It’s National Wellness Month. Unfortunately, I Am Still a Person.
Every August, wellness starts following me around.
It is in the giant water bottle with motivational timestamps printed down the side. It is in the woman on TikTok who has apparently consumed protein, meditated, dry-brushed, journaled, walked ten thousand steps, answered emails, and entered a state of spiritual clarity before I have located my glasses.
There are Sunday resets. Sleep scores. Magnesium. Morning sunlight. Pilates. Protein goals. Screen-time limits. Skincare routines with more steps than some graduate programs.
There is always someone gently reminding us to regulate our nervous systems.
Meanwhile, somewhere in America, a woman is eating shredded cheese directly from the bag under the fluorescent lighting of her kitchen because she has had a day.
I keep thinking about her.
Maybe because August is National Wellness Month, a month devoted to things like self-care, stress management, and developing healthier routines.
And I am not against any of these things.
I like sleep.
I believe in vegetables.
Going outside has, against my wishes, repeatedly improved my mood.
But there is something almost darkly funny about being overwhelmed by the number of things we are apparently supposed to do in order to become less overwhelmed.
At some point, wellness stopped being something that supported a life and became another life we were supposed to successfully perform.
And I wonder what that is doing to us.
When Wellness Becomes Another Job
Most of us already know what we’re “supposed” to do.
Sleep enough. Move your body. Eat regularly. Drink water. Maintain relationships. Reduce stress. Get off your phone. Spend time outside. Practice mindfulness. Have boundaries. Have hobbies. Schedule preventative healthcare. Make time for pleasure.
Don’t forget gratitude.
Also please work approximately forever.
Answer the email.
Call your mother.
Remember the dentist appointment.
Make dinner.
Maintain friendships across three different group chats that have somehow become full-time administrative positions.
Process your childhood.
Keep your relationship alive.
Know what is happening politically but not so much that it destroys you.
Have a skincare routine.
Floss.
Somewhere underneath all of this is a strangely modern fantasy: if we could just perform enough healthy behaviors correctly, perhaps we could finally become invulnerable to being human.
We could become the kind of person who sleeps eight hours and therefore does not feel grief.
The kind of person whose boundaries prevent heartbreak.
The kind of person whose morning routine protects them from loneliness.
The kind of person who has sufficiently regulated their nervous system and therefore never loses their shit in the Target parking lot.
This person does not exist.
I am sorry.
I also wanted her to exist.
Some Suffering Is Not a Self-Care Problem
One of the things feminist therapy asks us to do is widen the frame.
Instead of looking only at what is happening inside a person, we also look at what is happening around them.
Family. Relationships. Gender. Race. Culture. Religion. Sexuality. Disability. Work. Money. Community. Safety. Power.
Because our ability to feel well does not emerge exclusively from our personal choices.
Sometimes you aren’t exhausted because you haven’t developed an effective evening routine.
Sometimes you need childcare.
Sometimes you need money.
Sometimes your job is asking three people to live inside one human body.
Sometimes you are caring for children and aging parents while answering Slack messages from a bathroom.
Sometimes you live in a body that requires more medical care, more rest, more advocacy, or more money than the culture has decided a body should require.
Sometimes being yourself has consequences in your family, workplace, religious community, neighborhood, or state.
Sometimes you’ve become extraordinarily skilled at being the person who doesn’t need much because needing things has historically made your life more complicated.
None of this means individual choices don’t matter.
They do.
A walk can help.
Sleep matters.
Movement can matter.
Medication can matter.
Friendship matters.
Pleasure matters.
Food matters.
Mindfulness can matter.
A quiet twenty minutes in your car before walking into your house may, on certain Tuesdays, qualify as a sacred ritual.
But individual practices exist inside material conditions.
Feminist therapy offers a particularly useful way of thinking about this because wellness isn’t reduced to whether someone is thinking correctly or managing symptoms effectively. It can include a person’s relationship with their body, their internal experience, their relationships and social environment, and their sense of meaning and identity.
That changes the questions.
Instead of only asking:
How can I manage my stress better?
We might also ask:
Why does my life require this much stress management?
