You Don’t Have to Perform Wellness
My body started doing weird things in the fall of 2021.
When I lay down, I felt like I was floating on a raft in choppy water. If I turned my head in the opposite direction, it took me a moment to get my bearings again. I often woke up with a throbbing sensation in my skull, like my brain was expanding and contracting to the pulse of a metronome. I would surrender to the floor in the middle of the day, my body overcome with frightening fatigue. I struggled to read simple children’s books with my kids, doubting the accuracy of the words I saw on the page.
In the years leading up to this, I was riding the waves of my early 40s, new parenthood, quarantine life with a toddler and preschooler, devastating wildfires, house renovations, and continuous strife, both on TV and on the streets outside my home in Portland.
In August 2021, I contracted some kind of virus that might have been Covid.
When I did get a confirmed case of Covid the following February, everything got worse. My brain now burned like a raging dumpster fire. I couldn’t sleep more than a couple hours at a time despite my persistent exhaustion. It felt like being trapped inside an incurable case of flu mixed with an unrelenting panic attack.
Multiple visits to doctors yielded no answers, or at least no helpful ones. My tests all came back “normal.” I was offered a workshop for Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) patients, in which I was told to prioritize tasks and find ways to cope with the fatigue as I waited for things to shift. I was given higher doses of the antidepressant I was already taking, then a slew of different SSRIs and ADHD meds. Some of these did nothing, and some made me feel much worse.
When I called a mental health crisis line on a particularly awful day of despair, the rep on the other end told me that, unless I chose to go to the ER and admit myself to the psychiatric department, I might try watching a funny movie or eating a favorite food.
As kind as she was, her counsel amounted to throwing snowballs at the dumpster fire in my head. I eventually resigned myself to the fact that no current test or treatment could measure or address the terrifying dysfunction in my mind and body.
No one was coming to save me.
So I did my own research. I found other stories similar to mine, which then led me to mindbody healing modalities and various approaches to treating mysterious and misunderstood symptoms.
These approaches taught me why some of us bounce back quickly from viruses and injury, while others of us struggle to recover. I learned about the links between pre-existing trauma and stress, characteristics like perfectionism and people-pleasing, and our capacity to heal.
This was hugely validating. I jumped headfirst into a “brain retraining” program that preached the importance of identifying and interrupting our unhelpful thought and behavior patterns, then redirecting ourselves to a positive thought or sensation. This is the basic process of neuroplasticity, in which the brain develops and favors new neural pathways while weakening old ones.
The program was rigorous. I was advised to approach my healing “with the persistence and determination of an Olympic athlete.” I memorized a detailed script and a set of postures to take while reciting the script. One guideline recommended engaging in these prescribed steps at least 100 times in one day. Participants were also advised to avoid acknowledging and discussing any symptoms and any distressing topics, including news and media.
We were encouraged to post regular progress updates to the rest of the healing community in order to inspire others and keep ourselves motivated. We were offered group classes in which we were invited to share our progress but edit out our difficulties. We were led in synchronized, chipper pantomimes with the intention of “tricking” our minds into believing we were happy.
If we found ourselves confronted by traffic, bureaucracy, or any other indignity of modern life, we were guided to raise both arms in the air, force a smile, and fervently proclaim, “I LOVE IT!”
I was told I should be constantly looking for positivity and ways to “dose myself” with happiness hormones to make up for the imbalance in my brain.
Image of neuron by Hal Gatewood
I would do anything to get better, so I took these dictates very seriously.
And there’s some validity to all these suggestions. Thought and behavior change does take focused and consistent practice. Immersing ourselves in stressful information when we are already debilitated creates more obstacles to healing. Focusing on positive changes and our strengths can give us a boost. Finding moments of delight and joy in the midst of struggle helps us endure.
In the months I devoted myself to this program, my capacity did grow. I was grateful I could once again write more than a one-sentence email. I wasn’t waking up from nightmares in a cold sweat every morning. I could empty the dishwasher without having to stop and take a break partway through. Grocery store trips were easier when I wasn’t terrorized by the fluorescent lights and beeping registers. I could hold a conversation with my husband or a friend for more than five minutes. My inner dumpster fire had dwindled to a few remaining embers.
