Chapter 9: Introduction to Radical Self-Care - Who Is Wellness For?

PART III: ON SELF-CARE

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”

—johanna hedva, Sick Woman Theory

* * *

One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.

—bell hooks

Though I’ve been writing about self-care professionally for about seven years now—diligently, methodically, tending to it like a spiritual study—at times I have felt I know nothing about how to truly care for myself. Initially, I turned to the concept of self-care for answers, and found the works of the late, great bell hooks and the tender radicality of Audre Lorde. I, too, craved an anecdote to better understand who I was, and I longed to know how to aid myself in order to become that person. I knew that the reservoir of unresolved anger rooted in me like a deep prickly weed made it hard to know how to love myself, and so, I assumed (rightly) the first step toward my higher, evolved state was to learn myself intimately and to accept it all. I had to understand myself like a lover and appreciate everything I felt was unlovable, gaining a security I had never known in myself, and according to hooks and Lorde there is an inherent radicality to caring for yourself when you come from a lineage of oppressed peoples. Taking on self-care as an active embrace has meant merging the needs of my mind and body, because in the act of self-care—the mind and body are prioritized, that is the very self you are caring for.

Nothing that I share is a one-size-fits-all theory, but instead something I’ve gleaned from my personal studies. I have often felt like self-care should come with instructions, because I didn’t quite know where to begin the process myself. The nature of self-care’s commodification has meant that we’ve lost track of how personal this journey is. We all have our own traumas, fears, needs, and therefore our own specifications, idiosyncrasies. With such an overwhelm of choice, it can be difficult to know what we need as individuals, how to care for our own damn self. Capitalism has destroyed our sensors, and instead we want it all—or much of it—without understanding what is inherent or honest to ourselves.

We take direction from websites, peer reviews, and best ofs to determine the scope of what we like. This is of course those of us who have the luxury to afford and fathom caring for ourselves. Why does wealth—real or imagined, inherited or self-made—make us believe in our own entitlement? In the 2015 New York Times article “The Price of Nails,” Sarah Maslin Nir spoke to the labor conditions of nail salon workers across the boroughs of New York. “Nail salons are governed by their own rituals and mores, a hidden world behind the glass exteriors and cute corner shops. In it, a rigid racial and ethnic caste system reigns in modern-day New York City, dictating not only pay but also how workers are treated.”^[1] This is how they’re treated internally, then there’s dealing with actual customers. I remember feeling immensely grateful for this piece when it was published, as I had witnessed with my own eyes enough women (always white women) bullying nail salon workers in a variety of different scenarios to realize that there was a context of entitlement of who gets to self-care that wasn’t being acknowledged. So much of the rallying cry of white supremacy happens in these moments of ubiquity, when even the most virulent acts of entitlement are ignored because we expect it of whiteness.

I can’t write about self-care without first pointing toward the obvious—your care cannot impede on the care of others. Just like the concept of freedom—ask yourself, is it really freedom if it is only for some? If we prioritized not just what we think we deserve, but also how we are in relation to others, and thus how we care for them as well, we might experience true liberation. Being unbound by fear or hurt or pain, simply by showing up as the best version of who we are, sounds like liberatory behavior. Why has whiteness made the playing field so dirty with such high stakes and yet such low standards? Why isn’t the measure of a successful society how well we care for each other? And how can we possibly believe that programming people to think only for themselves could result in holistically positive results?

I think all these years I struggled with true, unadulterated self-care because I was taking direction from others, expecting them to have solutions that I could’ve easily just learned by myself, for myself. But I believed that I would be cured by another’s expertise. When that failed me too many times, I began to realize that I could find the right acupuncturist for me, the therapist for me, and that I could build my own routine around my life and my needs. Agency is an important and necessary part of self-care, because in the process of learning that you have it, you are forced to take ownership over your life. Caring for yourself means taking a giant leap toward yourself. You have to put yourself in your own driver’s seat.

