Old Money Wounds

I have this old money wound, as the kids call it these days, at least in esoteric circles. I think this wound is more related to work than money, but it affects both since work is how one makes money.

I really didn’t think I had a lot of old money wounds that I hadn’t sorted through at some point or another. One popped up for me today and, it’s a doozey.

For years I worked for myself as a massage therapist. I worked from home. I worked at other people’s homes, “Have table, will travel,” my first business card read.

I worked at Hustler Casino for a little over a year. That was the hardest work I have ever done in my life. It was real, physical, manual labor. I would work on card players at the poker table, stressed out about the money they were losing while I was trying to help them relax. It was impossible. People receiving massage should ideally be in a relaxed, receptive state so I could get into the tissues. These guys were in full defense mode. It was like a battle between them and me. Some of them had been playing for 3 days straight without leaving the table. They hadn’t showered and only got up to pee and smoke. You can imagine how filthy it was. Massages are all that keeps these guys playing because sitting tensed up that long without a massage is excruciating.

I used to describe what I did there as being like putting a cargo van in park, parking brake on, and then I would stand behind it, trying to use every bit of strength in my body to push it forward. I did that for 8 hours consecutive starting at 11pm and working until 7am. Most massage therapists do shorter shifts consisting of about 5 to 6 hours of massage work a day tops.

I knew a girl who did 9 hour shifts 5 days a week, and her body was breaking down. I remember her talking about going home every night and laying on her bed with her arms stretched out like a T post. She’d put ice packs on her arms and pass out on top of her bed from exhaustion. She never even got under the covers or on her pillow. She’d wake up only to start all over again like that the next morning. I didn’t know how she did it.

I worked a 12 hour shift once for the LA Marathon. I had a full body migraine when I went home that lasted two days. I got home and filled the bath tub with ice and water and had to numb everything just to be able to alleviate the pain enough so I could fall asleep. Massage work is hard labor.

At the casino, I only worked two days a week, but it was graveyard. Doing only two days per week graveyard, I never got used to the sleep schedule. At 4am my feet were exhausted from standing up. It probably had to be in part mental. Your body knows it should be sleeping. I would go to some chairs, just outside the bathroom of the casino and I would stand up on my knees on the chairs when no one was looking. I wasn’t technically supposed to sit down. I had to get off my feet, though, because they were in so much pain. I would drive home so tired, I was lucky I didn’t die on the highway. I did hit my next door neighbor’s parked car one morning trying to parallel park when I was too sleepy to concentrate.

So, now I can describe the money wound part.

All those years, I was doing all this hard work. When I had my apartment and customers came to me, I ran marketing campaigns. I was great at making money and getting new clients. But my parents never saw what I did as a “real job.” My mom and dad never had massages their entire lives. They wouldn’t even let me practice on them when I was in massage school. It was very odd. My dad would just ask me why I didn’t try to be a nurse or work for the fire department if I wanted to help people. My mom would constantly remind me that massages were a luxury service, and that I would always be optional to my clients.

My clients loved me. They were loyal and devoted. They were more family than my parents ever were, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that my parents saw what I did as being without value. My mom’s attitude was almost that I took money from people spending frivolously. I was contributing to frivolity in her eyes. What I did seemed wasteful to her. She couldn’t see it as an amazing valuable service that helped heal people. In fact, neither of my parents saw it that way. They were both happier, though, when I was in the casino. Somehow that job seemed more substantiated to them than working in a wellness center.

The casino was like a toilet bowl energetically. It lead to me getting in massive debt because I just started spending everything I made to make myself feel better about being somewhere I was so miserable. I caught multiple diseases working there. I had ringworm for like two months which was ridiculously hard to get rid of. I got pink eye off and on. I caught what seemed like whooping cough and had that for almost 3 months. I luckily dated a surgeon during that time period. He was worried about my coughing and breathing issues and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. I didn’t know at the time antibiotics suck for whooping cough. It wasn’t really diagnosed. However, they did help a little so who knows if I had some kind of bacterial pneumonia as well.

Nevertheless, I spent 25 years of my life working really hard, physically and feeling, I guess from what my parents said, that I didn’t deserve to be paid. On top of that, I felt embarrassed telling other people outside of a particular circle of friends or acquaintances what I did for a living. It felt like a sort of flakey, hippie job and never like anything anyone would take seriously. I would always market myself and put myself out there in safe circles. Health minded people who need massages and understand their value LOVE to find out they met a massage therapist. Most people I would meet in gyms, health food stores or yoga classes were impressed with my skills. I mostly hung out only in places where I could mingle, meet these kinds of people and make new clients. Still, doing massage therapy always felt like a job one does with their hands and not their brains. I felt like a major part of my abilities and gifts were going unused.

On top of feeling valueless, I was also feeling many of my abilities were being wasted. People don’t traditionally turn to a massage therapist for an opinion on anything important beyond their expertise in bodywork. This was a big pivot for me as I had been up until my senior year of school the kid with the highest grades and achievement. My dad’s secretaries, before the internet had my number on speed dial so they could call me at home when I was about 12 years old. They’d utilize my gifts as a human spell checker or to help with grammar when typing brochures or anything going out to other businesses or customers.

This was all until my parents got divorced. If that shit show hadn’t happened, I could have been valedictorian and likely would have attended Princeton or something. I was really smart, good at school and on track to be an attorney, scientist or mathematician right up to my junior year of high school. Their divorce was so spiteful and disruptive that in one year I went from being considered the smartest kid in every school I attended to barely passing any classes. I did zero homework. I basically went through the motions. I still aced all the tests, but I had no desire to be in school anymore or do busy work.

I think a big part of the reason my parents were both so disappointed in me being a massage therapist was because I had so much intellectual and scholastic potential. My entire childhood, they dreamed I would work in a lab or be a famous mathematician.

