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 Illustration by Emma Dajska | It was literary mood-setting at its most basic, the way one might bring The Orient Express on a European train ride or The Sheltering Sky to Morocco. I was heading to a spa in Arizona where I would spend four days in a state of blissful solitude, so I packed an aptly titled book: My Year of Rest and Relaxation. At the end of my first day of being smudged, hugged, and rubbed with hot stones the size of clementines, I settled into a corner table at the restaurant, a sanctuary of Scandinavian design and high desert views, and pulled the novel out of my bag. My fellow diners’ quiet chatter faded out the second I gathered just how toxin-studded and radically inappropriate my reading material was. Giddy with shame, I retreated to my room to devour more. Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel is zany, disturbing, and screechingly funny. It is also a daring manifesto against the age of wellness. Our unnamed narrator, a 24-year-old Chelsea gallery girl who studied art history at Columbia and looks “like an off-duty model,” can no longer endure the burden of her sadness. Her parents died within a year of each other during her junior year of college — her father of cancer, her mother of drink and drugs — and the pain is catching up. Thanks to her inheritance, our anti-heroine could afford to plumb the depths of her sorrows in daily therapy or send herself on a global tour of eating, praying, and loving. Instead, she devises a unique coping strategy and orchestrates a deep, yearlong hibernation in the confines of her Upper East Side apartment, facilitated by a steady drip of pharmaceuticals including Seroquel, Risperdal, Seconal, Valium, Nembutal, and NyQuil (that’s not including the ones that start with the letters A through M). The bulk of her calories come from the cream-spiked coffees and prepackaged pastries that she buys at the local bodega. Her mind is a pest to be quieted; her body a needy, sample-size creature to be tamed. While our narrator’s best friend, the bulimic and alcoholic Reva, worries about her friend’s health, our narrator holds firm. “It was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life.” Her medicine cabinet is stocked with toxins that are doled out like Halloween candy by a neck-brace-wearing psychiatrist named Dr. Tuttle, who is perhaps the least attentive and most hilariously rendered medical professional in the history of literature. No matter how many times she is reminded that her visitor’s parents are deceased, Dr. Tuttle inquires after them. No matter what her patient tells her, the only solution is to sprinkle more pills onto the ever-growing pile. Set in 2000, the time just before iPhones and reality television came to dominate our attention spans, My Year of Rest and Relaxation bubbles over with references to Sally Jesse Raphael and Titanic and Soapdish (Whoopi Goldberg might be the only entity that brings our narrator unvarnished pleasure). Brilliant a period piece as it is, the novel has a resonance that owes everything to our present moment. Even if you don’t read the book at a New Age spa surrounded by healers and feelers sporting fuzzy robes and doped-out facial expressions as I did, it is impossible not to interpret it as a riposte to our toxin-vacuumed times. We’ve entered what I’m calling wellness hellness. I started to notice it about five years ago, during that blurry period when I was either pregnant or nursing or pregnant again. Waiting on the subway platform on a weekend morning, I’d invariably see a woman, oftentimes several, kitted out in head-to-toe athleisure, en route to another borough to attend a fitness class. Nobody belonged to the local gym anymore, it seemed. Fitness had become the new going to the movies (and the new going out to eat, considering how far in advance class reservations needed to be made). Today, the global wellness industry is valued at $3.7 trillion. That is more than the global film, book, and music industries combined. Health is no longer the absence of illness. It is detox tonics and moon dusts and chaga-mushroom powders. It is festivals in the California desert with sought-after astrologers and acroyoga demonstrations. It is meditation workshops for new mothers who can wear squalling infants strapped to their chests as they attempt rounds of 4-7-8 breathing. As our world continues to skitter off course, it makes every bit of sense that so many people feel compelled to focus on the single thing they can control — their bodies. Every time I think we’ve reached peak wellness, I hear about another boutique gym specializing in journaling circles or subarctic studio temperatures. Even at my local bar, I hear women tossing off the