I did not know what “life force” was until my first Ayurvedic doctor, Pratima Raichur—an absolute renegade of Ayurveda in America—introduced the term to me, explaining it through the use of the Sanskrit word prana, which means “life force,” to explain ownership of oneself. Mine, she explained, was low and dull, which was evident in the hue of my skin’s tonality (I was yellow, but if I were more balanced, I’d be red) and the dryness of my body and hair. Details, like eczema, that were dismissed by medical experts were to her important clues about my constitution. My dryness was an indicator of my incapacity to absorb nutrients, even good ones. An apt metaphor, it suggested I had an excess of fire, meaning I had to focus on cooling my body, which meant doing less vigorous exercise and embracing an overall slowness, including reducing caffeine intake. As she told me this, I protested, almost resentful. “I can’t do that,’’ I told her point blank. Her advice, like a lost grandma’s ardent wisdom, was blunt: If I wanted to truly heal, she told me, I’d have to start registering that my body had answers. The markings were telling her what she needed to know.

Prana, she told me, is also about will.

Will is an interesting concept, because clearly I have it, I escaped my life and built what I have on my own, and yet on a fundamental, day-to-day level I felt so broken, so unchosen, that the IBS ravaged. Everything was a representation of my mother’s lovelessness and abuse, and any relationship could become a rearticulation of it.

*  *  *

In Chinese medicine, jing is known as essence—another interpretation might be prana—and it is passed from parent to child. Prenatal jing nourishes the fetus during pregnancy and determines basic constitution, strength, and vitality and is stored in the kidneys. One way to know if you have a weak jing is to examine and know the state of your kidneys. The last time I was alerted to take notice of my life force was during an ayahuasca ceremony, just before the pandemic. At the time, a teacher I was working with explained that my life force had been hijacked at such a rudimentary stage that to think that I could be in control was a new paradigm for me. But we all perform safety, don’t we? Especially in ourselves. We think we understand who we are, and yet everything we know has been informed by others on some foundational level, in ways we can’t even comprehend. I had to notice that I had tied my own hands (or, rather, that I had the keys to my own escape) simply by acknowledging the truths that I had never uttered, facing the reality of how I participated in my own life’s rhetoric. I had to accept that most people didn’t really understand me because they couldn’t see the psychological and emotional ravaging, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I needed to learn how to validate it to myself.

Living in the Western world gives you a certain hubris that you have choice, or freedom, and that things aren’t silently forced onto you, chosen for you, spoken for you. Whether it’s the laws that regulate you, the state that surveils you, officers that police you, or capitalism that seduces you, at the end of the day, you are bought and you have to be conscious about so many different facets of your life to understand how and when you are bought. In order to not fall prey to losing your sovereignty, you must choose the life you want, outside of the confines of what you’ve been told to want. Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry,^* explained in an interview with Atmos magazine, “Our lack of resting has stolen our imagination and our ability to be inventive and subversive and to imagine and to have hope. And to me, that’s true oppression. To me, once you have taken away a person’s ability to see their way out of a situation, to see a new way, to imagine a new world, to see something different, to invent, you pretty much have them. And I think we’re at that right now.”^[2]

This year has been a year of rest for me. Of borrowing rest from the years I had thrown that need to the side, not believing that I could be a successful writer (as in, be comfortable) and not need to worry for the next day, week, month. In my mind, I didn’t feel like I deserved to rest, because I hadn’t received the monetary foundation of being afforded the time to relax. Of course, this is a trauma response. For so long I just thought it was my drive, or the plight of being a Capricorn stellium (listen, it’s hard out here), but it was really just my incapacity to stop working out of fear that I would lose everything faster than I could say anything to protest.

