The Biology of Belonging

Photo: Bates Lane Photography

My dad moved to Chicago from Mexico at age 23, determined to achieve the elusive American Dream. He had grown up one of many siblings of a poor family with an abusive alcoholic father. Having experienced both the physical and emotional hardships of such a childhood, he was willing to work as hard as he possibly could to assimilate to this land of opportunity. Several months after he arrived, he was deported during an ICE raid on the meat-packing warehouse where he worked. He was dating my mom at the time, and she remembered that he just disappeared one day. He wasn’t able to let her know what happened until weeks later. He made a surprise return several months later, they eloped soon after, and then he returned to Mexico to get his papers, much easier now that he was married to an American. He went on to become a U.S. citizen.

The Benefits of Belonging

According to Cornell University, belonging is the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group. A large body of research confirms that belonging increases life expectancy. In the workplace, a sense of belonging correlates with a 50% increase in productivity, a 50% drop in turnover, and a 75% reduction in sick days.

In 1961, the remote village of Roseto, Pennsylvania, was home to a community of Italian immigrants. They worked together in the stone quarry and blouse factory. Multigenerational homes were the norm, and there would be communal feasts for dinner every night. Everyone attended the local church together. A visiting doctor took note that heart disease was far less prevalent in Roseto than in any of the neighboring communities. The rate in Roseto was less than half the national average, and the death rate was 35% lower than the national average. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that the village had zero suicide, zero alcoholism or drug addiction, no one on welfare, and far less crime on average.

The doctor hired a research team to find out why. They looked at diet, lifestyle, genetics, water, and healthcare. It was found that smoking cigarettes was the norm, many were sedentary, drank wine, and were often obese. They couldn’t afford olive oil so they cooked with lard. Animal fat made up over 40% of their calorie intake, yet seemingly without the typical negative health impacts.

As the children in the community grew up, went to college, married outside of the community, stopped going to church, and bought single-family homes in the suburbs, the disease and death rate in Roseto began to rise, and in the next decade would match the national average.

Although I easily assimilated into white American culture, I knew my family had different expectations of me than my friends’ families. I noticed that in Mexico, Dad was especially hard on us. He seemed embarrassed that his American children lacked that strong sense of respect and obedience so pervasive in his home culture. I felt almost disowned for moving into my own apartment after college. I remember sitting next to him on the couch, asking through tears if he even loved me. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at me. I knew I was deeply disappointing my dad but I wasn’t sure why. I have learned that this is a common experience for children of immigrants.

My dad earned a Bachelor’s in accounting, a field he’d never get hired in, he believed, because he was Mexican. He took speech lessons to eliminate his Mexican accent and sometimes even disparaged his paisanos. Belonging was a luxury he wasn’t afforded in his life, and so was not able to extend it to me.

Barriers to Belonging

Unhealed trauma can cause social isolation that leads to loneliness, which in turn leads to poor health. It is said that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking cigarettes. Lonely people have higher rates of heart disease, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. Lonely bodies age more rapidly.

Psychologist John Cacioppo believes that curing loneliness isn’t as much about spending more time with people as it is about altering our attitude about people. Traumatized individuals may view other human beings as potentially dangerous. I admit, I’m in this category. Perhaps, my dad passed this on to me. As do so many parents, especially those with marginalized identities. When we have repeatedly felt unsafe around people, being around people can trigger stress hormones, and isolating feels like the safer choice.

As my dad grew older, and I grew up, got married, had kids of my own, and got divorced, our relationship softened, though I never felt that he trusted me to make good decisions. In 2017, he was living in Mexico, and I was planning to bring my kids, then 11 and 7, to Mexico for the first time to visit him. He tried to persuade me not to! I was unclear why and fought feelings of being rejected by him again.

We went to Mexico anyway and made many lovely memories. He spent hours playing with his grandsons in the pool while my mom took me to get a tattoo that I hid from him. They were divorced but still spent time together with us.