words toxic and self-care with the frequency of my own amazings. A friend of mine recently sent her saliva to a laboratory in Canada so it could be analyzed for markers indicating how efficiently her body metabolizes caffeine — just for the hell of it. Another acquaintance, a twenty-something man who had no evident health problems, found an allergist who would run a battery of tests to help him winkle out “hidden allergies.” Our bodies aren’t just the source of pleasure and shame anymore — they’re systems to be hacked and optimized, Rosetta stones imprinted with endless clues to be deciphered. I am not immune to the madness. I’d rather pass time at a child’s birthday party talking to another parent about my wonderful new vial of White Fox Medicinals “Manifestation” CBD tincture than about our kids’ summer-camp plans. I follow enough fitfluencers (and one self-identifying “skinfluencer”) on Instagram to be the regular target of an ad for a Manhattan coworking space that offers its members Ayurvedic snacks and midday Reiki sessions in addition to printing privileges. The coworking space that I belong to, a bro-ey bastion of startups and podcasting dudes, hosts its own essential-oil workshops and kombucha-vodka tastings. Perhaps there is no escaping. While I still go to the occasional Saturday morning-yoga class, my regular “self-care” sessions now occur at the gym down the block from my home. Membership costs $15 a month. There are no classes, no towels, no exits through any elixir shop. The walls are painted blindingly bright colors, and it’s a bit like working out at Kinko’s. The other day I left my earrings on a treadmill, and when I came to pick them up from the front desk, where I had been assured they were safe, they had disappeared. I did not kick up a fuss. It seemed a reasonable price to pay for a dose of sanity. In my gym, I’ve found a time machine, a capsule that transports me to an era when a workout was not a reward for elbowing one’s way off a waitlist. My treadmill sessions are on my own terms. I cue up my Canadian indie rock and grunt through my three miles so that I can get on with the rest of my life. I have found all the wellness inspiration I need in Moshfegh’s narrator. She is no fool. Her yearlong experiment in modulating her levels of consciousness ultimately delivers her to a state of clarity and grace, exactly as she’d intended. Moshfegh has created a Jenga tower of ill-being, a cloistered world whose inhabitants hold a mirror up to our madness. Their routines of binge drinking and self-medicating mock our own obsessions with self-soothing, our circle jerks of nourishing and detoxing, stretching and sculpting, running and recovering. We’re just like they are, grasping for a higher plane of being, hoping against hope it doesn’t kill us. Lauren Mechling’s debut novel, about female friendship, is coming out from Viking next summer. | | | | |
 | Hate is a strong word. But when I repeatedly, vocally declared my hatred of camp, I meant it with every fiber of my young being. That was my voice, my truth. In my diary, however, I laid the praise on thick to appease my imaginary audience: “Today I went to camp. It was fun. First me and my friend and my counselor went into a canoe and we tipped! It was wicked fun!” Yeah, I remember that fucking canoe. It was not fun. When you’re a child, you’re an unreliable narrator, and you don’t even know it. My first summer torture sessions were long days at this woodland camp about twenty minutes from my home. I was eight years old, young for my grade. This was the summer after I got a checkmark on my report card in the “Plays well with others” box. Let there be no mistake. A checkmark is not a gold star. In a group of strangers, I played better with my toys. Right off the bat, camp and I were a bad fit. The experience tapped into my issues with authority figures. I didn’t believe in the “trust exercises” because I didn’t feel safe. The counselors weren’t teachers. They were teenagers. Like in Porky’s. I liked my leaders to look like adults. I especially loathed the part of the day where we had to change into our bathing suits. Like it or not, strip, little bitch, strip. So, of course, I lied about having my period to get out of swimming. I look back now, remember the dank air in that little medical place in the woods, and think of the poor nurse who had to deal with me. Nurse: “So, you’re getting your period?” Me: “Yes.” Nurse: “Should we call your mom?” Me: “No, I can spend the day in here. Do you guys have a TV?” That nurse was kind. She let me hang out in there for a while even though she must have known I was lying. There was no blood. I didn’t even have the wits to ask for some kind of feminine hygiene product. I didn’t fucking know how periods