In February, I wrote a piece regarding 2022, a year I spent in a deep state of conscious and unconscious grief. It started 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. It was not published, but the editor graciously let me take it elsewhere. So I’m bringing it here to y’all.
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?
Enjoy.
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 now, in February of 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 coronavirus 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 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.
That didn’t happen, 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 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 boxes, desperately scouring for what I’d lost.
I wanted it all back.
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