That night at dinner, I told my dad about the book “Mind Over Medicine” by Lissa Rankin, M.D., specifically the chapter entitled “Loneliness Poisons the Body,” where I learned about the Roseto study and the other research cited in this article. I meant to encourage him to move to a condo community where he could see people every day. He was alone often and admittedly depressed.

One month after our visit, he was found dead in the lounge chair in front of his TV, by a realtor and prospective buyers. He’d had a heart attack 3 days earlier. None of us knew he was sick. I believe that his loneliness had at least a small part to play. Somewhat of a loner myself, it was a wake-up call for me.

Getting to Belonging

If like me you’re ready to access the amazing health benefits associated with belonging, here are a few proven practices.

Go to a good church. I don’t! However, multiple studies show a strong correlation between attendance at religious services and longer life expectancy, 7 ½ years longer on average. One study even found that heart surgery patients who received support from their religious community were 3 times as likely to be alive 6 months later.

Get spiritual. You don’t have to affiliate with a religion to enjoy the benefits of a spiritual community. Practicing mindfulness in meditation, yoga, walking, or playing music alone and with others can optimize your health too.

Cohabitate. Studies have shown that people who live alone have higher levels of stress hormones than their partnered counterparts. However, being single is better for your health than being in an unhealthy or unbalanced relationship. Hence the fact that single women in general live longer than married women, but married men live longer than single men.

Having said all that, none of that is good for you if it isn’t healthy. If you attend a church that judges and shames you, and you feel like you have to mask your authentic self, you’re better off isolated because fitting in is the opposite of belonging.

Be authentic. In her book “Braving the Wilderness,” Brene Brown asserts that fitting in is the opposite of belonging.

“Fitting in is about assessing a situation and figuring out who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are.”

Heal trauma. Spending time in nature, learning to set healthy boundaries, searching out communities where it’s safe to be authentic, and showing up as ourselves in these spaces are all essential steps toward the benefits of belonging. Like every good thing, belonging begins within. Accepting ourselves with compassion is a precursor to showing up authentically with others. Bravely walking ourselves out of shame and fear cycles creates a safety net that will serve us well in our quest for belonging.

A Love is Love Story

By Teresa Cruz Foley

When we see members of the trans community in the news, it’s often about them being attacked, murdered, or attempting to read books to children in libraries, which seems to be as controversial.

This piece is not about the trans right to exist. It’s not about the danger they face every day. It’s not even about the legislation that perpetuates and protects the hate and violence against them.

This is a thank you letter.

I grew up in the Evangelical “Born Again” Christian Church. I was imbued with the belief that having premarital sex was the surest way to ruin your life and that being gay was the surest way to lose your salvation. Identifying as a gender you weren’t assigned at birth could not even be considered. These were a people to be feared.

As a teenager in the 1980s, I attended a multi-media event with my church’s youth group. The purpose of the event was to describe how deplorable it was to be homosexual. We learned that golden showers (peeing on each other) was a common practice among the lgbtq+ community to emphasize how depraved the lifestyle was. I later learned this wasn’t necessarily true or exclusive to the LGBTQ+ community. I don’t remember where I first learned the idea that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. I believed all of it, though. A dutiful Christian girl, I accepted the teachings to condemn all who identified as anything other than monogamous heterosexual. We didn’t call it hate, but I felt hatred and disgust in my heart for an entire community of people who had the courage to come out.

Years later, at our weekly group at their house, our college church leader very carefully, very strategically invited us to question the teaching that the LGBTQ+ community didn’t belong in the kingdom of heaven. I remember the absolute venomous pushback he received. People stopped coming, others continued coming to heckle his every word, no matter the topic. Eventually, the group stopped meeting. I am so grateful for this man’s courage to speak on the topic. He gave me permission to expand the beliefs I’d been given.