I started doing massage therapy simply because I was good at it, and it came easy to me. A friend just after graduating high school asked if I’d rub his shoulder. I’d never rubbed anyone’s shoulders before. I did not know what I was doing. I grew up in a household where I never touched anyone. I was a bit on the spectrum, I think in hindsight. I often shied away from physical human contact. Anyway, I ended up working on my friend’s back and shoulders for about 3 hours. We were watching some VHS movies with a group of friends at Sandrine’s house. I didn’t even notice the time passed while I worked on his back. That’s when I decided I should start doing massage, because I had a knack. That was all there was to it. I went to massage school to further develop a natural ability I had. I didn’t love it, per say. I assumed my gift in it was a sort of calling to it. I never really had an affinity for it, though.

By the end of my senior year in high school, turning away from scholastic achievement, I fell madly and deeply in love with singing. I took voice lessons weekly for years. It was my most enthralling and passionate pursuit. Massage therapy was an easy fall back plan which gave me flexibility to pursue a career in singing. Soon after I started doing massage, my parents asked me to get a fall back plan because in their eyes massage therapy would never work out as a lucrative and legitimate career. Massage was not my dream, so my heart wasn’t in the act of defending it to them as a career choice. It never felt like a career choice to me. It was just a skill, and I was making money at it. I was often frustrated that they were proposing I get a fall back plan for a job that essentially was my fall back plan. I realized that anything else I did to be financially successful was going to take more education. In turn it would take me further away from my true love of singing. Since I hadn’t found anything else I loved as much as singing, I was not interested in doing massage until I got enough education to do something else I didn’t feel passionate about especially if it left no time for the one thing I knew I did love.

The majority of my work history consists of struggling a lot, and not doing what I loved. I stuck with it because I was doing what I was good at, and I had one sure way to pay my bills. I had parents who never acknowledged I was any good at the thing that consumed my time. They certainly couldn’t assign it any value. I felt embarrassed of the work I did in many cases. On top of everything else, many people saw me as a blonde, big boobed, hyper flirtatious, massage therapist (translation: prostitute). Often people assumed I was a bimbo who gave hand jobs for a living. The stigma was frustrating. My first year as a massage therapist after spending thousands of dollars on classes, the city of Costa Mesa required massage therapists to get an “Adult Entertainment License” to legally practice massage therapy. In fact, many cities around the US had these same requirements. Gradually as massage schools became more lucrative, they made deals with cities to institute massage licenses that required attendance at their specific schools. It was a giant fucking circle jerk. To this day, I contend that massage licensing and permits are completely unnecessary measures to attempt to keep prostitution out of the industry. But to go to such lengths steals from people who make a meager income to begin with and it further establishes that massage, in lieu of licensing, is prostitution. Massage is the art of manipulating the tissues of the body to bring healing and restore homeostasis. It doesn’t actually even “require” any certification to be good at it. I had the skills before any classes. The classes showed me a few extra techniques as well as ways to posture myself to preserve my own health while doing the work. They were not however a foundational teaching without which the majority of what I did after school would have been impossible. The very first day when I worked on my friend at that party, I gave 99% of the same skills I had after school. Nevertheless, I went to school for a career. I paid for all my classes out of pocket. I worked my ass off in the field, yet people still erroneously assumed I was a prostitute. In a few short years, I had gone from being the top of my class in school to becoming a meager income person who people everywhere might look down on. I guess I can’t completely blame my parents for feeling disappointed.

Now, that I am writing, I often feel like I need to convince my audience that I have intellectual prowess. I find myself trying to win back the esteem of people who never even knew I had once been a massage therapist. I think part of it is there is a similar stigma for mothers. Our society got a big batch of brainwashing in the women’s movement that a stay at home mom was somehow less credible or valuable than a working mother. It took its toll. I feel like I am up against that stigma speaking out about parental rights or the misdirection of fields of education. That’s all stuff I struggle with in my head.

So, that’s the wound. It’s kind of a lot of things. I want to write a prayer tonight about the truth of my situation, the outcome from all this and the attitude about myself I would like to embody.

Prayer About Wisdom and Worth April 14, 2022

God is all knowing, all seeing, all present. God created me in His likeness and image. They say we only use a tiny part of our brains, and when stimulated, people can often access limitless knowledge and creativity. God gave each of us that gift, that ability to tap into His Wisdom, right where we are, without a computer, a school or a book. The seat of all knowledge rests within each of us. Today, I claim this experience of Wisdom and creativity about myself. I now may access the depths of my mind and reach whatever wisdom I need to be successful in all my endeavors.

I meet people knowing they, too, hold the seat of all knowledge, and in my recognition of their light, I am recognized.

I see people as worthy and deserving, and I see myself as worthy and deserving. My wisdom and my worth are one, and they are tied into the inheritance I have as the child of an all knowing Creator. I am walking the earth with other inheritors, and I treat them with the honor and reverence they deserve. All that I give comes back to me.

I see God wherever I go, and I am so grateful to always be walking in His Presence. I am uplifted in this knowing I am never alone. I am never abandoned. I am never put down. I am constantly uplifted. And as I rise up on this night of the full moon, I release My Word, but I also release tonight all my old pain, my old sorrows, my old disappointments, my old sense of lack or less than. I release hurt feelings and worthlessness. I release the need to compensate for any lack because I know no lack lives here. I let it all go knowing I no longer need to carry this legacy. I can embrace the reset to my true gifts of wisdom. I rest in all I received directly from the Mind of God the moment I was conceived in Him in a time with no beginning or end. I accept this Wisdom and Worth as the truth of who I am in Him and He in me, right here and right now. And I know it is so.

I let it be.

Amen.