worked, exactly. I was little. I had yet to read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. But I did have a dollhouse, and there was a lot of crazy shit going down in there. A secret room occupied by a Glamour Gal who wore a gown at all hours; a G.I. Joe action figure recast as a domestic bellhop/pot-stirrer. Making up stories on my own was empowering. It’s when you do it in real life that you get into trouble. *** One day, a counselor asked if I was psyched for the day, and I nodded. I remember that moment so vividly: the pressure to respond, to be psyched. I remember other kids singing the Tears for Fears school-bus power anthem “Shout.” “Shout … shout … let it all out … these are the things I can do without …” I felt like the opposite of that song. I was overwhelmed with a sense that I had signed a social contract to lie without even realizing it. Everyone was so fucking happy when I looked around, and I felt weird for not being psyched. I had never used the word out loud before. It was a word other people said. So of course, I repeated the word in my response. “Yes,” I said. “I’m psyched for camp.” I sounded stupid. Like, very stupid. It’s not that I mispronounced it, but you could tell that I’d never said it aloud before. Of course she laughed. Hard. Loud. In my face. I don’t blame her. When you’re vulnerable, you’re fodder. Especially on a hot bus. No doubt she had her own web of anxiety with the other counselors. And my inability to mask the misery on my face served as her comic relief. I was never good at hiding my feelings. It was an early lesson in voice. Something I think about every day when I write. What is my voice? What is this character’s voice? We all sound a little goofy or off when we’re not being ourselves, especially when we’re writing, trying to tell the stories in our head. But it’s part of the process, the part I love the most, the part that hurts the most. To spend six hours writing and to have that sense that you’re nailing the voice, so you go celebrate a little. You enjoy the high of having accomplished something. Then something shifts in your mind. The clouds roll in on your sunny spirit, and it’s like that Shel Silverstein poem “Whatif.” You get that creeping, crawling sensation that you actually did not tell the story, not the way it needs to be told, that you did not accurately transcribe the voices in your head. That what-have-I-done feeling is the equivalent of standing on the dock at the lake, knowing that you are not ready. It’s tempting to jump in and start writing as fast as you can, to just get into the water. And sometimes I do that. But that it is not how I want my life (story) to be — I would rather learn from my mistakes than repeat them. I always feel better when I write in my head before I get back to the page. And then comes the feeling that the story has taken over, and you’re really getting somewhere, because now the story has a voice. The story is talking to you. *** That’s writing for me. I’m always trying to get back on that bus, to know exactly why that counselor could say psyched and I could not. What is that line from Almost Famous? “The truth just sounds different.” Hell yes, Cameron Crowe. Yes, it does. I tell myself every day: Write until it sounds like the truth. I think I write about scary things in part because of all my summers at different camps. Yes, I was just as horrified by my experiences at a couple of those smart-kid-geek camps where you didn’t have to go swimming. At the most cringe-inducing classroom camp, we did a production of Cats. For whom, I don’t know. I just know that I was in purple tights and a leotard with my face covered in makeup and whiskers. This was not a good look for me at that particular moment. It’s that sense of absolute horror, of a place or a person being designed to be your enemy, that excites me when I write. It’s why I love writing in the first person, because it’s about what this character believes and how that sense of conviction intersects with the norms of the indifferent world. I know that Me + Childhood = No. I was not a child who got off on being a child. I lusted for adulthood. I didn’t like cartoons. I wanted to watch nighttime soaps. I pretended to smoke cigarettes (Bic pens), and my imaginary drink of choice was a Scotch on the rocks with a twist of vodka (apple juice). Now I do the same thing, in a way. I pretend. That I’m kidnapped, loved, and stalked; I imagine hearts breaking slowly on a daily basis. I think of every person having a secret history of unshared urges and thoughts, what they got away with, what they didn’t, how consequences form character, the ways in which we use “social” media to perform for that one person out there we want to see it. I love writing. I still hate