I attended the very conservative and academic Wheaton College in Illinois in the 90’s. It was known as the Harvard of Christian Schools. We were often reminded that we were the cream of the crop. I remember having lunch in the cafe with a new friend from English class. She confided in me that she and her roommate were attracted to each other. She told me that they were trying to resist their urges, because at least partly, they believed it was wrong, and because they would have been kicked out of school if the administration found out. I remember her telling me they were trying to stop at “grandma kisses.” I’m very relieved to tell you that my overwhelming feeling when she confided in me, was honored. She felt safe to share her story with me.

Little by little, I began to question more and more of the church’s indoctrination so deeply planted in my early conditioning. I began to notice those teachings of the church that were in direct opposition to the teachings of Jesus. I slowly began to extricate these teachings from my worldview. I still struggle with some of those old beliefs and how they play out in my view of myself and my role on this planet. Eventually, I left the church because it began to feel more like a patriarchal institution than a safe spiritual community. Among other specific reasons, I did not want to be where the LGBTQ+ community were not welcomed.

A decade later, in a multi-cultural psychology course for grad school, I chose LGBTQ+ youth as the population to learn about for my cornerstone project. I attended the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth (BAGLY) meetings, where teens squeezed together on a couch and shared their stories with me. Most of them had come out to their parents by age 15. These kids had done so much introspection, so much tuning in and aligning with themselves. They bravely chose authenticity over fitting in. It was a profound lesson for me. I was in love with them, in awe of them—maybe a little envious. I wanted to know what it felt like to be aligned like that. I wondered what thoughts I would have about myself if my brain hadn’t developed inside the configns of the Christianity I was taught. I wonder how differently our world would look if more people chose authenticity and alignment like these kids. These masters of a practice I knew little about.  they influenced me to find my way to align with myself more deeply.

To the LGBTQ+ community: You are still my soul’s teacher. I appreciate you for existing. I think about Nex Benedict, the nonbinary 16-year-old who died early this year after a beating by classmates in their school bathroom in Oklahoma. Nex should be alive. Their death was a senseless, avoidable tragedy.

My precious trans friends and family, you are heroes to me. I’m so grateful for your courage and I am blessed by your existence. I appreciate you for getting up every day. You are a gift to me and to this planet.

Trans people, in my opinion, represent the highest form of alignment with true self. To me, this makes them the best humanity has to offer. Their existence inspires me and encourages me to be my most unapologetic self. Their influence frees me to be the fullest expression of myself.

There is so much value in the perspective of someone with lived experience as both genders. These souls have something precious to offer our culture. I want to hear about your experiences and perspective. I have so much to learn from you.

A few years ago, I started an LGBTQ+ Pride group in my town on the South Shore. As a cisgender (someone who identifies as the same gender they were assigned at birth; someone who is not transgender) and a woman who has only had cishet (both cisgender and heterosexual) partners, I’m sure people wondered why I started the group. For one reason, I started it because our town needed it. In a community listening session, I heard from LGBTQ+ youth in our town about their treatment in school. The unrelenting harassment, the threats that were carried out, and the school administrators who turned a blind eye. LGBTQ+ kids are not safe anywhere in our country.

I was an activist before organizing Bridgewater Pride. That work is important and necessary. My hope for Bridgewater Pride is to build a community for myself as much as for others. I want a community that affirms each other’s unique identities. I want a community of people who’ve done the heroic work of aligning with themselves, come what may. I want a community that supports, protects, and celebrates all expressions of gender and love. One of my favorite friends in the group often says, “I got your back.” Those words bring a comfort to me that’s hard to describe.

And as far as my own identity goes, as someone who’s only experienced cishet partnerships, and been disappointed every time, I would like to try something else. I claim the freedom to explore attraction wherever it lands for me. Maybe in what I think of as more evolved generations, pansexuality (attraction to people of all gender expressions) will be the norm. It makes more sense to me than compulsory heterosexuality.

