“Cover yourself with the sheet and then ring the chime twice.” As instructed, I took off my robe and cotton slippers and lay face down under the sheet. I rang the metal chimes with a little wooden mallet to signal to my message therapist that it was safe to return.

I had never had a massage, so all of this was foreign and faintly ridiculous. After a couple days of adventures on the open seas, I had decided to chill at the resort and have a spa day. It was going to be relaxing. Relaxing as fuck.

When I think of spas, the first thing that comes to mind is Zoolander. Mugatu uses the spa as a pretense to brainwash Zoolander into assassinating the prime minister of Malaysia. I had a mild fear of being brainwashed and waking up in my hotel room a week later with no memory of what had happened. As far as I know this didn’t happen, though the timing of this post is suspicious (about a week after I entered the spa).

The spa manager suggested that I arrive half an hour early to soak in the sauna. When I arrived, she was flustered at having forgotten to turn on the steam and rushed to crank up the heat. I waited 10 minutes and then got in. It was hot as fuck, and I was sweating profusely in no time. I was told that this was good for me in some way and I would wake up the next day feeling like “a million bucks”.

The steam bath reminded me of another movie — Eastern Promises. In the David Cronenberg thriller (which I highly recommend), Viggo Mortensen engages in nude hand-to-hand combat with a pair of Russian mafia thugs who have come to assassinate him. It’s probably one of the best action sequences ever filmed, and certainly the best action sequence in a sauna. Luckily, again, I was neither assaulted nor brainwashed at the Grand Miramar Spa & Wellness Center.

For my first treatment, I opted for the one-hour “holistic massage”. Basically, this means a bit of everything — Swedish, Hot Stone, Aromatherapy, Deep Tissue, etc. I think she even stuck needles into my butt cheek at one point. I have no idea what that was about.

The massage was nice but not transcendent. I’m not one of those lucky people who experience autonomous sensory meridian response (also known as attention induced head orgasm). But I really dug the New Age music that played in the background and focused on that during the more painful deep tissue portions. My body didn’t feel signficantly different during or after the treatment.

The more profound part of the experience had nothing to do with the actual massage. When my hour was up, the masseuse rang the chime three times to indicate the service was over. I was taken to a recovery room and offered my choice of hibiscus or chlorophyll water. I chose hibiscus, but they were out. Chlorophyll it was.

The atmosphere in the waiting room was vaguely convalescent. There were big soft chairs and the shades were drawn. It was quiet and dim. I sat there in my robe and sipped my chlorophyll water. I felt suddenly as though I were recovering from some illness in a hospital or mental ward. And this thought overwhelmed me with emotion. It relieved a deeper tension than the back rub. Why?

To get by in the adult world, we all must become stoics. Sure, we do our fair share of whining, but it’s imperative to maintain the appearance that we are “fine”. Even when we encounter stress, doubt or failure, the first thing we tell ourselves and others is some form of “you’ll be fine”. In other words, we tend to minimize suffering and refuse to admit weakness. Because we have to be strong for ourselves and those around us. The idea that our struggles, however trivial in the grand scheme, might be taken seriously and treated with urgent care is deeply cathartic and refreshing.

To make a third movie reference, there is a scene in Lost in Translation where Scarlett Johanssen slightly injures her foot and is rushed to the emergency room by Bill Murray. The romance of the scene is that this overreaction is the opposite of the neglect and incomprehension she’s experienced from everyone else, including her significant other. It signals that she and her struggles, however slight, are actually real and actually matter. In that moment, I was Scarlett Johanssen and it felt great.