Yet something was off.
The progress updates I read from others featured stories of people triumphantly going on cruises, flying across the country, eating out at restaurants, getting their hair done, attending stadium concerts, riding roller coasters, buying new cars, running errands all over town, and returning to demanding jobs. When members did touch on their challenges, it was often with an apologetic or guilty tone. Many expressed worry that if they weren’t getting better, maybe it meant they weren’t following the program pillars correctly–all day, every day, like you were supposed to.
This culture fueled the urgency and desperate sense of indebtedness I already had around healing. I believed I needed to recover as quickly as possible to make up for the time I had “lost” being sick—especially all the labor, pain, and inconvenience I had dumped on my family and friends. I rejected the wounded parts of me that couldn’t just keep sucking it up and soldiering on. Clawing my way out from a deep well of deficit, I thought I owed everyone around me my wellness.
Every part of this undertaking started to grate on me. I had gotten used to the loneliness specific to chronic illness, but the loneliness had acquired a new layer. I was tired of feigning ease while my body was still in agony. I posted progress updates highlighting the things I could do again, leaving out the distress I was feeling while doing them.
Image by Nick Fewings
I was such a good student that I avoided telling anyone what I was truly experiencing, for fear of reinforcing old negative pathways that would keep me sick. When I finally shared with a program coach my frequent impulse to scream or sob, she told me I was probably reinforcing a trauma loop in my brain, and I just needed to keep redirecting my attention to something more pleasant.
Her comment stirred a deep rebellion in me. It sounded eerily similar to repressive messages from my childhood (e.g., “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about,” “It can’t be that bad; come on, smile for me,” and “We’re going to keep this a secret from your dad”). I had watched the women in my family mask their dissatisfaction or discomfort by adopting perky personas in order to better serve the men and children around them.
Being pretty, thin, and compliant on the outside was more important than how these women felt on the inside. This was a kind of performance, one I had been trained in as well, and one that had contributed to my illness. Twelve-Step folks call this the “look good”—presenting a poised exterior while hiding our heartbreak inside.
It finally dawned on me that this healing community was replicating the “look good” along with hustle culture, presenting wellbeing as a goal only attainable through grit, vigilant discipline, mind supremacy over body, and emotional bypassing.
Many of the program’s “success stories” featured a main prize of wellness: an enthusiastic return to achievement and consumerism, without any deeper acknowledgment or interrogation of the systems (and our participation in them), that helped create the conditions resulting in stress, trauma, and illness in the first place.
I had performed obedience growing up, and now I was performing my wellness.
This community was not the only one selling this philosophy. Plenty of others also endorse, to borrow from Audre Lorde, the use of the master’s tools to eradicate the very disease that the master created.
These “wellness” programs reinforce isolation and individualism by instructing their participants to complete regular practices that can only be done in solitude.
They suggest whitewashing our challenges in the name of positivity, a creepy echo of broader efforts to erase and revise our complex colonial history.
They keep us disconnected from our environment, urging us to escape into a fantasy world of visualization every time we encounter difficulty.
They overemphasize our achievements as a marker of success, equating our worth with our ability to get things done.
They promise we can “take charge” of our bodies, our healing, and our destiny if we just manifest hard enough.
Writer Sophie Strand discusses her experience with severe illness and the fallout from toxic wellness culture, naming the questions that plagued me:
[These people] felt abandoned by toxic wellness culture…They were curious why it was their personal responsibility to interrupt entangled webs of oppression that sedimented in their sick bodies? Why did for-profit medicine mean that people mostly slipped through the cracks, denied lifesaving treatment and beleaguered by bureaucracy? Why couldn’t the systems change instead? What unwellness was our wellness built from? What communities bore the unseen pollution created by our glossy atomized individuality?