We are road maps to ourselves and what we need on an individual level. In a recent ayahuasca ceremony, I had been ruminating on gentleness without completely understanding what that meant. I knew I longed for a soft touch, an agile hand on the head, fingers running through my hair with ease, but as I was unpartnered and celibate, where would I find this intimacy? Grandmother, the medicine, revealed that it had to begin with me. I asked her how. She pointed out that I was lying on a hardwood floor, rolled over in pain, convinced I was incapable of doing anything about it. At that moment, my life force was weak. She pointed out that there was a mattress, a perfectly good clean mattress right behind me that I could ask for help to get onto. Sometimes the medicine makes it hard to do the most benign things, so I hesitated. I would have to ask for help, and that scared me. It took me a while to ask, to even muster the word help! The first time nobody heard me, and I was immediately embarrassed, silenced, my abandonment wound perking up. But Grandmother kept pestering me to ask again and again—she told me to ask however many times I needed to until I was heard. So, I did. Finally someone heard me and eventually helped me get onto the mattress. It was an extraordinary feat, and as I lay there, on the mattress, my ass no longer in pain, I saw my own pattern playing out. Then I realized another way I obstructed my prana was not believing that I deserved help or deserved to ask for things.

No longer tender from the hardness of the floor, I cried at how easy it could be if I learned how to ask for help. It was, truthfully, something I needed on such a crucial level of self, and the absence and depletion of that necessary tenderness, the tenderness to believe you deserved help, had made me parched for love, for affection and care. So, I remained in a state of desperate craze, perpetuating my own myth. This is what happens when you are taught that your value is how well you accommodate others. I thought of the words of CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife” essay: “When a woman needs, she is needy.”^[3] To want gentleness, Grandmother told me, was key to the next step of my evolution. I had to believe not only that I was worthy of the love I wanted, but that it was also possible to find the people who could meet me here. But it had to start with me. More than anything, I had to give and offer this love to myself.

Regaining my life force was my first actualized step of self-care.

*  *  *

Earlier this year I remembered my father taking my mother, my sister, and me on a drive. He entered the woods—I don’t remember how it happened, but it happened fast. I think this was around the time he was first rebelling, too, thinking that he could control her hysteria if he wielded some kind of power as well. I don’t know, maybe that’s my read on it all these years later. At a certain point, past the clearing of trees, he started reversing toward a body of water. It happened so quickly. It was as if he knew the bank intimately and had been considering death here, backing into the water as my mother screamed. For most of my life, death at the hands of a parent felt so close, so immediate. When I think of life force, and where I lost mine, I think of all the times in my childhood I witnessed extreme violence that then suspended me into a dis-reality, a chaotic amalgam. Incapable of moving, of saying no, of screaming. As a child who relied on being “good,” my silence, my self-numbing, caused me to lose my life force. Every time I didn’t scream, every time I didn’t defend myself, every time I let my body get hit, I was allowing someone to determine my path for me. I was giving away my essence of self. This is why, I believe, survivors of rape and sexual abuse have a hard time expressing what is lost. What you lose is part of yourself. Sometimes you give so many parts away, however, that you’re no longer accessible to your own self.

When I began therapy, I had to be reminded over and over again that I had ownership over my life. I didn’t realize that I was living in perpetual fear, that my anxiety about something going wrong, about someone hurting me, accusing me of something I hadn’t done, was a form of PTSD. It took me a long time to realize a constant slow panic was a sign of distress and therefore a sign of something deeper at play. When I was a child, I just presumed I was an abomination. In Dreaming the Dark, Starhawk writes, “Psychologists have constructed a myth—that somewhere there exists some state of health which is the norm, meaning that most people presumably are in that state, and those who are anxious, depressed, neurotic, distressed, or generally unhappy are deviant.”^[4] That’s exactly it—I presumed I was deviant.

Finally understanding that I had to give words to all these things and let them sit in my system, giving my cells the lifeblood they had been starved of for so long, allowing myself to claim the space that I had never been given, was a difficult point to arrive at, and I wonder if it’s a place of constant arrival. Every day I gain further clarity of myself and my body’s alchemy—all its mysteries and wonders—understanding that healing or wellness is not a stagnant state. For some of us with bodies in revolt, it is a state of unraveling that’s necessary for the rebraiding to occur and reoccur. Life is an upward motion dance, and along with that, I’ve realized, wellness is, too. I used to get so upset by the slowness of my path, at how difficult it is to be in my body after all these years of trying. The work is glacial; it’s punishing, too. The only thing that has taught me any calm is to surrender. To embrace all of it and let it unfold as it must.

