Self-Care Can’t Save Black People, but Maybe “Hood Wellness” Can

Tamela Gordon was practicing self-care hardcore in her early 30s — doing yoga regularly, treating herself to manis and pedis, staying “mad hydrated,” and vacationing (when she could afford it). “By the standard of self care, I was crushing it,” Gordon tells PS in an interview ahead of the release of her new book, “Hood Wellness: Tales of Communal Care from People Who Drowned on Dry Land”. Despite these efforts toward self-improvement, Gordon couldn’t help but notice that her well-being and quality of life was still deteriorating — an all-too-common realization for those trying to navigate wellness while existing outside of white, heteronormative identities, Gordon says.

“A lot of the issues that I had honestly just could not be addressed with self-care, like housing stability, health, dental care. So I gradually had to identify some of these needs that I had and then find respective communities that I either was a part of or I needed to be a part of, so that I couldn’t get the assistance that I wasn’t getting on my own,” she says. By doing so, Gordon began to understand the power of communal care and what she calls “hood wellness.” She defines the two as the ways in which marginalized communities show up for one another, “whether that’s by the space that we’re facilitating, the resources that we’re extending, and even just making sure that we’re creating safe spaces where it’s okay to say I need help, or I can’t do this on my own,” Gordon says. Where traditional wellness would tell you to look inward, hood wellness and communal care encourages people of marginalized identities to look outward, toward the hoods you inhabit or can create in order to fill your cup. That’s how during the pandemic Gordon wound up creating her own hood wellness retreat out of her studio in Little Havana (which she was able to afford thanks to community fundraising) for Black marginalized genders throughout the country.

Now, in her Kirkus Star-reviewed book, Gordon explores the ways in which self-care can be attained while navigating intersectional marginalization via her own personal odyssey, as well as the experiences of those who lifted her up and inspired her to think beyond the surface-level systems of wellness that are currently in place.

In this excerpt below, from the chapter “Beg, Borrow, Heal,” Gordon details one of her initial revelations — a clear wake-up call that the type of wellness she’d been practicing needed an overhaul. Through poignant language, humor, vulnerability, and critique, Gordon offers just the shake-up this industry needs.

One day, I found my old copy of “Eat Pray Love.” Ha! I laughed to myself. You couldn’t tear that book out of my hands back in 2009. I unpeeled the pages, trying to keep them intact. Memories came flooding back of my older sister shoving the book in my hands during one of our regular brunch-and-book-shopping Sundays. Now ten years older, that beaten book had survived rush hours on a packed D train, hot beach days on Fire Island, and squished middle seats on long flights. I read it everywhere.

“Eat Pray Love” is a 2006 memoir centered on writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s emotional journey through divorce, depression, and self-discovery. After realizing she no longer desires the life she once yearned for, she commits to a year of travel to find herself. Even though her story and background didn’t correspond to mine, I found so much of who I was becoming in those pages when I read it for the first time at age twenty-five. Like Liz, I was a young woman ready to admit that the direction I’d first chosen for myself was no longer leading me to the place I wanted to be. I dreamed of spending months in Cuba off the grid, learning how to make arroz con frijoles like my abuela, then hopping to Hawaii and doing nothing but eat fresh pineapples and fuck surfers. Just thinking about it would excite me to the point of practicing my Spanish and shopping for a perfect bodysuit. I would get so hyped that I’d be convinced it was all going to happen until I remembered the sad fact that I’d yet to escape New York.

My reality was very different from Liz’s. For starters, I may have been a writer, but not the kind that gets comped for high-end trips and lives on their own in Manhattan. I was the kind of writer who had to tell bill collectors, “Oh, Tamela’s not here right now” when I answered the phone. The kind of writer who cashed her checks at the check cashing place where I reloaded my prepaid credit card. The type who must use self-checkout at the grocery store with earbuds plugged in, so she could pretend to be too distracted to notice she was stealing two-thirds of her groceries.

I barely got halfway through Elizabeth’s excursions through Italy before I shoved the book in the back of my collection. Liz and I were on totally opposite missions.

I felt humiliated thinking of the years I’d lost, prancing around like the flowers I was shitting would always blossom. Why didn’t I travel sooner? Should I have gone to college after all? Was quitting food service a bad idea? What the hell was I thinking all these years?

I became furious at Elizabeth Gilbert and “Eat Pray Love.” I felt disgusted that, unlike cigarettes and booze, there was no warning on the back of the book that said: WARNING: THIS IS NOT A BOOK INTENDED FOR CASH POOR, FAT, BLACK WOMEN WHO LIVE WITH THEIR PARENTS AND DON’T OWN PASSPORTS. IF YOU ARE SAID WOMAN, READING THIS BOOK MAY ENDANGER YOU INTO THINKING THAT THERE ARE OPTIONS FOR YOU THAT ACTUALLY DO NOT EXIST. YOU’RE STUCK, BITCH. GO PUT THIS BOOK DOWN AND FIND YOU SOME IYANLA.

“Healing is ugly, my n*gga!” Those words were spoken loudly by my friend and mentor, Tanya Denise Fields. She was recording a Facebook Live, talking about her journey to healing herself. While the conversation was rather delicate, she held back no emotion, yelling much of the time, clapping her hands, sometimes laughing but also crying. “You know the shit I had to hear from my kids in our last family therapy session?

And, you know what? They were right! I got mad work to do! That’s why I’m not playing about my healing.” Tears streamed down my cheeks while I lay clutching my phone, watching her as though my life depended on it.

The more I meditated on Liz’s experiences abroad and Tanya’s journey with therapy, the more I understood the life I was desperate to conjure: a chapter of selfish, private, unapologetic, ugly healing. Not just the regular weeping-through-therapy-and-stuffing-my-house-with-candles-and-plants healing (though that would come with time). A kind of healing that would allow me to transition from struggling and getting to a place of comfort. The healing that addressed the immediate needs that mattered to me, not just trendy self-care shit that did little to fill my emotional cup. But wait . . . What the hell are my needs?

I took out a notebook and began jotting down everything I needed to jump-start my personal healing journey. Even though I was knee-deep in a place of scarcity, I didn’t let thoughts of what I didn’t have or why I didn’t have it get in the way of writing it down. If I couldn’t afford it, attain it, or acquire it in any way, I still had to identify it:

Out of everything on that list, I couldn’t afford a single thing or a solitary reason to think I could get it. But it didn’t matter because it was what I needed. I may have been pushing it with the beach access, but it was the one place in the world where I felt truly free and beautiful. I’m a firm believer that heat makes humans at least 30 percent more attractive than temperatures below 76 degrees. I also believe that the weightlessness of bobbing around in the ocean is a physically euphoric experience that does wonders for mental illness and low self-esteem. So yes, I needed that form of water therapy in my life.

Maybe I wouldn’t fuck surfers in Hawaii or spend a season in Cuba. But maybe I could satisfy my craving for exotic life and water therapy in Miami. I had no idea how to get there, but I was convinced I was on my way. I went to bed feeling oddly inspired that night.

Excerpt by Tamela Gordon.“Hood Wellness: Tales of Communal Care from People Who Drowned on Dry Land” is on sale June 18, 2024.

Alexis Jones is the senior health and fitness editor at PS. Her passions and areas of expertise include women’s health and fitness, mental health, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and chronic conditions. Prior to joining PS, she was the senior editor at Health magazine. Her other bylines can be found at Women’s Health, Prevention, Marie Claire, and more.