You’re Up, Kid.
Growing pains, feminine rage, and my new couch.
Hey, it’s me, Sarah. You know the drill: this is Note to Self, a newsletter where I unpack whatever’s been in my notes app, tweet drafts, or group chat lately.
On the second floor of an unassuming studio space in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, there’s a jiu-jitsu studio, a yoga studio, and one spacious, peaceful room where L, a masseuse and reiki practitioner, works. A few weeks ago, I spent an hour on her heated table while she placed her hands on my body.
The juxtaposition of the space was stark bordering on ironic. Not 15 feet away, sweaty men covered in tattoos were groaning and grappling one another around a padded room, their faint thuds gently punctuating L’s white noise machines and ambient music. While the men intentionally triggered their fight or flight, I was about to have the single most relaxing hour of my life.
This was my first time meeting L. She made sure I was comfortable on her table and placed a soft, weighted mask over my eyes. I could hear her hands just above my face and smell the essential oil on her palms. Then, she touched the crown of my head and began working her way down my body, focusing her energy on each of my chakras with a gentle touch. With each minute, I sunk further into her table. I noticed that my breath had become very slow and deep, almost alarmingly so. Had I ever taken such long breaths before? And my hands — they felt farther away than usual, perhaps several hundred yards away. Were my palms facing up, or down? I couldn’t remember and I couldn’t tell. But I could feel my body responding to L; when she touched my abdomen, my stomach growled, though I wasn’t hungry. Later - who can say how long - she wrapped her fingers around my left ankle and I felt my entire leg erupt in goosebumps. Pricking tingles climbed to my left hip, then ribs, then arm, and shoulder. It didn’t feel that way on my right side, and I wondered what that could mean.
When our session came to an end, I sat up carefully and wrapped my arms around my knees. L explained her findings in a calm, clear voice: “Your left side, which represents feminine energy, needed more TLC.” I nodded slowly and asked L what I could do to fix this. She spoke about the propensity to go-go-go in this city - about perfectionism, inner criticism, and by contrast, nurturing, deep rest, and true vulnerability. I began to well up, and she handed me a tissue. “You might feel a little tender and emotional for a few days,” she said gently. I laughed and dabbed my eyes, “I’m always like this!” She shook her head with a kind, knowing smile. “This is different. Things need to come out.”
At home later that day, I curled up on my couch and scrolled through some articles about feminine and masculine energy. I’m familiar with the concepts, of course. On TikTok, I am often served woo-woo variety content telling me I “live too much in my masculine,” which is a bit too gender-binary essentialist for my taste. Unsurprisingly, the things that come most easily to me in life often do fall along the gendered lines I have been socially and culturally trained for since childhood. I can cook, I can talk about feelings, and I can get a red wine stain out of anything. But that’s not what L is talking about.
According to my googling, we all contain the spectrums of logic vs intuition, giving vs receiving, and doing vs being — the traits of masculine and feminine energies, respectively. I can concede that we each contain multitudes, whether you subscribe to the gendered energy concept or not. And if the idea is to live in balance, then I can also concede that the demands of “doing” have felt a bit unwieldy, of late.
To live and work alone is an incredible privilege and also constant doing. It is, simply, always your turn. The ceiling is leaking in the middle of the night? You’re up, kid. Found a cockroach? You’re up, kid. “Assembly required”? You guessed it. Contract negotiations, shoulder injuries, credit card fraud, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Pondering all of this, I look around my apartment. It is the tangible fruit of every labor in my adult life, most pointedly, the new couch I’m curled up on. I have lived here for two years, and I spent most of that time on a very small and comically uncomfortable couch. When I bought the little couch, the apartment was empty and soulless. I was living alone for the first time ever and the blank, bare space was both an accomplishment and a challenge. I spent weeks sitting criss-cross applesauce on my floor with my laptop propped between my knees, waiting for the little couch to arrive. When it did, it became a charming symbol of my new life, holding me through countless hours of Sex And The City, two covid isolation periods, and my first foray into freelance work. I have bruises, neck kinks, and back pain to show for all of it.
To say that I “outgrew” the little couch would imply that it was ever my size to begin with. Eventually, the discomfort outweighed the charm and I ordered a new, much bigger one. The day the big couch arrived, I hired a couple of movers to hoist her up my fourth-floor walkup. With a little twisting, turning, and manpower, they got the couch up the stairs and onto my doorstep. This is, obviously, where everything went to shit.