“If you are struggling to practice self-care,” disability rights activist Mia Mingus writes in “The Four Parts of Accountability,” “you will inevitably have to confront why you consistently put yourself last. In the example of self-care, you may need to let go of some things or say ‘no’ to something or someone; you may need to assess how you spend your time and why you make space for things that are not what you ultimately want to prioritize. Transforming your behavior is hard work and is easier done with support. Find people in your life with whom you can talk about your accountability, mistakes, things you’re ashamed of or feel guilty about, things you need to apologize for, or times when you weren’t your best self.”^[5]

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Something about caring for myself has also felt erotic. I mean erotic in an energetic sense, like how Vedic priests and Sufi mystics write about tantra, the art of energy, harnessing sexual pleasure to exist beyond sensuality and tactile pleasure, but rather about tapping into something akin to the divine, a source for all, a place of majesty and mythic imagination. To me, real sensuality was inexplicable, or what Derek Walcott calls a “green thicket of oblivion,” the energy that is both inside and outside of us—that’s the one to channel.

Growing up in a culture completely devoid of eroticism—yet having such rampant sexual abuse—says a lot about what exists, like a penetrating disease, at the heart of South Asian communities. Sex can’t be talked about, but it’s everywhere it shouldn’t be. On your mother’s tongue, in your uncle’s gaze, in your cousin’s touch. So much of these worlds are hidden, but growing up I felt it everywhere, all the time. When my mother and sister told me to go up on the roof with my creepy uncle, I said no, firmly. In retrospect, it’s interesting to see the times I had a backbone, but it’s usually when there was a clear delineation between good and bad. With incest or rape, or all the things we pretend don’t happen in our culture, sometimes it’s murky if you know the person and feel you must trust them. Or if some part of you felt good to be desired. These are complicated feelings.

As I grew older, what I realized was that this attitude wasn’t purely a product of South Asian culture. The literature, art, poetry, song, dance, even faith of these regions—and I’m thinking of India, a greater India, where we were all one—were erotic; this was once a powerhouse of eroticism, where thought about sex and desire was an evocative and ever-present current in the culture. What I had experienced in my youth was a mutation of my culture, of all the things that sex becomes when it is perverted. In Mughal paintings depicting homosexual sex acts, tantra, and religious sex acts, the legends of Jahanara Begum the lesbian, of kali-sutra, there is immense evidence that my familial lands pulsed with energy, with life, with prana, with sexuality. And now? What had happened to my lands and my people? Why had we moved so far from our cultural truth, where men freely hold hands on the street, are tender with each other? Where sexuality is an ingrained part of culture and space?

Part of reckoning what is lost inside of me—this ethereal lostness—is also tied to the immense loss of tantra, of sex, of our life force. It’s existential, but maybe existentialism is just an inherited feeling. A feeling of loss so great that for generations people have remained, living in these dimmed versions of themselves.

Impacts of colonization—directly tied to the very puritanical Christian ideal of rigidity—colluded in Indian culture, inserting codes such as Section 377, a British colonial penal code that criminalized all sexual acts “against the order of nature,” which prosecuted people engaging in oral and anal sex as well as homosexual activity. It has also been used to criminalize third gender people across the Commonwealth. “Sexual hierarchies, we found,” writes Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch, “are always at the service of a project of domination.” When you force people to feel morally corrupt, their desires ungodly, using words to demarcate non-white people’s inherent bestial nature, while crediting the white race and the Christian faith (brought to us by a Palestinian Jew, lest we forget) with purity, you make a people turn from themselves even more. So many of us are wandering around, thinking: Where do we even begin to start to heal these wounds? For so long we’ve had to pretend the unthinkable didn’t happen, that our lands weren’t completely stripped by an ungodly and cruel force, and that does something to desire. It forces desire to become about power. When you feel you’ve been exploited, how else do you determine your worthiness than by stealing it in the same ways your captors continue to?

