I created this Black Wellness Guide for Black People, but I hope that everyone can look through these resources and consider the roles we all play in ensuring that wellness is a human right to all regardless of race or income.
(LINK) BLACK WELLNESS GUIDE : SELF CARE RESOURCES FOR HEALING AND OVERCOMING RACIAL TRAUMA
To lovingly assert blackness means many things, and that love is surely contingent on your own personal terms with how blackness resides in your body and personal lived experiences. I want to lovingly assert blackness in myself when I’m alone with my thoughts on my couch, when I wipe off the bathroom mirror, when I fall safely into bed in the dark and my legs begin to twitch into the sleep dance….
The acknowledgement that black life matters also comes with the daily reminder that our right to longterm wellness and health can be promised. There are so many ways in which these rights can become more accessible, more affordable, more grounded in a reality beyond the abstract Lavender Bath Narrative of Self Care™. I have given up on Self Care during many occasions because time and money wouldn’t allow me to build this practice into what I believed it need to be: A still from a Solange music video; a Mickalene Thomas collage, a room with direct sunlight, a cold, moist slice of chocolate cake while sitting alone in silence….
Self Care is the pleasure and static coming together as one. It is the affirmation that black people can pull away from the minutes of the day to exist in our own pockets of space when we see fit. It is found in our food and water just as much as it exists within our words and patterns of behavior. It’s in the ways we move our bodies for pleasure and strength. It’s the people we hold space with—the ones who don’t expect a dissertation on our histories in order for us to feel affirmed as real people. Self Care is identifying how generational trauma has imbedded itself into our thoughts and actions, and it is the work of undoing that history to write something new.
Self Care is time travel, or conversely, the resistance to be anywhere else but here right now.