On The Connection Between Care and Wellness

Three distressing events happened to me late in the summer of 2019. The first was a staph infection treated by a physician who told me that if I hadn’t come in sooner, I would have died. (Another doctor later informed me that wasn’t true.) Three weeks later, there was a painful cyst that nearly became septic. (I’ve written about this before.) And the third was an odd migraine presentation. This was the scariest incident and the one I remember most vividly.

I was standing in the middle of a local pie shop on a busy night. When my name was called, I quickly turned my head to the side, and a disorienting jolt of pain shot through my skull from my left temple. I grabbed my forehead, stumbled, and caught myself. And, as quickly as it had come, it left. As late summer unwound into autumn, the jolts of pain happened just as randomly but much more frequently—even if I wasn’t moving.

Wrapped in a turtleneck sweater and a navy blue trench, I walked into my first neurology appointment in November 2019, and I wasn’t very hopeful. But the doctor was cheery and convinced that she’d determined what was happening: The number of antibiotics I’d taken during those back-to-back bacterial infections earlier in the year had caused me to develop a rare neurological disorder. There was a medication for it. I cried, happy that finally, I’d have some relief.

But in January, I walked into my PCP’s office begging her to take me off the medication. The neurologist had refused even though I’d told her that I was having newly onset suicidal thoughts, a sign that I was having a bad reaction to the medication. Plus, it wasn’t reducing the pain anyway. At the end of the month, I saw a different neurologist who properly diagnosed the new migraine presentation, which was, frustratingly, causing the jolts of pain ripping through my noggin. [1]

I still can’t quite describe what it feels like to believe, fully and totally, that you are dying. All three experiences remain, imprinted in my psyche, rearing their heads in debilitating ways years later. That 6.5-month period left me with crippling health anxiety.

The pandemic did not help.

I dissected this period of my life in February 2023 for a freelance project, after spending several years in a deep state of conscious and unconscious grief. This period didn’t manifest clearly—it began with me noticing changes to my body and my career, which spiraled into me realizing that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Most significantly, I didn’t know who I was outside of my career and my willingness to strive for perfection. The essay was not published, but the editor graciously let me take it elsewhere. I published it in my newsletter, Salt + Yams, and I’m going to reprint an updated version of it below. As I’ve written many times before, my relationship with wellness is incredibly complicated—and this is another piece reflecting on and working through that complexity. The thrust of this piece, however, is me asking myself the question at the center of Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters: What does it mean to be well? And do you have it in you to do it? It took me a minute to square this question with the work we do at the Better Life Lab, and I’ve struggled to bridge the connection between being well and care. But what I’ve written below offers a human lens to the answer: The systems that prevent us from taking proper care of ourselves and our families manifest themselves throughout all facets of our lives.

Complicated systemic issues provoke people to seek out the snake oil salesman because taking his potion feels easier than contending with our country’s lack of universal paid leave, guaranteed basic income, guaranteed housing, and child care to help keep the most vulnerable among us afloat.

I. Denial

I couldn’t get them up. I jumped, braced myself upon landing, jutted my hips forward, squeezed everything in, making myself as small as possible, and yanked. They didn’t budge. I let out a deep sigh as my coziest jeans made themselves at home just below my hip bone. Instead of trying again, I pulled them off and grabbed a pair of leggings—my bottoms of choice since the summer of 2021. But by February 2022, I was over it. I wanted to put on my most beloved denim.

I knew, on some level, that the jeans were a conceit for my desire to squeeze back into my old life, the one I had before the COVID-19 pandemic uprooted our lives and I reported on the deaths of one million people. I hopped on the coronavirus coverage early, starting with a series of stories on how COVID-19 was affecting people incarcerated on Rikers Island. One of those assignments entailed me fielding a series of phone calls from those same men who shared gut-turning details of the conditions they were living in. This, of course, led me deeper into reporting on the racial disparities we were bound to see play out, culminating in a piece about how, if officials did something, Black lives could be saved.

I couldn’t fit back into my old life, though.

I spent the greater part of 2022 mourning my pre-pandemic self—mostly my body, routines, and the days when I didn’t watch the COVID-19 death counter tick upward. But, more importantly, I realized I’d lost an integral part of my identity. My willingness to care for myself had slipped away from me, escaping my reach before I noticed it was gone.

