Where to start.

I just turned 30.

I am happy to be 30. Pretty uneasy about the general state of the world but excited for a new decade.

I don’t have much to say about the milestone but I do want to talk a little about my last year. I spent most of the last year with my hands going numb, the pain increasing as the day wore on. Often by night, my whole hand and arm would be in pain and all I could do was go to sleep and hope that I would wake up, the pain slightly less.



I did not expect for my hands to rebel at me in my twenties. To go to the doctors and get my test results back with the diagnosis: severe carpal tunnel in both hands.

In a way, I was lucky to get the diagnosis. My pain was not in my head, after all. It wasn’t just anxiety manifesting in my arms. It was real and it had a remedy that was relatively quick and easy. I could get surgery in both wrists to release the pressure on my nerves and from what I was told, the pain would be gone. And so I had two surgeries, spent four weeks off of work, and hoped for the best.

I was lucky to get the diagnosis and yet, I want to talk about the pain. About not really being able to use your hands anymore. About the pain coming every day. First in my fingers then the wrist then the elbow then the forearm. It throbbed. It rendered my hands useless. I worked through it day after day for years and then at night, I was done. I couldn’t cook, write, scroll through Instagram like the rest of my peers seemed to be doing. All I could do was occasionally cry and hope it would be better tomorrow.

I am still healing from my surgeries. The pain still subsists and I’m still trying to figure out why. The whole thing was a good lesson in something we’ve all come to know as life goes on, and strikingly so, this year. It was a lesson in things going wrong and having to change your plans and adapt, despite wishing I didn’t have to. It was a lesson in growing older and realizing my body can give out if I don’t take care of it (sometimes even if I do). It was a lesson in deep empathy, realizing in a small way what those with disabilities and chronic pain experience.

As for the cherry on top that came for all of us, after four weeks of leave after my surgeries, COVID-19 came. I never ended up going back to the office. Instead I set up shop in my spare room and worked, while I watched as our collective health was threatened every day. 

After my first week in quarantine, I bought Eula Biss’ book, “On Immunity: An Inoculation,” where she put the lesson I was learning in such wonderful and plain terms. “Immunity is a myth,” she said. I underlined it, repeated the words to myself. Immunity is a myth. If you’re lucky, it’s not something you realize when you're young but I have finally taken it in. No matter my deep-seeded plans and my attempts to stay healthy, I am not immune. Not ever - and thanks to COVID-19 and our flailing government, especially not now.

In addition to my doctor’s visits, I started therapy for the first time this year. Like most people, I’ve tried it a few times before but it never stuck. Thankfully, this time it took, thanks to a partner who helped me to take the leap after years of seeing me live with deep anxiety. I asked him to help me find a therapist for my birthday last year and he did. He sent me a list of six or so therapists and after calling everyone on that list and trying to judge as much as I could about a person from a phone call, I found a really good fit.

Therapy broke me. It broke me so much that in the middle of it, I had to postpone my wedding. As I do, I piled things on this past year (working late nights, taking on large projects outside of work as a volunteer for the Sierra Club, trying to find a new job because I wasn’t happy where I was, trying to write a book in any free time I had, and also planning a wedding — all while my hands slowly deteriorated). Something had to give and despite the deposit we had put down, it was my wedding that got the boot.

All of this to say I’ve been thinking a lot about how to take care of myself this year and it seems to be a bit complicated.

I have never been great at self-care. I think I’ve been fine, but not great. So much of self-care seems capitalistic. Buy this sheet mask. Buy this $200 serum (!). But the notion of it shouldn’t be dismissed. Jenny Odell in her wonderful essay “How to Do Nothing” examined the idea of self-care in a way that made sense to me: “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” she said. “[Take for example a rose garden], the most constant regulars of the garden are volunteers doing maintenance.”

Maintenance. I like that term. Or as someone said in a podcast I listened to, think of self-care as self-parenting. As adults, we don’t have parents checking in on us daily anymore, making us dentist and doctor's appointments, dealing with insurance once the bill comes. In this way, I can get behind the idea of self-care. It’s not a face mask. It’s getting yourself to the doctor (something I avoided for too long).