Instead of:
Why can’t I set better boundaries?
Maybe:
What has saying no historically cost me?
Instead of:
How can I become more resilient?
Sometimes:
What keeps requiring me to be this resilient?
Those aren’t rhetorical gotchas. Sometimes the answer really is that we need different coping skills.
And sometimes the answer is that something in the environment needs to change.
Usually, inconveniently, it’s both.
Wellness Has a Politics
There is another thing worth noticing.
The person we culturally imagine when we talk about “wellness” is not neutral.
Wellness has an aesthetic now.
It has countertops.
It has clothes.
It has supplements arranged beautifully beside a glass of water that inexplicably contains cucumber.
It has time.
And time may be the most revealing luxury of all.
Time to exercise. Time to cook. Time to sleep. Time to attend therapy. Time to recover. Time to go to medical appointments. Time to meditate without somebody opening the bathroom door and asking where their other shoe is.
Even our most reasonable mental-health advice can become strangely detached from the conditions in which people actually live.
“Set a boundary” sounds simple until the boundary is with the person who pays your rent.
“Leave the toxic workplace” sounds different when health insurance lives there.
“Prioritize rest” gets complicated when you’re working two jobs.
“Ask for help” assumes there is somebody available to ask.
“Be your authentic self” means something very different when authenticity can threaten family belonging, religious community, housing, employment, or physical safety.
This doesn’t mean autonomy is impossible.
It means autonomy has context.
A feminist multicultural approach is interested precisely in that intersection: the person is real, their agency is real, their choices matter—and they are also living inside systems they did not personally invent. Feminist therapy’s model of personal power includes bodily experience, internal life, relationships and social context, and existential meaning, including awareness of how social context affects us rather than pretending we exist outside it.
There is something relieving to me about that.
Not because it gives us someone else to blame.
Because it gives us a more accurate map.
You Are Also Allowed to Feel Bad
There is another way wellness culture gets strange.
Sometimes “wellness” quietly starts meaning feeling good.
Calm.
Centered.
Grounded.
Positive.
Regulated.
At peace.
Preferably while drinking something green.
But a human emotional life was never designed to remain permanently pleasant.
You are supposed to feel grief when something precious is lost.
Anger sometimes tells us something has violated what matters to us.
Anxiety can appear when we are stepping toward uncertainty.
Loneliness can tell us that connection matters.
Guilt can sometimes point toward repair.
There are emotions that become overwhelming, rigid, disconnected from the present, or profoundly disruptive to a person’s life. Therapy can absolutely help with that.
But an uncomfortable emotion is not automatically evidence that something has gone wrong.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy—ACT—offers a useful distinction here. Rather than organizing therapy around eliminating difficult internal experiences, ACT emphasizes psychological flexibility: developing a different relationship with thoughts and feelings while moving toward what matters.
Which sounds deceptively simple until you realize how much of modern life is organized around the opposite project.
Once I stop feeling anxious, I’ll go.
Once I feel confident, I’ll apply.
Once I’m less sad, I’ll start seeing people again.
Once I stop doubting myself, I’ll make the decision.
Once I finally feel okay about my body, I’ll let myself be seen.
We wait for the internal weather to become favorable before giving ourselves permission to live.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it rains for six months.
ACT asks a more interesting question:
Can this feeling come with you?
Not because suffering is noble.
Not because we should tolerate situations that are harming us.
Not because every uncomfortable experience needs to be accepted.
But because a meaningful life cannot require the permanent absence of discomfort.
The things we care about make us vulnerable.
Love makes grief possible.
Belonging makes rejection matter.
Speaking honestly creates the possibility of disapproval.
Trying something meaningful creates the possibility of failure.
Being alive is, frankly, a terrible risk-management strategy.
Maybe Wellness Can Look Less Impressive
I wonder what happens if we stop imagining wellness as a finished state.
Maybe wellness isn’t the moment when your habits are finally optimized, your attachment is secure, your boundaries are flawless, your childhood has been processed, your cortisol has apparently received the memo, and your kitchen contains twelve identical glass containers of pre-cut vegetables.
Maybe wellness is more relational than that.