Writer Sophie Strand, in an image from The Mythic Masculine
In a related piece, Strand reckons with the aspects of wellness culture that keep us separated from reality:
Just as we are uncomfortable with other people’s illness, other people’s dying, so are we uncomfortable with the environmental devastation and cascading societal pain all around us.
Do we go outside and say to the clearcut forests, the poisoned ecosystems, the microplastic-threaded oceans, and say, “Hope you are feeling better!” If we can develop a greater capacity to witness and accompany pain and illness in each other, we might become more sober and compassionate in our assessments of our own environmental entanglements. In the words of Donna Harraway, can we stay with the trouble?
When we say to someone who has been clear that they have an illness, a chronic illness, a tricky prognosis, or even a terminal illness, “I hope you’re feeling better,” what we are really saying is, “I want to discharge my social responsibility—but I find you, the sick person who cannot be cured, scary.”
What we are really saying is, “Perform wellness for me. Make me feel better.”
Today, I hold the amorphous, slippery concepts of healing and wellness much more loosely.
I still squirm a little when I see the word “wellness” in my website address, and I don’t use it without deep ambivalence. “Wellness” has become too bloated with cultural baggage, too closely aligned and burdened with very American concepts of infinite growth and optimization. More often than not, the person or platform or corporation invoking wellness is trying to sell us something, with no regard for the whole, willfully ignoring the ways in which our individual wellness is inextricably tied to the wellness of all.
Wellness efforts that sidestep the political and social conditions perpetuating harm are ultimately limited and unsustainable. As Prentis Hemphill notes in their book What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World:
“Over time, I have come to understand that social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together. Not one or the other, but both.”
Performing my wellness on a trip in early 2023: I shared this image in many healing community forums, trying to convey vitality while secretly struggling inside.
If I, as an individual, meet all the criteria for “wellness,” but my larger community and ecosystem do not, what does that mean?
What is the criteria for wellness, anyway?
The absence of chaos, weakness, grief, and pain?
A body and mind that earns accolades from the powerful and reaps the rewards of patriarchy, ableism, and empire?
The ability to attend exclusive and expensive retreats, where our “self-care” often depends on resource extraction and exploitative labor?
Loyalty to the cult of busyness by checking off items on an endless to-do list?
The refusal of help from others?
Insistence on patronizing mantras of “Good vibes only” and “No bad days”?
If this is wellness, I don’t want it.
A common refrain of “wellness” culture. (Photo by Ashley Whitlatch)
What if true wellness is living in the fullness of our human experience?
What if wellness encompasses—and even centers—our fragility, our shadows, and the constant change inherent to our existence?
As I continue to walk the long and winding path of healing, I now engage in a wide range of practices and tools that offer support and solidarity without denying the reality of the polycrisis we are living in. I nurture my capacity to witness and accompany my own pain and illness and that of others. I am more able to stay with the trouble, so that I might be more alive to it. When I can stay with the vulnerability of trouble, I can stay with the vulnerability of joy. I try to embody another piece of 12-Step wisdom that reminds us: Recovery is not about feeling better, but getting better at feeling.
Photo by Shane Rounce
If our place in the world teaches us anything, it’s that wellbeing is not a fixed state or a goal to be achieved. It is never static. It can vary from day to day and hour to hour. We move through perpetual cycles of growth, rupture, and renewal.
We don’t “owe” anyone else, or any system, our health or wellbeing. Our wellbeing is for us. How do we want to define it, and what do we want to do with it?
Let’s examine and dismantle the mainstream messages of wellness culture together.
Let’s define our own wellness and embody it together.
Let’s stop performing wellness and instead practice being in our full humanity.
Please join me for my upcoming sessions where we will do just that.
UPCOMING SESSIONS:
Wednesday Community Rest Sessions at Leaven
April 2nd, 16th, and 23rd from 4:00-5:30
NEW OFFERING!
Online Community Care Sessions for Activists
Saturday, April 12 at 9:00-11:00 am (PDT)
Sunday, April 27 at 3:00-5:00 pm (PDT)
As always, please contact me with any questions, suggestions, or ideas.
I hope to connect with you soon!
When we rest together, we heal and we thrive,
Stacy