I have so much to learn from people who dare to be their truest selves in a world that condemns this form of authenticity to death.

Precious community, thank you for being here. Thank you for your impossible courage. Thank you for your hard-won wisdom and your priceless perspective.

Love,

Your student, your fan, your people.

Tess

Finding My Brave Space

Photo: Ivana Doria Photography

Finding My Brave Space

It’s February 2021. We are holding huge rainbow peace flags at a social justice rally that I helped organize. I’m listening to my comrades shout dehumanizing remarks at people with different beliefs than them. I’m watching them shout offensive names at children who had come with their parents to a rally, a group that reportedly supports the police, but even the police at the rally told me they know better. The group is in support of the unjust system that imprisons people of color at significantly higher rates than it does people with light skin. A justice system that often protects law enforcement with qualified immunity, and it appears to me that it supports the idea that people with darker skin aren’t equal, aren’t good, and aren’t deserving of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

Black people in our local social justice community had also explained why the rainbow peace flags were problematic. We were specifically asked not to use them in counter-protests, as peace did not convey the urgent need of oppressed communities. They need justice. They need equity, we were told. They explained that peace, in this instance, felt placating and lacked understanding of the plight. Furthermore, the rainbow represents the support of the LGBTQIA+ community, which absolutely deserves all the support, but it was an odd choice for this rally, especially in response to the murder of George Floyd, which is why we started organizing rallies. The message that Black Lives Matter was diluted and largely lost with the rainbow peace flag. Lastly, and most importantly, we were told by Black leadership in our community that when well-meaning white people make racists angry, they get to go home—and be white—and will likely not be the target of the racist anger they just fueled.

As a behavior analyst, I knew that screaming obscenities at children was not an effective way to build an inclusive and equitable community. I knew that the behavior I witnessed from our group that day would likely confirm the bias of those we countered. I knew that we were likely causing the behavior and beliefs we wanted to extinguish to increase.

At that rally, I promised myself that I would become a more effective agent of change.

How did we get here? The summer prior, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, two other moms in my town and I had begun organizing weekly protests, which we called Stand-Ups. We sold Black Lives Matter yard signs and used the money to pay speakers to address the hundreds of people who attended. It felt great. We quickly grew to have more than 500 members in our Facebook group. We were gaining notoriety, and other groups began asking if we’d organize stand-ups in different towns, specifically countering rallies. At this point, one of the three moms who started our group dropped out, citing personal reasons.

After that counter-protest, things escalated quickly; I made several attempts to steer the group and had several discussions with my friend and co-organizer. So much so that I began to be viewed as a sympathizer. I know there are many ways to protest. I did my research and knew that I wanted no part in the type of protest that the majority of the group wanted to engage in.

Soon after, a known white supremacist “nationalist” group was planning a rally in our town. I wanted to counter by holding our rally centered on the ideology of Black Lives Matter. The anniversary of the death of Breonna Taylor was approaching. The majority of the group felt differently.

The police chief got my phone number and asked me to come in to discuss our group’s plans. I brought my co-organizer, knowing we had different opinions, but I wanted her input and didn’t feel safe going by myself. I was in way over my head. The police chief asked us how many people we thought would be countering. We said we had no idea, which was true. They asked us where we were planning on gathering. They asked if we would be willing to have our rally in a different location than the nationalist group

That all sounded fine to me, as I was focused on centering Black people, which was the whole reason we started the group. I acknowledge that the group was predominantly white. For their safety, most of the Black folks that regularly attended stopped coming as the weeks progressed and the group began to morph from our original mission. As a single mom, a sole parent, I have to think about my safety as my kids’ safety, and so the separate rally appealed to my sense of security. One of the families who’d stopped coming implored me not to attend the counter-protest. “It’s not worth it,” they said.