A relationship with your body.
A relationship with your emotions.
A relationship with your needs.
A relationship with other people.
A relationship with the world you actually live in.
A relationship with the fact that some seasons of life are simply harder than others.
From there, wellness might occasionally look profoundly unimpressive.
Taking the medication.
Buying the convenient food.
Going to bed with dishes in the sink.
Cancelling something because you’re sick instead of constructing an elaborate legal argument for why illness makes cancellation permissible.
Letting someone be mildly disappointed.
Calling the friend.
Making the appointment you’ve avoided for six months.
Turning off the news.
Turning the news back on because disengagement no longer feels aligned with who you want to be.
Admitting you’re lonely.
Realizing the relationship isn’t working.
Realizing the relationship is worth working on.
Taking a walk.
Not taking the walk and refusing to turn that into a referendum on your character.
Resting before you have produced sufficient evidence that you deserve rest.
Laughing very hard with someone while something in your life is still unresolved.
There is no single aesthetically pleasing version of this.
Which may be the point.
What Does “Well” Mean to You?
Maybe National Wellness Month doesn’t need to become a 31-day project for becoming a superior version of yourself.
Maybe it can be an excuse to examine the definition of wellness you’ve inherited.
Who taught you what a well person looks like?
Are they productive?
Thin?
Calm?
Independent?
Able-bodied?
Financially comfortable?
Pleasant to be around?
Emotionally regulated at all times?
Do they have needs?
Do they get angry?
Do they require other people?
Are they allowed to change their mind?
Can they be grieving and still be well?
Can they be disabled and well?
Can they take psychiatric medication and be well?
Can they have a complicated relationship with their family?
Can they be struggling financially?
Can they need accommodations?
Can they be furious about something that deserves fury?
Can they spend an entire Saturday watching terrible television because this week took everything they had?
Does your version of wellness make room for an actual person?
More specifically:
Does it make room for you?
Because perhaps the goal was never to become so psychologically healthy that nothing hurts anymore.
Perhaps the work is learning which pain needs tending, which circumstances need changing, which stories need questioning, which feelings need room, which relationships need repair, which expectations were never ours to begin with, and what we want our lives to stand for while all of this remains imperfectly in progress.
Therapy Doesn’t Have to Be Another Self-Improvement Project
Therapy can become part of wellness culture too.
Another appointment where you arrive with the vague suspicion that you have failed to manage yourself correctly.
You should regulate better.
Communicate better.
Cope better.
Think better.
Have better boundaries.
Become better.
And yes, therapy can involve learning skills. Sometimes skills change lives.
But therapy can also be somewhere we examine the premise.
Why are you exhausted?
What have you been carrying?
What does your anger know?
What have you learned to call “normal”?
Who benefits from you never needing anything?
What did belonging require?
Which coping strategies helped you survive one chapter and are making the current chapter harder?
What actually matters to you underneath all the instructions you’ve accumulated about the person you’re supposed to become?
There may not be a morning routine for those questions.
Thank God.
If you’re looking for therapy in Utah, this is part of how I approach the work: not treating you as an individual self-improvement project detached from your relationships, identities, history, culture, body, and circumstances, but getting curious together about the whole complicated system.
Not: How do we finally optimize you?
More like:
What has it been like to be you here?
What makes sense once we understand the whole story?
And what might you want to do with your life from here?
Maybe that’s enough wellness for August.
Need someone to talk to?
You don’t have to arrive at therapy with a diagnosis, a crisis, or a perfectly articulated reason for why things feel harder than they should.
Maybe you’re exhausted. Maybe you’re anxious. Maybe something in your relationships keeps repeating itself. Maybe you’ve become very good at functioning while feeling increasingly disconnected from your own life. Or maybe you just know that the way you’ve been carrying things isn’t working anymore.
Therapy can be a place to get curious about what’s happening—not only inside you, but around you: your relationships, identities, history, body, values, responsibilities, culture, and the systems you’re navigating.
If you’re looking for a therapist in Utah and need someone to talk to, you’re welcome to reach out. We can start with where you are, even if you’re still figuring out what you need.
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