There was no reprieve in my desperate search for it. I scavenged the shelves of my pantry and rummaged through the piles of clothes I could no longer wear. I stocked the fridge with the foods I loved and reinstated the routines that kept me sane. I even returned to my sanctuary, lifting my old weights, and jumping onto plyometric boxes, desperately scouring for what I’d lost.

I wanted it all back.

II. Bargaining

The life I had before the pandemic was an accomplishment I had chased for years. My routines and body were what I’d always wanted, and I spent a great deal of time trying to recreate them. In 2019, I had a set schedule. I was up at 6 a.m. I did yoga, meditated, and made breakfast before hopping on the train. Then, I’d get off a few stops before the office and walk a mile in. Once the day had wrapped, I’d walk to the gym and workout.

That process didn't click in 2022. My attempts to get up at 6 a.m. went smoothly—but yoga, a long walk, and breakfast? Before 10 a.m.? Then a second workout later?

Nah.

I’d become terribly anxious about my physical health after three very distressing health scares in 2019, and that feeling of hypervigilance skyrocketed during the pandemic. My intuition told me that this push for my old way of being was anxiety-fueled and a desperate attempt to control something as the world around me rapidly changed.

Still, I fought for what I once had. I adapted, switching up my routine to exercising midday, walking in the morning, and doing yoga whenever I felt like it. That didn’t work for long, either. So I went for walks around noon instead and returned to morning yoga and evening workouts, which, you guessed it, didn’t work. By this point, I was convinced that something was wrong with me. I reread The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara’s opus on what it means for Black women to commit fully to healing. I delved into Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks, a reflection on how misogynoir—the racist and sexist contempt leveled at Black women specifically—affects our health for the first time. I increased the frequency of my therapy sessions. None of it worked in the way I’d wanted because I simply couldn’t recreate the same sense of control I had over my life before I covered the deaths of one million people.

My over-ambitious approach to being well was hindering. Healing isn’t an achievement. It's an ongoing process that can’t be relegated to a checklist. The only way to heal is to surrender to the incredible amount of emotional and spiritual work it takes to do so, to take on the responsibility and the weight of it—maxims I learned from hooks and Bambara—so that you can reclaim your agency and liberate yourself from the pain.

Their work provoked me to come to terms with an intricate truth: Complicated systemic issues provoke people to seek out the snake oil salesman because taking his potion feels easier than contending with our country’s lack of universal paid leave, guaranteed basic income, guaranteed housing, and child care to help keep the most vulnerable among us afloat. When our struggles to feel well are assessed through this lens, the pull to have the right workout regimen, an optimal morning routine, and an ideal waistline begins to make more sense. The machine of capitalism is promising a cure for the problems it has caused. But we don’t need fancy supplements; we need access to nutritious foods. People don’t need another self-help book; they need child care. And, most importantly, we don’t need advice from the multi-billion dollar wellness industry; we need an overhaul of the systems that prevent us from being able to take proper care of ourselves.

III. Acceptance

Acknowledging who I am now hasn’t been easy. It’s required me to dig deep and allow myself to be vulnerable while not dwelling in the muck. I’m more emotionally sensitive now, and I need more radical rest. But I’m also giving the compassion and grace I’ve given others back to myself. I’m no longer surviving. I’m living now.

In June, after a go with COVID-19, I tried to pick up where I’d left off, but the health complications from the infection sat me down. It was physically impossible, at that time, to do too much. I don’t view illness as an opportunity for reflection, but I decided to look at it that way this time. So I asked myself: What do you need right now in 2022?

The answer was, “A lot.” In addition to therapy, I accepted that I needed to start taking antidepressants. I stopped being rigid and embraced a 7 a.m. wake-up time, which had always felt more natural. I took a month off from the gym, and when I returned, I started cycling my workouts to incorporate more rest days. I use that time to stretch, meditate, and get my yoga flows in. I don’t cram everything into a single day anymore.

Now, I am someone who honors their current reality, and who incorporates an understanding that internalizing systemic failures won’t help me feel better. I take care of myself by being kind to my body, refraining from (much) negative self-talk, and refusing to punish myself with exercise. Getting there required me to open up to change. It took me months to release the grip I had on what once was, what was no longer working, and what never really worked. I’m still working on it, but I’ve taken my ego out of it and surrendered to 2022. That is who I am now.

Or, at least, for the time being.

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[1] For those curious, my migraines are done being weird and have reverted to regular, degular episodes that leave me laid out on the couch with a bottle of ibuprofen glued to my hand. No triptans needed—a massive feat of which any migraine sufferer is well aware.