When the day came, I stayed in my assigned location, with my hand-painted portrait of Breonna, with a small handful of high school students. The majority of the people who showed up headed down to counter the white supremacist rally. I knew what was right for me, and I knew that it wasn’t my place to tell others how to protest. I also knew that any attempt I’d made to share my perspective seemed to make people suspicious of me.

Among those headed to counter the white nationalists was a protester in a pig mask. The sentiment was anti-police. We’d always had police presence at our events, and many of us enjoyed chatting with the law enforcement officers on duty. The group’s sentiment on the police had changed. My desire to cooperate with the police in my town was questioned. I was “in cahoots with the cops.”

I wasn’t where all the action was, but I still felt unsafe holding my sign and walking back to my car.  At the nationalist event a half mile away, arrests were made. One of the young men countering had brought a gun. It’s illegal to bring a gun to a political event. I was confused that nobody else in the group seemed alarmed that he’d brought a gun; they were just outraged that he’d been arrested.  Meanwhile, our Facebook group had a mole screenshotting posts and comments and sharing them in white supremacist groups. These groups labeled me the leader of a violent hate group, and my fellow social justice advocates called me a  “bootlicker” and worse.  I was trying to find Black leadership for our Facebook group, but nobody I asked wanted anything to do with us. I ended up closing the group at the suggestion of the original moms, who made the suggestion in the comments of a post she made on social media, calling me a “white savior,” among other things. That night, I started sleeping on the floor of my son’s bedroom. My room was in the front of the house, and I was afraid of a rock coming through my window. I felt unsafe. I didn’t know who to trust, so I didn’t trust anyone. I still don’t feel safe with many of the people who were involved.

While in hiding, I sought to heal my nervous system through mindfulness practices like meditation and breathwork. Simultaneously, I researched proven equity and inclusion initiatives, determined to be more effective than my last attempt. I started to notice similarities in the research around diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes and the neuroscience of mindfulness. Integrating these two sciences with my background in behavior analysis could foster the optimal internal learning environment for the most important subject: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Privilege lacks awareness. I began to see how practices that activate the prefrontal cortex, where healing, relaxation, and learning occur, help us build awareness skills, become less resistant to ideas that challenge our cultural conditioning, increase our capacity to empathize with other people’s lived experiences and reduce our dependence on bias.

I audaciously started Brave Space Consulting using this scientific approach to DEI. I have since had the privilege of speaking to rooms full of municipal executives and at educational conferences. I’ve conducted equity audits that make workers feel heard and have impacted real change in daily work culture. I facilitate training that some say is Marxist propaganda, some say doesn’t go deep enough, and some say is the best DEI training they’ve been to. I published a curriculum, “Mindfully Inclusive,” to teach school-aged students how to make room for others by first creating safe, internal space for themselves.

I still love a good protest. I’m still an activist. I don’t have all the answers, I never will, and that’s fine. I am, without a doubt, the more effective agent of change that I set out to be.

Teresa Cruz FoleY is a Mexican American behavior analyst and social justice advocate and founder of Brave Space Consulting. Her desire to heal from internalized oppression and supremacy beliefs led her to research best practices DEIB from corporate, HR, education, and individual perspectives, and to create Brave Space Consulting. Tess is the author of “Mindfully Inclusive: Connecting Social Emotional Learning With Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Skill” an evidence-based curriculum.

Advocacy begins Within

The Advocacy that has become my whole personality most recently, is for myself

Photo: Bates Lane Photography

By Tess Cruz Foley

How exciting for me that my column debut is in The Advocacy Issue. I’ve centered my life around advocacy. I have created a career around advocacy as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Consultant. I realized that I wanted my advocacy efforts to be more effective in changing people’s hearts and behavior rather than dehumanizing each other, confirming each other’s biases, and justifying their acts of rage. Advocacy rights wrongs, gives a voice to the marginalized, and leads to shifts in collective values and norms. The advocacy that has become my whole personality most recently is for myself, as I navigate long-term illness in a culture that equates “hustle” with one’s worth. A culture in which I have been deeply indoctrinated.

