A situation in a tiny room that went one way but could have gone another: do you speak up or not? And food that can help the heart.
What you will learn
- How you can use a little self assurance to avoid a lot of discomfort
- How to eat some great foods to help you if you’re feeling lonely, scared, insecure or just plain blocked
Before I say anything else, I’ve GOT to say that this is NOT a sex story. It really is NOT girl on girl. I mean, it could have been, but things didn’t really go that way. It’s more like a super vulnerable, I-know-I’m-not-the-only-one-but-it’s-still-kind-of-weird-so-its-super-scary-to-share story.
So on with the story
It takes place in a tiny room – specifically, in a maid’s room in Paris – a ‘chambre de bonne’.
There are a few requirements for a room to classify as a real French maid’s room:
- Tt must be super tiny. How much room does a maid need, right?
- Tt must be at the top of at least 8 flights of stairs with no elevator
- It must NOT have a shower
I guess maids didn’t need showers? That one kind of baffles me – but anyway. If you were a lucky maid you’d have a communal shower in the hallway. Otherwise you just did what I did, you went to the local pool a lot.
It had no kitchen area either – surprise surprise – but we had an electrical socket next to a shelf with a hot plate. We basically made a lot of pasta and oatmeal. I guess it was the equivalent of what the British call a bedsit. A bedsit is a room with enough room for a bed and for you to sit on the bed. There’s not much else.
We actually had a deluxe maids room because there was enough room for TWO beds which was unheard of really. Maybe that one was where the head butler lived or something.
Anyway I was really grateful to be able to live there with my friend – I’ll call her Mave.
Mave was the whole reason I went to Paris in the first place. She had said ‘Come to Paris, I’ll be there too, we can stay for a year, it’ll be really fun’. Mave went back to the US at the end of that year, and I wound up staying for another 14 years (but that’s another story).
From the airport straight into ‘French fried’
When I arrived fresh (well not so fresh actually) from the Paris airport, the train and the subway, Mave was kind enough to help me lug my 3 HUGE suitcases up 8 flights of stairs (God knows WHAT I was thinking by bringing so much stuff). She also let me stay with her till I got my own place. She was working as an au pair and the maid’s room was included in her ‘deal’. So there were TWO of us in a tiny room that was smaller than my bedroom at home – but way more exciting of course because it was in Paris!
Now one day I’d just come back from a long hard slog of going around jobhunting…before Google. Before the internet. You had to look through newspapers for job adverts or go out of your house (what a concept) to look at local noticeboards. Then you had to call people up and go to see them. Of course you also had to find them first, in a strange city. So when I got back I was feeling a bit discouraged because it was really hard.
Why was it hard? Because my brain was absolutely FRIED from trying to do everything in French. I was job hunting, reading, talking, getting lost, asking for directions and interviewing, all in French. My French wasn’t good enough to make that an easy process (buying bread was stressful, so imagine jobhunting. What was I thinking?).
Plus you didn’t have a mobile to check Google maps to get directions. Just imagine.
So I was totally wiped out. I can remember the insides of my cheeks hurting because speaking French requires different facial muscles. Did you know that? Totally weird – and totally another story.
Here comes the ‘not girl on girl’
Anyway I must have looked as discouraged as I felt. Mave was like ‘Oh, you look like you’ve had a rough day, let me give you a massage’.
Now if this had been a guy saying this, I would have been like ‘He’s totally hitting on me’ and I would’ve just laughed. I would have either said ‘Well maybe another time’ or ‘Hmmm, sure!’ Depends if I was attracted to him and how I was feeling at the time, right?
But because this was coming from one of my closest girlfriends, I was like ‘OK’. I laid down on my stomach on the floor (there was nowhere else). Mave started massaging my back and my shoulders, which was really nice.
Now a lot of my close friends are gay or bi, so, you know, I don’t see people’s sexual preferences as any big deal. I think we’re all on one big spectrum anyway. A few minutes into the massage though, and I started to sense that things could easily go in a totally different direction from just a friendly massage. It was like that spidey sense that we’ve all got, right? When your brain goes ‘Whoa! Alert! New information here! What are we gonna do?’
So I kind of started panicking, and I thought, “What do I do? What do I say?” I mean I loved this girl, but I wasn’t attracted to her that way. Actually the most important thing to me was that I really didn’t want to hurt her feelings. So I just said something like ‘Ummm, I think I’m good now, thanks so much!” and I sat up and started doing something else. I think I probably started making oatmeal (we practically lived on oatmeal so that would have made total sense).
