It was a beautiful summer’s day. Picture-book fluffy white clouds dotted the sky outside my office window while a pair of nesting hadedas were doing criminally cute things in the gently waving branches of the tree in which they’d decided to make their home.
A perfect highveld day.
Suddenly, while doing a frankly mediocre job of researching “Man Dressed as a Hotdog” (I have a weird job), I was abruptly, painfully aware that I was sitting at my desk like some kind of scrunched-up, handcuffed praying mantis trying to smoke a very short cigarette. I say “painfully”, because not only was my posture something straight out of Gollum Impersonator Monthly, but it really was also kak sore.
I suppose, like so many people, I give about as much thought to my (spectacularly shit) posture as I do to the ingredients list of “Man Dressed as a Hotdog”, which means that, for me to notice that I was agonisingly hunched at my desk like a crushed beer can, things were, in fact, quite bad.
Modern living is weird. It gives us so much: nail art, pretzel rolls and a place in Australia called Mount Buggery. It also delights in being such a generally stressful experience that, according to The Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research, a breathtaking 79% of people globally are currently experiencing some kind of severe stress.
I really, really get it. The cumulative effect of pandemics, wars, climate change, and multiple ongoing economic and humanitarian crises on everyday people trying to figure out how to assemble a bedside table ordered off Superbalist without interpreting it as a crippling personal failure, has been that our net stress levels have blown the bloody doors off.
So, we have ergonomic chairs, white noise machines, lofi hip-hop channels, Urbanol, video feeds of AI-generated log cabins on YouTube, the worst-designed cannabis shop imaginable on every second corner, a middling-to-severe chenin problem and stress balls. That last one is the most galling. How the actual hell some cheaply-made foam nonsense branded as a corporate gift by Soup Corp made in a Cambodian gulag is meant to alleviate the stress of trying to function in a global systemic meltdown, is maybe the best joke since the dugong.
But still, we insist on blithely doing all the things that get us to that 79%. This includes spending most of our time lurking behind computers like doughy T-Rexes and commuting to Pretoria.
Ninety minutes of hell
So, it was in that moment that I decided I was going to Do Something about my tension-wracked body, which by now was feeling like the chassis of that one model of bakkie that used to break in half all the time. My solution was to bravely pick up the phone and book what was advertised as an “anti-stress” Thai massage.
This is a massive deal for me, because I find the process of finding, booking and going to a massage, you guessed it … enormously stressful. Now, look, I know this is mostly on me – but we all have our things, and for me this is one of them. The vast irony of being stressed out by an activity that is literally meant to be an antidote to stress is not lost on me. I have examples galore. On a trip to a wonderful Japanese Onsen in Bangkok, I was absolutely paralysed with a kind of protocol anxiety, and instead of submitting myself to the most relaxing thing invented by humankind, I sat out in the cafeteria while everyone else had a great time being stroked by peacocks or whatever the hell goes on in there.
And this is the nub of it: the stuff widely recommended for alleviating stress – going on holiday, physical activity, spending time with family – most of it is inherently stressful. International travel, surviving the Engen garage outside Bloem during December, trying to cross a road in DayGlo running shorts without being taken out by a lawnmower with a Bolt logo plastered on it – all these need to be navigated before getting even close to the bit that’s meant to relax you. The snake is very much eating its own tail here.
So anyway, there I was, nervously walking up the (admittedly very tranquil) front garden of a low-slung house that had Buddhas everywhere a Buddha would fit, on my way to being thoroughly anti-stressed – to have all my aches, pains, tensions and worries melted away at the hands of someone with magic in their fingers. But before I could access that gentle relief, a tiny, sweet-faced Thai lady stopped me at the door, with a crisp, “shoes off, please”, as she handed me a pair of straw flip-flops.
Now here’s a problem. I absolutely cannot walk in flip flops. I don’t know how anyone does it. They either fly off my feet like I’m throwing a boomerang, or I must scrunch my toes like I’m trying to pick up jelly tots just to keep them on. This means that I walk like a cat that has just suffered the indignity of being forced to wear pet-Crocs for the first time. Which is what I did to the pleasantly darkened room with the gently cycling pan-pipe music.
It should have been the first clue that I’d stumbled into an awful trap. The second was being asked if I wanted the massage soft, medium or hard. Timidly, I said soft.
I don’t know what I did to that tiny Thai lady, either in this life or the past – but it must have been something really, really bad, because it’s the only possible explanation for why she was so murderously intent on killing me dead.
It was as though butter knives had sprouted from every finger and her elbow had been replaced by a pneumatic rolling pin designed in the shape of a shovel. Muscular tension was her sworn enemy and the only way to get the better of it was to gleefully cripple me, all while innocently asking “You okay?”
In short, that little Thai lady uncompromisingly, relentlessly brutalised my shellshocked body for a full 90 minutes. Whyyyyy did I book an hour and half, was the only coherent thought I could muster after about 20 minutes of her remorseless savagery.
Once it was over, I tried to unclench my locked jaw just to be able to utter a sound that wasn’t a crying whimper, and cat-stumbled my way back to the front desk to pay. The tiny, twinkly-eyed Thai lady looked up at me as she tallied up her blood-price, and with a cheerful grin said, “Your back is very bad. You come back in three days. Three days.”
Now I really am stressed.
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