My apartment is a street-facing one-bedroom on the top floor. It has beautiful high ceilings and natural light pours in from two big windows, spilling all the way down the cute vintage runner in my narrow entry hallway. The movers could fit the couch through the doorway, but no matter how sharply they angled it toward the ceiling, the hallway was just too narrow. “Did she even measure?” one of them asked. “I don’t think anyone measured anything,” the other answered with disdain. They couldn’t see me standing behind them down the hall. I felt embarrassed and indignant. I would have had to use the Pythagorean theorem to anticipate this, but that just sounds like an excuse now. I should have been more prepared, and because I wasn’t, there was a big problem sticking out of my apartment. You’re up, kid.
The movers took the couch downstairs again, but first, they asked if I would be tipping them since, “we were only supposed to take it up, not back down.” Showing even the faintest frustration would have been humiliating, so I tipped them for insulting me and waved off their patronizing apologies. After they left I stood in my couchless apartment and tried to calm down before picking up the phone.
“Dad, I need your advice.” Right away, my voice broke, betraying me. Now I would have to tell him about my feelings, a distraction for us both. “First I need to tell you that I’m stressed out and upset because I fucked up, and my couch won’t fit into my apartment, and I can’t return it, and the movers were condescending about it, and I know they wouldn’t have spoken to a man that way, and I am so tired of doing everything by myself all the time.” I felt self-conscious about coming to him with tears, instead of a clear articulation of the problem so I added, “That’s not what I need your advice on.” There was a beat of silence. “I know, sweetheart.” We spent an hour on the phone trying to figure it out. (Dad 🥹)
My dad told me I would need to take my door off its hinges, which launched me into a spiral. “It’s a fire door!” I shrieked at him. Removing it would require me to strip decades of paint out of a dozen old screws with a razor. I’d need to buy a pry bar to lift it off the ground. And since movers were clearly not the solution, I would also need to ask my real-life friends to lift not just a giant couch, but a giant slab of metal for me. And what if we couldn’t get it back onto its hinges when all was said and done? What would I do then? Call my landlord and ask him to help me? In this city? Sleep alone in an apartment without a door? In? This? City?
I hung up with my dad and sat on my stoop. My face was salty with sweat and tears, my shoulders knotted with anxiety. According to my therapist, anxiety can be a result of unexpressed anger. Sometimes, it feels safer and less disruptive to swallow your anger and direct it inward, instead of at the relevant people and circumstances. But then, it has to go somewhere. “The next time you feel anxious, try asking yourself what it is that you’re actually angry about,” she told me. I felt angry about everything, so I walked to home depot and bought a pry bar.
A few hours later, my friends Steven, Brandon, and Amelea arrived. The men wrestled the couch up the stairs. Amelea and I consulted on angles. We flipped it every which way and concluded that not even removing the door would help. My generous, patient friends took the couch back down the stairs and returned to the fourth floor. I ordered pizza and poured them wine. “You might have to call the Couch Doctor,” Brandon said. “Who is the Couch Doctor?” I asked between bites of Speedy Romeo’s.
The Couch Doctor gets impossible couches into impossible apartments and he answers on the first ring. It is somewhat reassuring to me that this service exists — I’m not the only idiot in this city who didn’t use the Pythagorean Theorem. Anyway, I described my impossible couch and my impossible apartment. The Doctor said, “We can do it” and gave me a quote that made my eyes water. My friends left. I got into the bathtub and tried not to be mean to myself. “It is what it is,” I repeat over and over again. “You are so lucky that you have the means to make this mistake and solve it,” I say, massaging my temples. I didn’t know where else to put my anger so I put myself to bed.
The Couch Doctor’s men arrived at 5 pm the next day. They almost got the couch in as is, but alas, even the Doctor’s men couldn’t bend the laws of load-bearing walls. In the end, they did the “doctor” part. I didn’t want to watch, but what happened is: they took the upholstery staples out of one corner of my couch, sliced the corner off no more than a foot in any direction, pulled the couch inside, drilled the corner back on, and sutured the upholstery back into place. I went to the ATM and when I came back, they were arranging the throw pillows.
At 6:45 pm, I fell asleep on the couch, inside my apartment.
It was a few weeks later that I met L, and learned about my feminine energy. Curled up on the big couch after our session, I thought about the advice the women in my life have given me: to let things out, to practice deep rest, to examine my anxiety, and to release my anger. If the little couch felt like a happy harbinger of my then-new life, the big couch felt like a growing pain of the next iteration — or perhaps the physical manifestation of my latent anger, quite literally coming home to roost. But now that it’s here, now that it has come apart and back together again, I’m not angry anymore. Now I can let the big couch hold me and we can both rest.
My friend Kelley came over after the whole couch ordeal. I poured her a glass of wine and we sat on the big couch talking for hours. She said, “Sometimes living alone is like being a single dad to yourself.” We laughed about this for a while, that is, until I knocked a glass of red wine off my coffee table and onto the couch. You’re up, kid.
It was fine in the end, of course. I can get a red wine stain out of anything.
xx,
Sarah
♥️