We Need Each Other To Be Well
Unraveling From Wellness: Part 3
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In the education of abolition and liberation, I feel like I’m still in middle school. What I mean is that I am very much a student in the framework, but deeply hold the values of healing justice, community care, mutual aid, transformative justice, Black liberation, queer and trans liberation, anti-imperialism, and the overall dismantling of structures. While I continue to learn and implement my learnings, my education comes directly from Black and brown educators such as adrienne marie brown, Patrisse Cullors, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Mia Mingus, Dr. Ayesha Khan, and more. A big part of my wellness journey and practice has been informed by the teaching and words of Fariha Róisín, Priya Parker, Dalia Kinsey, Tricia Hersey, and others.
I name this to note that my understanding of community care and the unraveling of wellness is not a unique thought of my own–it is informed by the lineages of these authors and leaders. To name these lineages is to honor generations of Black and brown communities that have been practicing community care and have rejected hyperindividualism since the beginning of time.
Content warning: mentions of disordered eating/ableism/racism
Nothing has made me feel more connected to my wellness than sharing food with those I love. My first experience with this was in a second-floor brick apartment building in Midtown Kansas City. Avery and Krissy were roommates and hosted a soup night. I’ll never forget Krissy teaching us how to pole dance in the middle of their living room while Avery chopped and cooked. I was in awe and had just begun learning to really cook myself.
Avery would cook a soup topped with extravagant garnishes alongside a cheese board since she worked at The Better Cheddar back then. We would all gather in the living room with a backdrop of dried flowers to accompany our laughter and vulnerabilities. This group continued to grow and shift, with the common denominators being soup and conversation. In 2017, I experienced the most devastating breakup and life unraveling to date, and it was the soup night community that held me through it and fed me through it.
A video of Gwyneth Paltrow is currently circulating TikTok about her “wellness routine” where she drinks coffee for breakfasts, drinks bone broth for lunch, eats vegetables for dinner, and then does (in her words) “a nice intermittent fast”–an eating disorder by another name. Food is the single most connecting thing in my life. There’s a reason I have written and will continue to write books about it. To hear someone that everyone deems a “wellness guru” have such a disordered relationship with food makes me worry. Food and wellness are so inextricably linked, and food and community are too.
When I say we need each other to be well, I mean my relationship to gathering and my inability to do it has single-handedly been the most devastating thing about the COVID-19 pandemic for me. I am grateful to have a partner who appreciates food and cooking like I do. Making pasta by hand and baking together has tethered me to this earth, and sharing photos of my good soup on Instagram only to have people make and repost their version is life-giving. But needing each other to be well goes far beyond food.
I have made the intentional choice to move away from asking my friends, “How are you?” and almost never even ask if they need something. Instead, I Venmo money, drop off soup at a doorstep, or send snacks straight to their door through GoPuff or Doordash. I know when I am unwell, the first thing to go is my ability to feed myself. When I am most connected to myself, I can make a salad with arugula, chickpeas, tomatoes, cucumber, red pepper, feta cheese, and a homemade lemon herb dressing with no problem. The moment reaching for a cutting board feels laborious, I know I need tending to.
When I was in the midst of my “wellness” centered eating disorder, I was so scared of food. I thought eggs would make me inflamed, non-organic produce was toxic, and I avoided processed foods, no matter how accessible they would have made eating for me. Eating made me so anxious and I could barely enjoy a communal meal without overthinking every bite. Of course, there are nuances to food and where it comes from, which creates a different kind of anxiety.
Another thing the pandemic taught me is that we need each other to be well. Not only did we learn isolation is detrimental to our mental health, but we simply have to be community-minded when we think about public health. One person’s actions can have a ripple effect far beyond what we can even fathom. The truth is, though, we don’t live in a world set up for interconnectedness. We have to choose it actively. We see this even now with how we are handling the pandemic and leaving mitigation efforts up to individual choice as opposed to collective care and solidarity.
Living in the suburbs for the last year has only solidified this for me. My neighbor is a cop who had a Trump 2024 flag up for the last few months (but just recently took it down), and no one waves to one another. Knocking on someone’s front door feels like a faux pas. I know this isn’t an issue only in the suburbs, but I notice it more now. The concept of being “neighborly” feels dead. Knocking on someone’s door asking for a cup of sugar feels like something we’d only see in old movies now.