camp. And I was right about adulthood. It most certainly is better when no one is allowed to make you go swimming. Caroline Kepnes’s third novel, Providence, will be published by Lenny Books in June, and her first novel, You, has been adapted for a Lifetime series that premieres in September. | | | | |  Illustration by Janice Chang | When I heard about Danica Roem becoming the first openly transgender person to be elected to state legislature in Virginia last fall, it felt like all that my queer and nonbinary-identifying self could do was breathe a sigh of relief and say “Finally.” Except I quickly learned that the key word was openly. There was another unsung trans person who had blazed a path for Danica: Althea Garrison, who was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1992, but was not out to her constituents. Garrison is still alive but difficult to track down. But as I read details about her story, I was surprised to find more similarities between us than just our shared experience of being black trans femmes in America. While I was born in Nashville in the late ’90s, both Garrison and I spent part of our childhoods in Georgia — I spent half of my life in Atlanta before moving to Orlando, Florida, while Garrison lived in Hahira, Georgia, through high school, in the ’40s and ’50s. I think of my time in Atlanta as a period when I was simply black and existing, uncomplicated and unmarred by the pressures of labeling my identity any further beyond my name. I have fond memories of riding home on a bus from day care surrounded by other black children, rapping Lil John’s final bars in “Yeah” by Usher without a care in the world, as if we had made it up ourselves. I felt safe, uncomplicated, free, and understood. Perhaps Garrison felt the same way? After moving and experiencing life in Florida, I found myself excited to begin my college career in Boston, which also happens to be where Garrison studied after high school. This move to Boston made me feel like I was “the one who made it out,” and I pictured the Northeast as a place of opportunity, growth, and success. I can imagine Garrison had a similar point of view, considering the proximity of the Great Migration as a historical backdrop. She moved to Boston when many people thought that moving from the South to the North could potentially grant black people greater access to economic opportunity. However, something that I believe both Garrison and I have learned about the Northeast is the sociocultural alienation that can accompany a move from predominately black spaces to predominately white spaces. *** It’s no secret that the city of Boston has an extremely complicated history with racism and blackness, and in the time that I’ve spent learning and growing in Boston, I’ve found myself yearning to reclaim the carefree, sometimes naïve attitude I held in Atlanta. I’ve done this primarily in my work as a spoken-word artist, using my poetry to express a longing for the freedom I experienced living in the South and a righteous anger at what I feel I’ve lost or had taken from me while living in the North. If I’m feeling suffocated in our current age by the New England tendency to act as though racism simply doesn’t exist, I was sure Garrison’s experiences in mid-twentieth-century Boston had led her to a similar place. I expected to find that we would align politically, due to the distinct experiences we share. I don’t affiliate myself with either party, but my beliefs as a black trans leftist tend to align more with the Democrats. But I was surprised to discover that when Garrison was elected as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the ’90s, representing Roxbury and Dorchester, she ran as a Republican under unusual circumstances. During the primary, Garrison took out her fiercest opponent, incumbent Latino politician Nelson Merced, because she successfully challenged the number of signatures Merced submitted to qualify for the primary. Thus, in the general election, she was able to secure her place in the state legislature by simply acquiring more votes than the other Democrat representative she ran against. Ironically, Garrison is generally said to have had beliefs that are more stereotypically Democratic (for example, being an advocate for labor unions); however, she was notably against same-sex marriage and abortion. In 1992, upon finally being elected as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Garrison was outed as a trans woman against her will. Prior to her election to the legislature, Garrison’s identity as a trans woman was not a publicly well-known fact. Some reporters say that the Boston Herald story that outed her was published with the express intent of damaging Garrison’s political career. While not much