MINA DIARIES: on dreams
It’s been over a year now, and I still remember how it felt to walk into the studio before it was my studio — when the white walls were bare, the bright fluorescent light illuminating the stark nakedness of the room.
I had signed the lease and had the keys in my hand, but aside from a bright yellow-orange abstract piece of wall art I later gave away and a clock on the wall, it was an empty room. Empty, but full to me of my humble dreams and aspirations.
There was a business plan, of course, a detailed one, as I can be quite a detailed planner. I didn’t make just one business plan. I’ve made a handful over the years, some for school, some for businesses I’ve dreamed up but will never follow through on, one for a business I hope to have in the future, and one, the one for Bella Mina, that was actually coming to fruition. So what I was thinking about in the bare room that was to be the studio was partly about dreams and plans becoming reality, about how ideas are these nebulous things that float around in the ether until someone plucks them out and gives them a name and a space and an existence on the earth.
The other thing I was thinking about was the long winding road that had gotten me to this bright little room. It began on a fall morning in 2005 back in Boston, when I was twenty-one. I had recently dropped out of college, had left the dorm, was jobless and had moved back home with my mother.
“I’m going to be a massage therapist,” I told her that morning. “I just got off the phone with a school administrator and I have an interview for next week.”
“A massage therapist!” She laughed. “Are you sure? But your hands are so small.”
“I told the man about my small hands,” I said. “He said it would be fine. He said there’s a girl in the school with only nine fingers.”
She laughed again and folded her newspaper. “Where did you get this idea? Were you watching late-night TV and saw a commercial for the school while you were eating Cheetos?”
I was. But sometimes that’s when epiphanies happen, and epiphanies don’t care if you’re in your pajamas, if you’re half asleep or your hands are covered in fake cheese crumbs. The people in the commercial were watching a teacher point at a skeleton, then smiling while rubbing a smiling person laying under a sheet on a table. They all looked so happy and I thought, I could be one of those happy people. I would learn everything I could about skeletons, and then I would learn about all the other bits that encase a skeleton, and i could use my small hands to make people feel better.
All of us in the class in massage school were instant friends, like we had formed our own little school family. But that didn’t make it any less awkward the first time we massaged each other. Nervously, we kept applying more and more oil, the way one might pull at their shirt sleeves or pick at hangnails during an uncomfortable social encounter. Our bodies would be bathed in oil, so that we all would go home cold, with soggy skin.
“Are you giving a massage,” the instructor would ask, “or moisturizing your own hands?” Oil had to be rationed out to us because we were wasting the school’s resources.
“Feel this,” the instructor announced one day with excitement in his voice, motioning us all to come closer and palpate the latissimus dorsi of one of the students. “You can feel the hypertonicity of the muscle, the heaviness and stagnation of the tissue is palpable.” The instructor was a blind man from China who specialized in Shiatsu. To us he was a sort of superhero. He could describe in great detail the tone and quality of any muscle tissue he touched, and we imagined his abilities were magnified by the fact that he couldn’t see.
As each of us one by one agreed that we could feel what he was feeling, I wondered silently how many of us were lying. I certainly was. I simply didn’t have the knowledge, intuition or experience to know what he was talking about. It was like trying to learn another language, but there are no equivalent words in English, only vague approximations. I wanted so much to understand, but I knew I had to be patient.
And then one day, about six months into my practice, I felt it, so palpably — the hypertonic upper trapezius muscles of a young woman. How taut they were! Through my hands I could feel the stress of her life. But what to do about it? I ran through my training, using techniques I had learned, but nothing I could do could make those muscles budge. I had not yet learned all the novel ways of communicating with the muscles through the nervous system. I would have to learn more, be patient again.
In the bright little room that was to be my studio, my mind flashed forward, way forward, to 2020, when I was learning how to do nails. Some days I would be pleasantly surprised with myself, having mastered the art of holding a brush, steadying the hands, being an apparent natural at French manicures and nail art. Other days it seemed that everything would go wrong for me — a piece of lint would land on a freshly polished nail, there’d be cuticles that I missed that my instructor would have to clean up for me. “I don’t know if I’m even cut out for this,” I said one day to my instructor, a diminutive, wise, patient Vietnamese woman.
“What you do when you new at something? What about when you new at massage?” she asked me. “You give up, or you keep try?”
If only I could have heard her wise, stern voice in my head years before I’d actually heard it. It’s a simple thing, but sometimes it’s the simple things that make all the difference.
Once I felt confident in my massage skills, I went back and finished my bachelor’s degree in psychology, but I wasn’t ready to pursue a master’s degree. There still was, and is, more for me to pursue in the world of spa. In esthetician school, I began again learning a whole new language. Looking at the skin under a magnifying lamp, I saw that the skin spoke to us, and if we understood what we were looking at, we could speak back in the form of applying the right combination of products.
One day we all got to look at our skin under a Woods Lamp, a fascinating and genius yet horrible contraption that highlights in different colors all the flaws of one’s skin. I stared at my sun-damaged reflection for a long time. I had two realizations — one, I do need to apply more sunscreen. But the second, and perhaps more important realization, was that I vowed to accept myself just the way I am. The parts of my skin all come together to tell the story of who I am and where I’ve been. I hoped one day I’d have a space where I encourage people to take care of themselves, but also love and appreciate themselves for who they are and where they’re at. We have laugh lines because we laughed. We have worry lines because we worried, and that’s part of our story too.
And here it was, this space I’d dreamed of, small at only 160 square feet, but looking around that bright empty room, I had hopes that big things would happen here.
That’s my story — or part of it, anyway — but each and every person who comes in to the studio brings their own story in with them. And the studio’s purpose is to add something good to that story. I often think that the studio has now taken on a life of its own, and it has, in a sense, because of all the good that the people come in bring in to it, all the life that is breathed into it. All the beauty that has been brought to this space is because of you, dear reader and patron, and that keeps me humble and grateful for this nebulous cloud of an idea that has become a real space on this earth.