Radical self-care, I believe, means going to the beginning. I want to explain to you how I see these things, holistically, complexly. Naturally, when you feel you don’t have agency, you are pliable to a market, to capitalism, to an industry that will tell you that it knows exactly what you need to make you love yourself—convincing you that those needs can be met outside of you. That this lost, insoluble thing is something you can gain from a better life, aesthetically. Everyone wants to be well, but few want to do the work to be well. This is an existential problem—we deem worth, value, on the exterior—related to the idea that happiness can be gained through material possession or the perfect body that you’ll never have (but even if you had, you could never enjoy) because you were stripped of the initial confidence needed to make you feel good about yourself in the first place. If nobody has looked at you as a human, with a complex ecosystem of experiences, of traumas, of loss, of failures, of longing, of desire, of inadequacy, of hopefulness—and, on top of this, as a person with a deep need to be loved and seen, alongside an incapacitating fear that you will never get it—wouldn’t that drive anybody mad? Instead, we become a target for the plight of consumerism, because we all need (and yet lack) love so deeply.

*  *  *

Audre Lorde writes in The Cancer Journals about losing one breast to a mastectomy after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She speaks of grief: “I want to write of the pain I am feeling right now, of the lukewarm tears that will not stop coming into my eyes—for what?”^[6] Is there anything more relatable than a woman’s worthy articulation of her pain, and then her own dismissal of said pain in one breath?

I used to think I write for the legion of sad girls, but since writing this book, I’ve become clearer on my mission. I write for those desperate to understand the faint hysterical patterns left like an imprint on our souls. I can’t look at someone’s sadness, their illness, or depression, without tracing it back to the research and findings in this book. I don’t want to pathologize, but I feel that our sadness, depression, and illness are a portal to understanding ourselves, our pasts, and our families with more searing clarity. It’s a door. Sure, sometimes it’s one to oblivion, but my own process of allowing myself to go mad, to leak out and stain the floor, to die and die again, has led me to an incredible awakening.

Though there are still some days I resent having had to save myself. I hate how I’ve had to finance my own healing on a writer’s salary. I’ve been mad that I had to do this work in the first place, but I also know that if I hadn’t, it would have meant actual death.

In the West, there’s no space to rehabilitate from a hard life. You were in a car crash and now you’re paraplegic? That’s your problem. You were gang-raped in college, failed all your classes, and were forced to drop out of school? That’s your problem. You’re neurodivergent and are confused by people because it’s hard to engage with reality when there’s no truth in society? That’s your problem. There’s no space for the most vulnerable to heal. If you have money, you might have more resources, but healing is always going to be limited because there’s no after-rehabilitation process, as in a step-by-step guide to reintegrate us into society. Society isn’t safe. In a city like New York, where I lived on and off for over a decade, that’s a known fact. It’s a hard city that relies on the continuation of hardness, which is misread as strength. But I think it’s really just a denial of the needs of people. A society can’t be a one-size-fits-all concept, because this always prioritizes those who have power, and I mean that in a racially, able-bodied, and class sense. When society cannot protect all of us, how could any of us think that we can feel safe or cared for?

“What if depression,” Ann Cvetkovich writes, “in the Americas, at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances?”^[7] What if, before the trauma ripened in people, we gave them space to grieve, to share, to connect, to speak the truth of their existence? What if we allowed people to be honest about how much they hold? What if we met them there, at that wounding, and didn’t isolate them? According to writer May Sarton’s findings, “care has its roots in the Gothic word Kara, meaning ‘lament.’ The ‘basic meaning of care,’ then, Sarton notes, is to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with.”^[8]

It’s interesting to me that to care can mean to lament when society offers so few places to do so. How many people ask you how you’re doing and care about the answer? It’s been hard to find people who can really nurture me on the daily, on the regular, who want to do that work and meet me at my grief, knowing that it doesn’t usurp theirs, knowing that there’s always a space for all of us to grieve and that multiple people can be present in those needs being met, that we can all be that for each other. Often when I’ve wanted to express sadness or a complaint, it has been explained back to me, or I was glass half-filled. Something stuck out—always—and rarely would anybody want to hold my pain with me. If they did, it was usually trauma bonding,^* and those interactions cascaded and fizzled long before they got any ground. When “being present” doesn’t feel like a worthy offering, what does that say about the society that adheres to such dissonant standards of connection?