appears to exist to confirm these intentions, the impact of the Herald story has been clearly documented: Since the story and her one term in the House, Althea Garrison has not held any form of public office, despite multiple runs all over the political spectrum. *** Learning this part of Garrison’s story saddened me deeply. While some would look at Garrison’s life and career and describe what they saw as “messy” or “complicated,” when I look at her life and career, I see someone whose existence challenges the very idea that there is only one particular way of being a black trans person. I believe there can be power in self-identification; however, one of the biggest challenges I experience with labels is the accompanying assumptions we make about people using those labels as justification. In analyzing and interpreting Garrison’s history, it’s clear that her life, like her beliefs and political affiliations, evades clear categorization. Unlike trans activists Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera, she doesn’t quite fit the box of the unsung revolutionary, but she also doesn’t quite fit the box of the self-hating trans person stuck in the Sunken Place. In fact, I believe that in fitting neither of these categories clearly, Garrison exists with a fullness of personhood that exceeds either one. Considering Garrison’s political career, I realize that her policies are the points of view of an individual who is willing to challenge ideas and norms, someone who doesn’t just follow the bandwagon, someone who is critical and unafraid to take up space with their dissent. When I decided to write about Althea, I wanted to find out why she is so easily forgotten by history. Now I believe I know why: no surprise, it’s transmisogynoir (the discrimination against and oppression of black trans women). But to be more specific, it is the way in which a racist, transantagonistic culture denies black trans individuals the space to exist as complex human beings, which results in violence that is directed toward black trans individuals who don’t fit whatever America has decided the single story of black transness is. To exist in a way that challenges or defies as many binaries as Garrison’s life does is actually something that I admire as an individual committed to taking up space in a society that tells me to be small. So, to Ms. Garrison, I say: I see you. I see your struggles. I see you living your life as best as you can. And I applaud you. Keep living as you, someone who understands what it means to simply be black and existing. Dev Blair is a spoken-word poet, playwright, and theater artist training at Boston University. They can be found on Twitter @Dev_Blair and Instagram @dev_blair. | | | | |  Illustration by Kelsey Wroten | In my early twenties, I found myself on an unforgettable date. He and I had briefly met at an event the week prior and spent a few days in conversation over the phone. Initially, the first date seemed promising: he picked me up in his car (a super-duper plus for NYC), picked one of my favorite restaurants, and had me in tears from laughter mid way through dinner. And then, he brought up my least favorite topic: hair. “Black women with natural hair are goddesses to me,” said my date, as he smiled a child’s grin from across the table. “The fact that so many Black women choose to wear weaves and wigs is a disgrace to me. Like, how much can you publicly hate yourself?” he scoffed. I uncomfortably adjusted my chair and picked up my glass of wine; gulping until the cup tilted back above my head. Drinking was my only salvation as my kinky, curly wig caught onto the zipper of my jacket, thrown on the back of my seat. “See, things like that” — he laughed as I fiddled with the coat and my faux fro — “all of those Black wannabe-woke women who wear that horsehair don’t know your struggle.” At that very moment he flashed a beautiful set of perfect white teeth that bounced off of his chocolate dark skin, but I couldn’t afford the luxury of relishing in that anymore. Now, I had to be a gentle, but stoic bitch who had to educate yet another man about his ignorant ideas on Black womanhood. My eyes bulged out of my head, and I wanted to scream. The first date I’d enjoyed in a long time was taking a turn for the worst at the finish line — fantastic. I exhaled. “I’m not really sure what you mean,” I said with a slight cock of my head and an expressive batting of my eyes. “All women wear all types of different hair, and it really has nothing to do with being Black or prideful; it’s all just personal preference and aesthetics.” I rolled my eyes, then made direct eye contact with him so he could grasp that I was neither impressed nor flattered. He stumbled a bit. “I only meant that Black women who wear