Just Relax

One of my earliest memories goes like this: It is a sunny, wholesome day at Mill Valley Nursery School. I bait the school rabbits with a few tepid, slimy carrot pieces I’ve clutched in my pockets all the way to school, scooping them into my arms and burying my face in their warm, brown fur as they squirm and struggle. I eat a Dixie cup of Ritz crackers. I ask if I can have peanut butter with my crackers. No, not today—the new boy, Darryl, has an allergy. What is a “lergy”? It means no peanut butter today.

I spin in the tire swing and teeter dizzily across the yard, crashing into the fence where the honeysuckle blooms. I furtively nibble the nectar from a few blossoms. I do art, gluing corn kernels into the shape of a “J” for “Julia.” I wish I had peanut butter. I hate Darryl. No. Hate is a strong word. It is not nice to hate people. I do not hate Darryl. I pedal furiously across the playground on a squeaky trike as my best friend, Tom, shrieks and dives out of the way. I curl up in a worn chambray beanbag and read a book about a selfish fish who learns to share his shiny scales.

My mother comes to pick me up. We walk from the schoolhouse down to the crosswalk. The round light is red. Red means stop. (Green means go.) Our big gold car is parked across the street.

I am next to the car. How did I get to the car? My mother is on the other side of the crosswalk. She is shouting something about somebody running across the street. Who ran across the street? The light is still red. Oh no. I ran across the street. The somebody who ran across the street is in “big, big trouble.” Oh no.

When the light finally turned green, my mother thundered across the road and found me cowering behind the car, trying desperately to cram my guilty, three-year-old body under the cabin of the family station wagon, shouting, “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it! I didn’t run!” My Shaggy defense was unpersuasive and I was sentenced to 30 agonizing minutes in solitary confinement.   

15 years later, my belated ADHD diagnosis would confirm what everyone had long since known: impulse control is not my strong suit. I spent most of my childhood in “big, big trouble” for infractions committed entirely unthinkingly: No one was more surprised than I to learn that someone named “Julia Irwin” graffitied her own name on the inside of her desk with a Bic white-out pen during Ms. Reilly’s seventh grade English class.

I didn’t have any intention to misbehave, but that was no defense. When, during an altercation, my friend Louise gave me the finger, I kicked it, putting her in a splint for a month. “What were you thinking?!” my mother shrieked, “You know better!” I did, in fact, know better, having just that past summer been summarily punished for kicking my fellow summer camper, Theo (an utterly insufferable 12-year-old) in the shin. The problem was that I wasn’t thinking when I kicked Theo’s shin, or Louise’s finger, nor was I thinking later that year when I kicked Atticus’s scrotum.

As my rap sheet grew, so did my anxiety: I never knew what my next infraction might be, only that I would commit it, assuredly drawing the exasperated opprobrium I fear above all. I habituated the scrunched, cringing posture of someone perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop, hiking my shoulders to my ears like a frightened turtle. As the years passed, my Golum-like posture began to take its toll on my spinal health, and by end of high school, I had developed a chronic deep, piercing pain behind my right shoulder blade.

I’ve spent years trying to fix it. I’ve earnestly invested countless paychecks in physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga classes, meditation retreats, posture correctors, muscle rubs, and a wide array of alien-looking self-massage devices, only two of which have been occasionally mistaken for sex toys. Every evening, I slather myself like a greased pig with CBD cream and Icy Hot, reeking of menthol and marijuana as I furiously grind my Theracane into the throbbing knot between my shoulder and spine.

This past winter, the pain became so intolerable that, thanks to my fiancé’s infinite generosity, I found myself face-down on a massage table at a fancy spa in Carmel. The frigid, windowless shed (“Relaxation Room #2”) reeked strongly of fresh paint, applied earlier that morning, making me dizzy and light-headed. Suddenly, three pumps of ice-cold massage lotion were unceremoniously expelled onto my naked back and my masseuse promptly proceeded to try to grind all of my bones into a fine powder. “Quite the knot here, huh?” she growled menacingly. “Bone,” I whimpered, “That’s a bone,” but my protests were muffled by the thickly padded face cradle. “My, you certainly are tense, aren’t you,” my abuser commented dryly, giving each of my toes a hard flick. Anchoring her thumbs, coated thickly with lotion, into my ear canals, she gently tickled my chin and imparted her sage wisdom: “Just, you know, relax, okay?”