I have spent more this year on medical care than I ever have, though I know this is probably just the beginning of ailments. For the first time, I have a primary care physician. I have seen a few hand specialists, surgeons, physical therapists. I have a therapist I see regularly. And while it isn’t cheap, it does make me realize that what we need more than self-care is just care, in general. Sometimes, we need a team of medical personnel to help care for us. We need insurance that allows that to be possible.

For me, the hardest part about incorporating self-care into my life is figuring out where resistance fits into all of this. I gave up a lot of “self-care” time for my volunteer work last year and my volunteer work fed me but it also exhausted me. Part of me thinks that’s just what activists have always been doing, sacrificing their free time out of necessity to fight against injustice and unrelenting power, but I wish it was acknowledged a bit more (though the term "self-care" did originate from Audre Lorde, a feminist and black rights activist, who was using the term in relation to activism). 

I felt it deeply when climate activist Naomi Klien talked about self-care in an interview for the Cut:“I don’t hold myself up as any kind of model for work-life balance,” she said. “I feel a genuine terror about how little time we have. I feel that incredibly intensely and have ever since I have started to listen to the climate clock. So I go hard. My balance is really about my son, my family. That does come at a cost to what these days is called “self-care,” but that’s just life. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do the work, be there for my son, and also have a regular yoga and meditation practice and chill out at the spa.”

In a way, I also go hard and then I take breaks when my body tells me to. Usually, when it screams at me to. This isn’t a great process, but I don’t know any other. I’m trying. I am seeing doctors when my body hurts and I’m talking to a therapist to sort out the many issues I just thought were a part of life and inevitable when they weren’t.

I’m also — in the midst of a pandemic — quitting my job due to my continued chronic pain. It’s scary to say the least but as my therapist tells me, “It’s okay to take breaks.” My body needs it, though I don’t know exactly how to take breaks without feeling guilty or worried about finances. But this is part of it too. She reminds me often, so wisely: “Learn to sit with discomfort.”

So now, here I go, off to sit with some mental discomfort for the sake of my physical health. Hoping I can enjoy, just a little bit, some time in the rose garden doing maintenance.

Pictured above: some shots from my first roll of 35mm film. Everything came out overexposed or out of focus but I'm a big fan.

Also: I know. It's a bit of an eye-roll to talk about my own pain right now and the concept of care as a white woman when for so long, we have denied black communities access to this care, as well as trauma therapy, quality education, job opportunities, food equity, community safety, an unbiased justice system, reparations, and other basic human rights. Our black communities have been deeply devoid of care for so long and we need to be working towards major shifts in our communities and personal lives. I've said this in a post before but as writer Brittany Packett suggests, "Spend your privilege. And then when you think you've spent enough, spend some more." I.e: Donate monthly to black organizations as a form of reparations. Move money from white people who have benefited from a history of privilege to black spaces. Become personally / monetarily invested in the health and safety of black communities. Work toward the defunding of police and for the funding of social services (Every year at the non-profit I worked for in Chicago, our trauma therapy and after school programs were cut and social workers were asked to do more with less. I thought it really was a budget thing, that we didn't have the money, but now I know the funds were just being put into policing first. Our social workers and therapists and teachers and care workers deserve more, especially since they do the desperate work we need). Volunteer, get immersed in the cause, learn to occupy spaces with people of color and work to release the racialized trauma your own body holds. Put your kids in the neighborhood public school. Support the school and then listen to the community who was there before. Read "What Is Owed" by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and the many others who have taken the time to teach us. Support black art that celebrates black beauty. See the joy and full humanity. Support black businesses. Support black farmers. What else? I've learned so much in the past months and have a lot of work to do. Please, I hope you're doing the work too.

Final note: Eula Biss' "On Immunity" is not only the perfect book for this time in terms of COVID-19 (I never thought a book about viral disease would be so relevant and interesting, especially in terms of how it also speaks to climate change. Her interview with the Cut talked about the idea of community care so well.) but she has also been a formative writer for me in terms of white privilege and debt. I highly encourage reading her essay "White Debt" and "No-Man's Land" and listening to her interviews about whiteness here and here.