Other people’s dismissal of my feelings made me accept, again, that my needs could be dismissed, and that that was advisable. It was less messy, and it made me more pliable to others, which is what I thought I wanted. But so much of people being incapable of meeting you where you’re hurt is due to their incapacity to meet themselves in those very places. Perhaps they, too, have been dismissed too many times. There’s a sanitized way we meet each other, with zero compassion, and severed interest or concern beyond anything that is mercenary. It is not surprising that a society that runs on commerce would proliferate a cycle of people incapable of meeting each other on a deeper level.

And, yet, if I meet myself, if I am holding my own pain, naturally it’s easier for me to hold yours as well. I’m not waiting to be saved by someone else’s validation. I’m validating myself. Writing has been that journey for me, and through this process, I’ve made some of the most intense connections of my life.

Virginia Woolf, in her 1930 essay “On Being Ill,” observed that it was strange “that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”^[9] Literature, Woolf believed, concerned itself too much with the mind while pretending that the body was “negligible and non-existent.” Woolf called for a new literature, one that would report on “this daily drama of the body” during illness. She believed that looking illness “squarely in the face” and writing about it would require “the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the Earth.” For these works to be penned, Woolf remarked, writers would need to invent a new language—“more primitive, more sensual, more obscene.” And people would have to “reorder their hierarchies to include illness (along with jealousy, for example) among life’s central experiences.”^[10]

*  *  *

A few years ago, when I was living in Montreal, I remember envisioning the life that I wanted. At that age, so much of my existence was shrouded in denial, existing side by side with some uncomfortable ghosts. The life I have now has definition, despite at times being difficult to bear. But I would take this life with its continuous openings and blood-curdling revelations over the silent rupture of not knowing. I’m the generation that wants to know, I came here to hunt. Not to play a dull solipsistic game of feeling sorry for myself for a millennia only to curse all the generations to come with poison because I couldn’t be fucked, like the generations before me, to really change. I don’t blame them. Partition, famine, civil war, gang rape, the traumas that exist adjacent to genocide, monsoons, malaria, dengue, immigration to two different white settler colonial nations . . . I forgive my family for not being able to think about me. But imagine what it would mean to inherit all this?

In Montreal, I had no idea who I was, but I knew I was in immense pain. Pain, I believed, with enough insistence, I could hide. I believed I was only likable if I became so small, like a particle of dust. I was a people pleaser. I was amendable, malleable—like gold—but I didn’t think I was precious; instead, I told myself it was my responsibility to placate any situation with the skill of a precise moderator. I am immensely sympathetic. I can almost always see someone’s side, even if it means I have to apologize or take accountability. My skill is how well I can believe I am the bad guy and that I should apologize or submit to something I was accused of doing. As a child, accusation at my mother’s hand was common. Sometimes she was right—I stole from her shamelessly. She always stole it back from me; she’s stealthy, but sometimes I stole lying to her face. This gave me a complex. Was I inherently bad, and that’s why I was being punished into eternal damnation by having a mother like this? Or was I damaged, broken, believing I deserved some sweet redemption that, in lieu of a mother, I stifled through food and a mild shopping addiction? Most days I was the latter, but I punished myself believing I was the former. The more I made myself invisible, playing into my own abstraction, believing in my mother’s mythology of how we were all bad, I continued to lose my authentic sense of self.