After contracting COVID in late December 2021, I started to notice that I wasn’t bouncing back. I was more tired and less patient, getting headaches, and experiencing malaise. I couldn’t get my brain to process what others were saying and I noticed memory lapses. Once, I walked into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee only to find a hot cup of coffee on the table, which I had apparently made minutes before. I started to feel more anxious while driving. I spent days feeling faint.

By summer of 2022, I was hopeful that eating healthier and buying all the supplements would resolve my symptoms. I worked in a summer program for underrepresented youth, which I loved, but which was not aligned with what my body needed (rest) and I grew resentful of myself for pushing so hard.

That July, lab work showed prediabetes and an EEG of my brain came back “abnormal in a peculiar way.” As the neurologist continued to describe my results, I became suspicious that she had no idea what she was looking at. She told me to “rest my brain” and retest in January. Since all of this started for me after COVID, I began to suspect I was a “long hauler” (someone who is significantly impacted for several months after a COVID diagnosis.)

I joined  a Facebook group called COVID-19 Long Haulers Support. They have become my people. I learned that my abnormal EEG and the insulin resistance that lead to prediabetes are both common long COVID (LC) symptoms, as well as my headaches, malaise, fatigue, and cognitive impairment (memory loss.) I learned terms like “post-exertion malaise” and that the weird “passing out” feeling was likely caused by malfunctions in the nervous system called autonomic dysfunction, or dysautonomia.

I researched local LC clinics and asked my doctor to refer me. It took 6 months to get an appointment and was then referred to other specialists; I quit all of my volunteering ventures to rest my brain, and in time I got better. Test results in January 2023 showed a normal EEG and no more prediabetes. I was able to continue working and do the bare minimum in parenting and home upkeep. I didn’t have the energy to socialize, but life was manageable otherwise and I was hopeful to continue improving.

In March 2023, I got COVID again. All of these symptoms came back worse than before. I’ve spent day after day on the couch. The headaches are constant. The malaise is malaising. My body is weak, my brain is dumb. On better days I worry about what my future will look like. Most days I’m too tired to care. The hardest part for me is the excruciating psychological discomfort that accompanies my inability to continue life at the speed at which I am accustomed.

Through my work connecting social-emotional learning with diversity, equity, and inclusion skills, I seek to help people heal from internalized oppression. I help people with marginalized identities, who’ve been carrying systemic trauma through generations, develop mindfulness tools to release trauma and resist cultural conditioning that would have us believe we are inferior to anyone else. I help people with privileged identities become less fragile and less defensive so that they can acknowledge the truth about the imbalance of power in our culture and leverage their privilege to access the benefits of diversity.

I came to this work because I needed it. One of the main themes in my efforts to decolonize my thinking has been to resist “hustle culture.” The connection between setting out to grow awareness and resistance to hustle culture and the development of my long-term illness is not lost on me. We can cognitively understand something. We can adamantly disapprove of it. But that does not undo conditioning.

“Everything about my business, how I build it, and what I do for others, is about decolonizing our thoughts. This includes the belief that hustle is necessary to survive and is how we earn our right to exist. ”

This belief was deeply indoctrinated in me as the child of an immigrant father who came to fulfill the American Dream, but also as a child of a conservative Evangelical mother.

I grew up believing my highest purpose was to “be a good and faithful servant.” I repeatedly heard Bible verses such as “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” As the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, I learned that all opportunities were to be appreciated and not to be wasted. I learned from my parents that productivity was the difference between a good “deserving” person and a bad “undeserving” person.  I grew up believing that I must earn my right to exist and that my worth depends on my performance.

As a single and sole parent my level of hustle throughout the past decade meant pushing through pain, injury, and illness to parent directly and to earn a living—with the ongoing assistance of caffeine and ibuprofen. I am both resentful and proud for making this life work for my kids.

