I worked at Starbucks for 2 years, while also trying to finish the manuscript. During my second year I connected with a regular client and asked her what she did for a career one day. She said she was a massage therapist. I said oh, neat. I want to learn that in the future. Since secretly while I was consciously focusing on writing, I was also starting to get the itch to learn something new. I was scanning massage school websites all over Vancouver Island, and dreaming about taking classes. I told her I wasn’t sure what style I wanted to learn. She suggested I try working at her spa first.
Six months later I was working at the spa as an attendant and just finishing off working at Starbucks. I was also still working on the manuscript.
I was the jane-of-all-trades, maid, grunt worker, you name it, for the spa. The very first day I arrived I was a minute late and the toilet in the woman’s locker room overflowed. My new supervisor and I went right to work at cleaning up the space. It was not the perfect start. Cleaning the mess helped me calm down from being stressed about being late. And my supervisor was super cool, and was not mad at me for being late. I was still use to Starbucks, having to punch in on the correct time, or getting in trouble if we did it too late or too early.
There are two worlds in the spa: one in the general lunch room and the other with clients. It was amazing watching practitioners contort their faces into smiles that everyone except the client knew as being fake. Or a loud person changing their voice to calm and sweet. Clients loved the spa I worked at and I even took pride in working there since it was very pretty. But I knew that I would never use the mineral pool, or what we attendants liked to call people soup unless I knew it was totally cleaned. Every day we had to clean the scum off the edges, not really pleasant when you think about it. Or the steam room, which seems nice but that is a whole other story.
Working at a spa must be peaceful is a false statement. I was constantly helping the practitioners set up their treatment rooms, then running to clean the locker rooms, cleaning the lunchroom since the practitioners rarely helped clean their own mess or changing light bulbs in the front room, and finally folding laundry. There were many other tasks that I had to do, I would have a list to follow but often I would get torn from the list to help someone else. I was very busy working there but I did get to see what it was like being a practitioner and being able to have cheap sessions with them.
I also got to see what it was like to be a practitioner working at a spa. Newbies got little clients, and were supposed to help me clean up the spa but they chose to sit in the lunchroom to read books instead. Practitioners that had been there a long time would often get more clients than they would really want, and have little time for breaks. I didn’t understand then how draining a session could be if you don’t have time to relax between sessions. Often they only got about 10 mins between each session, barely enough time to go pee, if I were not there to help them set up their next space.
Now it may seem I have negative thoughts about working in a spa. My experiences were not all bad. I actually think working at a spa has many benefits. Such as working with other people, having to not worry about administration or marketing and being in a beautiful setting. I wanted to share the negative to stop people from idealizing working in a spa, like I had done in the past. Working in a spa is a job where as I decided now to have my own space. It is still a job but I am my own boss as they say. And that can be just as hard.
I finished my manuscript while working at the spa and sent it to my friend’s publishing house. They turned me down, but I was already expecting that. I just wanted to follow through with my decision to send it to them. I worked at the spa for 4 months before I had my first shiatsu session. I had thought shiatsu was a name of a type of dog, but realized that was shih-tzu.