After my suicide attempt in the bathtub in 2015, the thing I haven’t said before is that I thought of my mother—that’s what pulled me out of it. The sadness that I might not get a chance to forgive her. I wanted to absolve her sins, but at that point, I hadn’t even named them. There was too much to account for and not enough of her sanity to hear me, to face me, to tell me why. I will never get over the grief of not being able to have a real conversation, one where I’m not clawing at teeth for an answer from the person who birthed me. The saddest thing is that I want to know her, but she won’t let anyone in. She would much rather live in a fantasy where she is the only victim of life’s cruelties. I used to want to believe that it was true. That what had happened to her was so unlivable that she turned out the way she did. I always humanized Disney villains because I had my own.

On a trip to New York many years ago while I was still living in Montreal, I bought a little red book from a shop in the West Village with the word Ideal on the cover stamped in gold. I still have this book, and years later, I still write my dreams and aspirations, with the new moon, in there. My first entry, etching in my needs, I conceptualized my ideal life: regular massages, acupuncture, and an Ayurvedic doctor. A decade later, I have finally achieved the inherent rhythm I sought back then, in my early twenties, when I was just starting to understand the edges of my body. It’s humbling to know that the self-hate wouldn’t just dissipate, that I would have to begin to confront it. I knew it had something to do with needing to love myself. Throughout the years, I’d notice that I felt the most embodied after random massage work. The regularity of bodywork significantly helped me work in the journey of liking myself—the somatic healing surfaced a deep reverence I had never had for my body. It’s as if the touch of someone else’s hand was a way to soothe me into existence, a way to counteract all the violence that hit my body. I had often felt too shell-shocked by the world, because my initial entry point into life was so much devastation that I was forever in the folds of the fear that beckoned me as a child. To get out of that trauma state, or to not always adapt and fall into that trauma state, requires continued resolve. I started to also see how many of us believe things like acupuncture or massage were extra, and therefore unnecessary, as we’ve silently taught to be callous with our own bodies, and thus somatic needs. I began to see how much shame there was in claiming care, or even stating a need for it. We have all accepted the failure of the status quo . . . but what about the bodies, like mine, where this lack of care could be lethal? For me, the work had to be done, otherwise I’d die. I think I would’ve killed myself from the pain and the misery of physical discomfort. I had no choice but to begin to heal somatically, which required a regularity of touch, of care. During the pandemic, this was immensely difficult, but the clarity of the time gave me conviction to claim myself more ardently. After a conversation with my friend Jamie, where we acknowledged our own chronic body pain, we began to dream of the possibilities of affordable care. What if everyone could afford a weekly massage? Weekly acupuncture? Why weren’t these things more accessible to those who needed the most, across class lines? Why is caring for yourself your own responsibility? And, in the revolution, wasn’t there immense possibility to re-envision what real care could look like, for all?

I didn’t understand that an expert therapist could know how to unravel you slowly so that you could begin to see yourself less fragmented. Early on, when I kept telling E that I wanted to be better, she asked if what I really meant was that I wanted to be whole. I knew there was a lot that was in the dark; I knew that from the signs of death and decay on my body. There have been many times in my life that I have felt hanging between portals, life or death, who knows—the underworld, or here—and I was spending more time in a deep psychic space, those treacherous planes. At a certain point, I realized I didn’t want to be sad anymore. I had to understand how to harness the nectar of life, the one I had tasted, that I knew existed. To save myself.

You know how enforcing a good habit or breaking a bad one makes you feel alive? Well, self-care feels like that for me. A chance to choose myself again and again. For so many of us, accessing ourselves means breaking down the tunnels of cement we’ve placed between us and our own internal knowing. Some of us as children are punished when we ask for care, and many of us are admonished by our parents in times of need. Our desires are met with annoyance as opposed to openness and gentleness. Every child deserves to understand that their words and requirements have meaning and value. When you are made to feel small, or punished, especially when you ask for something, then you begin to absorb everyone else’s needs, just like you’ve taught your skin to harden so you don’t feel the hits anymore. Just like you’ve dulled your nervous system so that shrillness doesn’t penetrate you anymore. Numbness is a survival tactic.