The only thing ‘coming out’ was good ol’ insecurity
I actually felt a bit guilty inside, like maybe I’d disappointed her or hurt her feelings anyway. My mind was like “OMG we’re gonna be sharing this small space for potentially a few weeks and things are gonna be all uncomfortable and weird…”
Actually Mave was absolutely fine about the whole thing. I had been panicking inside for nothing. She was almost laughing about it, you know, like ‘easy come easy go, just a thought’ kind of thing.
And you know, we never talked about it, I’m sure because I was way too afraid to mention it. I mean I was so chock full of insecurities anyway at that time, and I was so focused on not hurting her feelings. When I think back, not only was she totally OK with the whole thing, she was OK with who she was.
She still is, in fact now she has this SUPER high-powered job, a great relationship, the kind of life that anyone would envy. And I realize now that she was way more grounded in herself than I was at that time, even though she’d definitely had her share of challenges growing up.
I think it’s taken me like 30 years longer to feel anything close to the degree of self-assurance that she had at 24, which is how old we were then.
So I kind of wish now that I’d been brave enough to at least talk about stuff rather than push things under the rug. I wish I wasn’t so embarrassed and uncomfortable about the whole thing. I’ve gotten way better at talking about stuff now, but 30 years seems like a long time to get there, you know?
Has anything like that ever happened to you? Did you have an opportunity to be really open and honest with someone and maybe you didn’t take it, you closed up instead? I think we all have at some stage, right?
What I wish I’d known then
I personally wish I could have felt braver rather than scared, more secure rather than insecure, or even just happier and more confident rather than be riddled with low self-esteem. In other words, I really could have used something to help me unblock my ’emotional self’, or my heart center, to put it another way.
Now I say ‘heart center’ because I don’t just mean our physical heart, I mean the whole center of our chest that comes alive when we feel happy, loved and expansive.
If you think I’m going all woo-woo on you, just bear with me. Think of a time when you hugged someone you love, or cuddled a pet – you know that warm feeling in your chest? That’s the heart center expanding. There’s an actual physical process that goes on there that can be measured. It’s why people with cats for instance are less likely to develop heart disease. I mean, I’m not making this stuff up.
How do you know if you need a bit of ‘unblocking’?
So how do you know if your heart center – or heart chakra, some people would call it – how do you know if it’s a bit blocked?
Well, any time we experience loneliness, shyness, an inability to forgive, jealousy, harsh judgment of others, sadness, codependency – in fact, any time we block our feelings, we’re blocking our heart center.
So if any of these are familiar to you, and if you’re human I suspect the answer is yes, your heart center could use some tlc and a good ol’ foodie boost.
I mean, we all feel these things sometimes. It’s nice to know though that there are things we can do – and foods we can eat – to help us through these feelings.
The perfect food, and it isn’t what you think
So let me share with you the perfect foods to help. These foods are not only good for your heart center, but for your physical heart too.
And no, I’m NOT talking chocolate (although that’s good too, for other reasons which you can read about here).
The food I’m referring to is…I hope you aren’t disappointed…green leafy veg!
But wait! Before you go ‘ewww I hate greens, I’m not a rabbit’, hang in there. There are ways to make them taste amazing, and I’ll get to that in a second.
The rule of thumb is pretty much anything that’s green, and I’d say the darker the better.
Eating greens like spinach and kale is great for your heart because they give you magnesium. Magnesium helps regulate blood pressure. Plus green veg are rich in fiber so they help lower cholesterol as well as lower the risk of cardiovascular disease.
One thing though: if you’re on blood thinning medication such as wayfarin, check with your doctor – you’ll need to limit the amount of kale and spinach that you eat because the vitamin K content can make that particular medication less effective. However you can have other green veg like broccoli and celery which will still benefit your heart, so you won’t lose out.
How to eat it without feeling like a rabbit
Now how do you eat your greens, especially if you don’t like them? Well, make yourself a green smoothie! Toss a mango (take the huge seed out obviously), a handful of spinach and some water in a blender, and voila! Delicious!
If you’d like some recipes to make a wide variety of greens taste absolutely amazing, you’ll find lots of inspiration in my 5-minute recipe ebooks.
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I hope you have an amazing day. Thank you so much for being here with me to share in my Clean Food, Dirty Stories. Bye for now!