wigs and weaves are obviously just embarrassed about being Black. Why would they want hair like a white woman?” The rest of the conversation that night is all just a blur now. But what I do remember is deciding to never take another call from him. Certainly, he didn’t deserve to know my truth and I’m glad that I never revealed it to him. Perhaps it’s a bit petty to say I stopped talking to him because he said he didn’t like “unnatural”-haired Black women. But in reality, it’s much deeper than that. Because I was born with alopecia areata, I’ve never had a full head of hair — not even a quarter full. Throughout elementary school, I braved the questions and the stares; I was still this adorable little girl, after all. By the time sixth grade approached, I felt different. I didn’t want to feel like an outcast. I didn’t want to have to explain that my hair patches weren’t from chemotherapy or why it made me look so alien compared to other girls and boys. So my mother, sisters, and I shopped for a wig. I’ll never forget it: it was twice the size of my head, with huge bangs and shoulder-length dark-brown hair. My head felt huge, and for months it was extremely uncomfortable. But it released me from the constant anxiety and instant ridicule I had often felt — although it induced a low level of paranoia. That paranoia reached its fever pitch the first time I kissed a boy. I was visiting my family in New Jersey the summer before seventh grade, and one boy in particular caught me eye — as I did his. He was cute, tall, dark skinned, slim, slightly older (going into eighth grade), and most likely a geeky gamer, too. Whether it was planned or not, by the end of the day, he and I ended up in the driveway of our mutual friend’s home — alone. The kiss was as magical as any first kiss that ended with giggling, wondering, unsure embarrassment. But there was also a feeling I hadn’t anticipated — his tongue. The tongue led to what was supposed to be a warm caressing of my face and neck, but the proximity to my nape, which was directly below the strap of my wig, quickly flipped my excitement to pure anxiety. Little did I know that it was the beginning of an emotion that I would experience for many years to come. In all of my (pleasant) dating experiences, I’ve dealt with this same rushing feeling, of being swept off my feet and made numbly afraid that my wig would be swept off right along with it. Even with all of the new options for wigs — whether I get them custom fit, wear full lace with adhesive, or just use a regular strapped piece — I suppose the feeling won’t ever go away until I decide to be bald and free publicly. Wigs aren’t as risqué today as they were when I was an eleven-year-old girl; now they’re a regular occurrence from celebrity red carpets to your local clubs. But here’s the thing — disclosing the fact that you wear a wig and why is extremely personal. Over the years, I’ve oftentimes had to make quick decisions about if I should lie or be completely vulnerable to a stranger. The question is that your real hair? or a simple compliment can make me uneasy. Do I say thank you and carry on, or do I just plainly tell the truth? Many times, when I was younger, I preferred the lie. These days, I just give the honest truth as early as comfortably possible. My wigs and I have been through a lot over the years. They’ve been pulled off by mistake in the heat of intimacy or an argument; slid off in public due to sweating; pushed back after an accidental bounce of a ball to my head; and, once, even publicly exposed by way of a third party in an attempt to embarrass me. I have stories for days and all of them end differently. But when it came down to it, I realized that I wasn’t comfortable telling potential lovers about my disease because I was worried that it would scare them away. Would they think I was weird? Would they be embarrassed to be with me? Would it be uncomfortable for them? I was trying to hide who I was because I was worried I wouldn’t live up to a standard; a standard that I had created for myself and could literally never live up to. These days, I’m much less afraid of how men will react once I reveal my truth — I’m much more interested in finding out who they really are once the truth shows up. I am not my hair, but I am not not my hair — and I’m damn sure no one's local hair educator. Jasmine “Jazzi” Johnson is a writer, journalist, essayist, and scriptwriter from New York City who is relocating to Los Angeles to pursue scripted animation full time. Her docuseries Black Girl Bald is currently in production and focuses on the challenges and adversities Black men, women, and children with alopecia face in their day-to-day lives. | | | | | | | | |
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