*  *  *

Learning the value of shared reciprocity in relationship, that there is a shared burden and that each party should always be considering the needs of the other, as well as themselves, has been a transformative recognition. I was socialized—because of my gender, but also as a South Asian, Bangladeshi woman—to do everything, to be silent, for everyone. Asian labor across the colonized world is the labor of caring for others, and is thus seen as feminized labor and therefore undervalued. Much of my parents’ decision to leave was because of the violence in Bangladesh that was making all of our livelihoods dangerous. Caring for myself, when this is my legacy, is, as Audre Lorde tells us, an act of warfare.

I wish I had something more profound to tell you about my actual practice of self-care. I can tell you I prefer deep tissue massage. That reflexology is king. And that the kidney 1 acupuncture point (with the needle) is like a painful but relieving sex position. I could tell you all salads are not made equal (and they’re not good for you all the time depending on your Ayurvedic, TCM composition, or digestive system). I could tell you it’s boring if you don’t know what ashwagandha or reishi or turmeric actually do—and even more boring if you don’t support decolonial spices^* and only buy from white-owned companies who don’t give their employees healthcare, lol. I could tell you that if you don’t know what self you’re caring for, it’s harder than if you did. So, in that sense, what I can say about self-care is that the best of it happened when I decided I was going to pay attention and validate every little thing someone else had told me to distrust and dismiss about myself. Last year, during a moment of prayer at my altar, I noticed that my foot was cramping about four times before I moved it. When you’re always on fire, what’s a little more fire added to the situation? “Sick Woman Theory,” writes joanna hedva, “redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance.”^[11] As humans, our mere existence on this planet is precarious. So, what else do we have but each other, through this?

I hid my chronic pain starting in my mid-teens, believing that the pain that I endured was my path, a path I had seen my mother and the other women in my family take. One of martyred servitude. But when I started to look at myself more intently, with no narrative attached to my own being other than the notion that I wanted to know myself better, I released myself from the servitude. Now I was something worth knowing, even if it was just to myself. I wanted to understand the shattering, I wanted to see the glass on the floor, I wanted to see where the rock landed and determined the real gravity of its impact by finally facing who threw the rock and why. At a certain point I began to see that this recognition of the multiple stories, of the multiple paths, of the endless realities, were what made up life. The purpose of being alive wasn’t to be right, it was to accept and understand yourself and others and compost whatever wreckage you could do to heal the cracks, for yourself as well as the generations to come.

“Torn apart into basic elements and then reconstructed,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa in Light in the Dark, “the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. The healing occurs in disintegration, in the demotion of the ego as the self’s only authority.”^[12] I realized I had a responsibility to myself, and the clear indication was that my body was sick, that I was unwell, and that I needed extra attention from myself. For the first time, with a sense of relief, I realized that maybe I was beginning to figure out how to take care of myself, and maybe all I needed to do was listen to myself—to my body—and trust myself. For the first time, I made that connection without shame. A lot of us might have the switch—the red light that goes on with the same kind of interior recognition—but to trust oneself is also a journey of self-care that consists of rewriting, redetermining, and rerouting how you exist in this world. That commitment is what I believe self-care really is. It’s what Estés says is “becoming alert by oneself, for oneself. Letting die what must die.”^[13] It’s remembering you’re all you have, and that there’s grace and real love in accepting that.

Footnotes

* “The Nap Ministry was founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey and is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps. Our ‘REST IS RESISTANCE’ framework and practice engages with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing. We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.” “About,” The Nap Ministry, accessed March 25, 2021, https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/about/.

* Trauma bonding defines a psychological phenomenon where those who are abused form an intense, unhealthy relationship to each other due to the false intimacy created in their shared or similar experiences.

* The original intent of colonial conquest of the Indian subcontinent was a desire for domination of the spice trade. Founder of Diaspora Co., Sana Javeri Khadri, an Indian woman, created a way to counteract extractive ways of getting Indian spices by working equitably with farmers. “About,” Diaspora Co., https://www.diasporaco.com/pages/about.