My upbringing was intense, but the hustle is very deeply ingrained into dominant cultural belief systems. Competition, hierarchy, and beliefs that some people are superior to others perpetuate oppression and keep us all hustling. Lying on the couch for days and missing opportunities for paid work, volunteering, and socializing while dishes piled up and the kids eat Hot Pockets for every meal does a number on my self-esteem. I would crawl out of my skin if I had the energy.

I feel so guilty for being sick! My house is always gross and I’m ashamed that I don’t have the energy to make healthy food for my kids like I used to. My oldest son has been comparing me to his dad, an alcoholic with liver failure. We sound the same, always complain about how we feel, make excuses for being shitty parents. This burns me up. I want to say that maybe doing the work of two parents for decades contributed to the deterioration of my health. That may be true and it may not be—and it doesn’t matter. It does no good to blame this on my ex.

My mom came to live with us and I have spiraled into a mix of guilt, resentment, anger, and desperation every time I have to say “no” to something she asks of me. She says that my health is her priority, but I don’t believe her. I think everyone thinks I’m faking it.

I’m ashamed that I watch so much TV now. I used to love books; I would pour over books about neuroscience, politics, and trauma. I loved to learn and take deep dives into information. Books were my anti-depressant. I had a good brain and I loved using it. I can’t read anymore. It hurts to read. It’s hard to explain and I feel like a liar even trying to explain, but my LC comrades get it. Heck, I tried to attend an hour-long learning session recently and my head hurt so bad from just trying to process words and to respond cohesively. It’s lonely! I don’t have the energy for friendships. I very rarely make plans and when I do, I usually cancel or leave early. I have not had much to invest in relationships for over a year. It’s incredibly isolating. Navigating all of these icky feelings on top of being sick causes a cascade of irritability.

“It’s been hard work to be patient with myself as I slip further into the couch cushions. I’ve had to allow myself to rest, though I hear people called “lazy” for resting. I don’t agree with the concept of laziness, honestly. Let tired people rest. Let overwhelmed people rest. Who are we to determine whether or not rest is deserved? ”

I have had to practice the mindfulness that I preach through this experience. I’ve had to remind myself to breathe. Deeply. Slowly. Activating the prefrontal cortex that releases healing hormones and enhances my ability to retain information. I teach people that the prefrontal cortex is like a wise owl, while the amygdala, which commands the stress response, is like a tiny, barking Chihuahua looking for threats. Only one of these brain animals can be active at one time. One is clearly a better leader. Unfortunately for those in hustle culture, the Chihuahua is making the decisions most of the time.

A few years ago, I developed a mysterious rash that spread for 3 weeks. It was biopsied twice; every treatment made it worse. It was a private hell. Someone recommended that I drive to Boston to see an infectious disease specialist and I made plans to go to the ER. After arranging overnight childcare, I learned that infectious disease doctors don’t work overnight. I decided to give myself a night of respite, so I spontaneously booked a hotel room. I bought snacks and a journal and I took baths and I blissed out. In the morning, I noticed the rash was beginning to heal. I could not say for sure, but I believe that bliss initiated that process. Now that I know about the wise owl brain it makes even more sense to me.

I’m writing this from a writer’s retreat with three women I just met. Thirty minutes into the ride here I considered turning back. I arrived here a grumpy bitch in pain, but I received grace from these strangers. I walked out in the middle of more than one group session to lie down and was praised for listening to my body. I opted out of activities, attending to my most sensitive needs and weird little impulses, like putting my feet into fresh water at every opportunity. I felt accommodated and cared for. I write this on my last day of the retreat, which is also my first day in several weeks without a headache.

This has been a difficult road to navigate but I have learned to let myself rest, be alone, and love myself better. I know that my ability to advocate for others effectively depends on my ability to do those things for myself. This illness has given me the opportunity to deeply heal those old beliefs equating my worth with my productivity. It’s the hardest work, but we’ve really got nothing better to do than heal.