I digress.

This magical gift certificate that I gifted for myself was at a spa place than I’ve ever gone to before. They give you a whole robe and a foot soak and some hot tea in a room called the relaxation room… the kind of stuff that is the polar opposite of who I am and how I operate. (What is a relaxation room? On that note, how does one relax? All I do is keep busy…) So, as I sat in a fuzzy white robe with my feet in a foot soak of hot water, in a dimly lit room with no clock (what the hell time is it, how will I keep on schedule with my life), no cell phone (I bet I have a thousand new emails piling up or I could at least have brought it to browse social media) and a hot towel around my neck (that I could get used to), I felt a little out of place and wanted to move things along. This was a lot of relaxing and not a lot of getting it done and moving on to the next thing, until they called me in for my appointment.

Ok, awesome… until I realized when I made the appointment I had said I was fine with a male masseuse, and then for the first time in my life was having a massage with a man. When I scheduled the appointment I assumed that because my “back is whack” (my opinion, not a medical diagnoses 🤣) and has knots for days a male would be better to help work out my issues.

I have almost always in my adult life gone to male doctors, have many male friends and have always felt comfortable in male dominated settings, but for some reason my first thought was “oh shit, I don’t know how I feel about my body in this moment.”

I felt conflicted about the fact that I’ve got extra weight sitting in my mid section, but I also know I’ve got some strong defined muscles and was about to be butt ass naked on this massage table with no unicorn onesie or little while robe to cover my anxieties of my saddle bags and my stretch marks.

I’ve never had that type of a gut check ever, where the two ways I see myself mesh into one visualization. I was about to be full Monty face down on this table and I couldn’t decide in that moment if I felt I was fat or if I felt I was strong.

I pulled myself out of my headspace fast. I reminded myself that there’s no pre-reqs for coming in and getting a massage. Any insecurities I am feeling right now shouldn’t be projected as what I imagine others are thinking about me.

As the session was going to begin we discussed what I needed work on. I noted my calves and my shoulders from all my running and strength training, and we made that a topic of small talk. As I felt knots being worked out, a few four letter words almost come out of my mouth, and some much needed physical relief, I worked on letting my insecurities go away and relaxing.

I had a moment while I was on that table where I thought to myself this exact phrase: “be grateful to your strong body and all it can do”, and that I was gifting myself this hour to give my little body some much needed attention for all the hard work I give it.

And at the end of the day, it was one of the best massages I think I’ve ever had.

Don’t let yourself get into the headspace of insecurity. Let yourself celebrate the positive and focus your energies on that. You’re the only person who sees yourself in a bad light. Don’t project those feelings onto others.

Lesson learned.

Be grateful to your strong body and all it can do.

Cheers to strength!

Vanessa

I had a weird not me experience the other day earlier this week… I really enjoyed my workout at Santa Rosa Strength & Conditioning and felt like a champion…. the kind where you play Eye of the Tiger on the drive home and then came home and got into weird head space about my body. That’s really unheard of for me, though I know I have goals, I don’t really ever get in a funk about my body size. That same day I had to submit what size shirt I wanted for The Biofreeze San Francisco Marathon Ambassador team and it stung a little to be the only women’s XL on the list. I felt a little bit like hmmm, do I belong here?

But I had to remind myself…. When I had the honor of reading through commentary on the ambo applications for Mermaid Series, I was surprised how many people wrote “I don’t look like a runner”.

I have now been to many races and training runs and though the really super fast runners are built a certain way, there are people of all builds running 5ks to 50ks, from noviced runners to runners who can tackle events with thousands of feet of elevation gain.

I don’t look a certain way but I haven’t really let that stop me. I had to remind myself of the same words I constantly am reminding everyone else of…

If you run, you’re a runner.

I don’t have to preface that with things like “slow”, “fat”, “plus size”, “turtle” because I don’t identify that way. I simply see myself as a runner.

End of story.

Yesterday as I was scrolling through social media, I stopped on a post that said New Years resolutions usually don’t stay past January 12th. Though I myself am a huge fan of goal setting, I actually never really set very big New Years Resolutions like losing a certain number of pounds, buying a house, paying off a big bill or anything like that. In fact this year I only set one, to be less wasteful, and restated last year’s, to always put my cart in the corral at the store after unloading into my car.

Last night my husband and I enjoyed a much needed date night and our first stop on our outing was pizza. 🍕

Now, like any other self respecting 30-something year old who grew up on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and begged my mom for a TMNT birthday party instead of a stupid princess themed one when I was a kid, pizza is basically a good group to me. Life without pizza is like a day without sunshine. But I digress.

I had hardly eaten much of anything before going out because I was knee deep in working on a project before we left. After basically inhaling the salad I ordered as an appetizer and spilling half of the olives on the table, our pizza arrived in all its glory.

In my life, when pizza arrives at the table in most instances, my first instinct is to find the BIGGEST piece and generously offer to distribute slices to everyone so I can selfishly keep the biggest one for myself. This says a lot about my relationship wit food. It doesn’t matter if the slice is one centimeter bigger or if they forgot to cut two pieces in half and it’s a mega piece. I can find it immediately and IT IS MINE.

But many years ago I realized my relationship with good was skewed because thoughts like that cross my mind. I feel a sense of entitlement to the largest piece of pizza, cake, pie. The bowl that looks like it has the biggest portion it is should automatically go to me. It doesn’t matter that this can often equate into one extra bite, but I realized long ago that this was a big habit deeply burned into me I needed to break.

So a few years ago my New Years resolutions was to not take the biggest portion of something. I can’t fix all of my relationship issues with food in one fell swoop but I can attempt to break them one at a time. It took that entire year to stop and think about my choices around which portion was mine, or which to choose when cake, pizza, and staff luncheons happened at work. But slowly I got there, and am still here today.

So last night when I picked up the pizza spatula and found the largest and most glorious looking slice of missliced pizza that was nearly 1/4 bigger than its companion slice, I asked my husband to hand me his plate and I placed that piece of pizza on his dish for him.

Sometimes NY resolutions stick if we really want them to and are willing to work for it!