How can we take small steps to move into a more interconnected mindset? The thing about being in community and in relationship is that you have to be willing to take emotional risks. What completely shifted my idea of friendship and relationships is the understanding that conflict is not the end of all relationships. I had to learn that being able to withstand conflict, moving away from punitive practices, leaning into deep listening, boundary setting, and authentic vulnerability is how we create connection. I’m not as practiced at this as I’d like to be–it’s a constant unlearning and relearning.
This is true for me in wellness, too. Some may replace interconnectedness with being holistic–but not in an individualist way. Many holistic practitioners I’ve come into contact with have told me to honor my whole person, but often leave out the whole system of our world. That’s why books like The Politics of Trauma that acknowledge collective trauma and somatic healing helped me understand holistic wellness happens outside of myself and with others.
We have entered the fourth year of the pandemic, and I, like many high-risk people, am trying to figure out how to navigate living a connected life when many have opted to center their individual health without consideration for the whole. They say it takes a village, but what happens if one village can’t access the same things as another? It takes each village to be aware of one another and commit time and energy to ensure everyone has a full stomach–a full life. We must move away from the bandaids offered by any individualistic framework.
The wellness industry, as I’ve said before, relies on us believing that we can buy our way into feeling well. This hyperindividualist mindset is a core feature of white supremacy, and I often think of Indigenous communities and their connectivity to the land. Not only do we need one another to be well, but we need the land (quite literally, the foundation of our soil) to be well, which means we must divest from capitalism and consumption to do so.
As I watch Gwenyth’s video, I think back to my childhood and my relationship with food, and being fed, and I wonder how much of my wellness–my family’s wellness–was so volatile because we didn’t always know where our next meal was coming from. I grieve a mother who couldn’t teach me how to cook but I’m unsure anyone taught her.
As I continue to think about wellness and how I’ve spent so long unraveling, decolonizing, and rebuilding my understanding of community care, abolition, and liberation, the place I come to is that we must begin to dream bigger than the systems we inherit. There is no such thing as being self-reliant or self-care. Any kind of wellness we have access to is a by-product of another, whether land or labor, and it is worth asking if we are continuing a chain of care.
Purchasing from a corporation that wants to sell us a new thing but doesn't pay their workers a living wage or throws us deeper into disordered eating or participates in fear-mongering is not continuing a chain of care. We have to think critically about where our resources go to nourish and sustain communities–especially ones that are underrepresented and left at the margins. Don’t get me wrong–it is hard to divest from systems committed to devaluing human life and prioritizing profit because our world is built upon these systems. But I think the first step is to dream past them–then take immediate action.
Much of the work I’ve been doing lately has been researching, brainstorming, and dreaming up mini-models of a queer-centered, anti-carceral mental health system through community-based organizations such as the St. Louis Queer+ Support Helpline. What would it take for us to move towards a holistic, anti-carceral, LGBTQIA-centered mental health model, rooted in healing justice, peer support, community care, and chosen family? These questions, dreams, and curiosities energize me–mostly because I know it won’t happen alone.
In an effort to offer a small first step, I recommend reading this piece from
. Anne also writes about creating infrastructures of care, and my friend Lenna speaks of chains of care and it’s just something I can’t get out of my head. Remember when I said I moved away from asking my friends how they were? That’s mostly because, after reading Anne’s newsletter, I realized there are so many better things we could be asking. More specifically, there are more things my friends want to be asked, and they all differ in how they want to be asked. I highly recommend reading the newsletter below and brainstorming how to create your own shortcuts and models for care.
We simply won’t be able to tend to the world without tending to our worlds. Let’s start small and then rebuild it all.
This article about unwritten recipes kind of made me weep.
Abolition Action’s We Keep Each Other Safe Zine
I made this soup last night and it SLAPED.
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Love,
I love your thoughts about community and food. I recently relocated from a crowded townhouse community in the city to a much more spread out suburb in a smaller town and am trying to figure out how to establish a community here. My dream is to have standing Friday night pasta nights where a rotating cast of neighbors feel welcome, adults talk late into the night, kids run wild, and we really get to know and rely on each other.
Sam, I cried a lot reading this -- tears of joy, for someone putting into words how I feel about community care (feeding others is how I show my love to others) -- and tears of rage for how diet culture and wellness culture and Gwenyth and her ideas are still so pervasive, and how they still fuck with me. Also, so appreciative of you naming all of the amazing Black & brown folks you’ve learned from, some I have also learned from and some I am looking forward to getting to know. You are a gem to the internet and I am so glad to have found your writing. Thank you for all that you do and all that you are.