My How and Why as Roundabout Origin Story

wherein I will NOT rely on being a political blowhard (saying this as a spell)

I have just realized that the stakes are myself

I have no other

ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life

my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over

the roulette table…

this flesh all I have to offer..

- Diane Di Prima (from Revolutionary Letter #1)

While I attempt (badly) to be a less long-winded person, I operate almost to compulsion to tell things fully, which is why I’m putting this on Substack and not on social media or an email newsletter. Furthermore, my main livelihood of acupuncture and bodywork are systems-based modalities that emphasize, or rather their entire efficacy is dependent on the interconnectedness of the body. I’m at a place in my life where I’m fully accepting all the ways things smush, layer and fold together into overlapping meanings.

I am also deeply committed to testimony. Or more importantly the reclaiming of testimony. By testimony, I refer to the ways in which we relate and speak to each other and how that’s been so easily co-opted by advertising. Think of those late-night infomercials “I was so tired all the time and ready to give up on life, until I tried HerbaLife!”, it seems clunky and obvious but I get a visceral feeling when I see how this kind of thing is still everywhere, especially in the so-called “wellness” industry, which I will resist diving too deep into what I take issue with in that sphere (for now). I think it’s unique how we’re all on here (the internet) and talking and listening to each other a lot of the day; in a pure sense it’s very cool, so I think my commitment that I want to name here is not sound like an advertisement.

I don’t want my first experience of acupuncture to sound anything like these kinds of testimonials. The phrase “I tried ___ and it changed my life” is a tough one for me, because while it can inspire some buzz around a thing enough for people to try something for the first time, it also creates a fals sense of what it is and what it does. It becomes another consumable experience, one that can be very profound at first, yes, but becomes another thing to chase; lusting after that first experience like a hungry ghost. I say this because I’ve definitely done this with all kinds of things elicit, legal, proprietary, benign and harmful. With this in mind, I want to communicate about how I came to work in these modalities, but it will need to be careful and thorough.

Finding myself lying prone on a table with needles in my back, legs and arms begins with work; how I was hurting my body doing it and how I didn’t have money or access to care because of it. There’s a very circuitous story of every job I had, meandering in low paying positions from industry to industry- sitting on the floor of my drafty apartment for hours sending off resumes and cover letters to a literal void. The process of becoming a massage therapist was an attempt to uncomplicate all of this; I receive training and license, I provide service, I am paid for service. This is what I wanted more than anything, to just sell my labor for something directly, without all the layers.

While I was no stranger to pain and injury, an important confrontation I had with this job was the limitations of my body meeting the reality of cost of living. I feel I am a simple person when it comes to what kind economics I want to live; I don’t like the term “scaling” very much, I naively think what I have to offer should be enough, but the cost of rent and everything else pretty much demands some scaling. Even more so, if you’re being underpaid at your job at a subscription-based massage franchise (I will stop myself there on that topic). Essentially, I had gotten my license and I had to figure out how to do 5, 6, 7 hour-long massages each day at work when the most I had done in my training was maybe 2. For me, needing money, the strategy was just to start doing that many massages a day and have no backup plan if I hurt myself. I was younger in those days, sure, but honestly, I’m not much different now.

Smash-cut to me, during one of Seattle’s famous November cold snaps where the sun shines brightly but the temperature hovers in the 30s. I’m walking, as I do for transportation, and I need to put my hands in my pockets only I can’t because it’s accompanied by a sharp, stinging sensation in my wrists that makes me wince in public. This is a classic median nerve entrapment pattern and I know the reason why I had it was all the massage I was suddenly doing daily. I know this because it was also the reason my shoulder stung, my back hurt and why I had to pull out my soft knee-braces again. I was hurting all over; it hurt to live and it hurt to work but I couldn’t stop doing the latter if I wanted to keep doing the former.

So it’s here that’s a big part of my why; being in this position where you’re in so much pain, but you have to keep working and having little to no options as to what to do about it. This is the point in the story, where it stops being my story and starts being the reality of so many people, a lot of my peers. “What do people do when they’re in pain?….Like who do I go to?” These were questions from a dear friend with a highly physical job who at the time was lightly playing off the fact they were hunched over, unable to stand up straight due to some back pain. Even on the day I write this I received a request from a friend experiencing back spasms amidst a string of solo cooking shifts with no back-up. The immediacy of pain smacks right in to that of work; working through it is the obvious outcome, but a proper intervention of the pain can be easily postponed because really, where do we find one?

The proverbial elephant in the room is rooted in a recalcitrant systemic problem which is that many industries, especially those in food and beverage service, do not offer any paid sick time and many of these individuals have little to no health insurance. This reality is a huge part of my existence, rage and reason behind my structure, but I simply must put a pin in this topic now otherwise I will not stop. But anyway, here it is... for later.

In those days of stinging wrists and body pain and receiving something like $15 a massage, I was offered care by someone I admire so much: Dr. Sari Gallegos, ND. She didn’t need to accept me as a patient and treat me pro-bono, but she did. I got a full checkup from Sari on the day of the acupuncture, in fact, I didn’t even know I was getting acupuncture that day. She was going through the important and routine things and at first I didn’t know anyone in this position could offer me anything for the pain I was in; I hadn’t come across that paradigm yet. When she needed to attend to other patients she said, “we’ll give you some acupuncture”. And then she did. As I was lying there I felt lively and heavy sensations in places where the needles were. My wrists, the backs of my knees and my left lower back began groaning and cramping around the needles. Things were moving and happening, I did my best to relax and breathe.

I went the rest of the day feeling a bit (or rather a lot) like I was high. I floated around picking up some supplements she suggested for me, got some food. I talked with people each place I went. I wanted to tell them I had just gotten acupuncture for the first time, so I did. I was met with total enthusiasm and each person had a story of their own. “Acupuncture totally saved my cousin!” I recall something like that, they were all like that, totally beaming about it all, like I was.

Living my life and working the days that followed wasn’t like a catharsis; one of my favorite things to say, because I work with soft tissue for a living is “there is no catharsis! Only slow and anti-climactic relief!” This is me enjoying being a killjoy too much, yes, but it’s also this really amazing thing that’s maybe better than catharsis. You just start living your life and then at some point someone might ask you about your pain or how you’re feeling. “How are your hands, do they still hurt?” Then I pause and think about it. I had been putting my hands in my pockets every day since my treatment. I had been showing up to work and managing my patient load. I didn’t come in wearing my knee braces anymore, funny how that happened.

Anyway, there’s dozens of reasons to explain what happened that day with those needles. But I must mention, in my obsession with thoroughness, that the two-pronged approach of being shown that kindness and offering the needles when I needed them started to put something on a low simmer that sustained for many years.