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At The Maddie Way, wellness is defined broadly as bodily autonomy. This definition is both personal - the choices we make in response to how our body feels - and political - the choices afforded to you by your circumstances, like living in food deserts or near hiking trails. Everyone has a right to be well.
Enjoying the freedom to move outside.
Yesterday, May 7th, was my 23rd birthday. That morning, I put on my mask, went for a run, and came home to a long stretch. On my run, I celebrated my revolution around the sun and enacted my right to bodily autonomy. It felt so good, but it felt so heavy as I thought of Ahmaud Arbery’s run. Today, May 8th, would have been Ahmaud's 26th birthday.
The morning before my birthday, I read the headline that he was lynched on a jog by two armed white supremacists, one a former district attorney investigator.
What does it mean when coming home is not a given? How can you be well when you cannot exercise autonomy to your own body?
I jog to sort my thoughts, explore my surroundings, and feel my heart in my chest. I crave the endorphin rush and the sense of accomplishment that that discomfort immediately rewards once I walk through the door. I imagine Ahmaud did, too.
Ta-Nehisi Coates considers this autonomy in Between the World and Me, the best-selling “letter” written to his son on growing up black in America. He writes that white supremacy was formed on the “pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”
Knowing this, living this, and sharing this with his son, Coates asks himself, “How do I live free in this black body?”
Wellness is largely about what it means to live in your body: energized, nourished, and safe. It is everyone’s right to feel well in their body and to practice bodily autonomy to achieve this. Despite my own definition, I still often ask myself, “What is the point of wellness?” when I so frequently see wellness whitewashed into fluffy capitalism.
This is a different beast, called Big Wellness. It is wellness in a capitalist context that is individualistic and falsely emancipatory of circumstances related to identity and privilege. Think of listicles like “14 Products for a Perfect Night of Self Care.” Efforts to be well are put upon the individual without challenging the systems that make wellness inaccessible. It glosses over unaffordable healthcare, food deserts, and oppression in exchange for the consumption of wellness products. There’s no number of CBD gummies or bamboo “silk” eye masks that can alleviate the fear of not coming home from a free form of self care: running outdoors.
A former competitive runner myself, I first got interested in wellness when I was suffering from crippling stomach pain that wound me up in the hospital and hip pains that ended my varsity tenure. Despite the chronic pains, I received no diagnoses or suggestions to heal except to take ibuprofen when I needed to. I say this as a woman who walks into doctors offices with a U.S. passport, health insurance, and every Eurocentric beauty standard in the book. I was profoundly disappointed with the people who were supposed to help me heal and instead ushered me out of their office with new bills, wasted time, and a growing sense that I was crazy.
Because of this dismissal, alternative forms of well being are not new in the United States. I certainly have sought them out myself and write about them in The Maddie Way. As NYT culture writer Jenna Wortham explains in her article, “Black Health Matters,” with the mental and physical toll that social media, unrelenting news cycles, and oppression take on the body, the act of self care is not a luxury, but rather an “act of resistance, survival, and disobedience” (2016). For black and brown Americans, especially, holistic health care has been used as a coping strategy for reconciling with relentless injustice.
Christian Robinson
I am profoundly disappointed with the doctors who don’t believe pain. Studies show that racism is as damaging as environmental hazards: black women are more likely to die from heart disease and stroke before age 75 than white women and black patients are routinely undertreated for their pain. This is compounded by the repeated stripping of humanity and dignity in an administration, incarceration, healthcare, and criminal justice system vitriolically intent on reinforcing that black lives do not matter. Wellness and the need to care for the black body, feels like “an emergency,” Wortham writes. “If you can’t be a human being in public, you take it to a private place."
Wellness is resistance to chronic pain and nutrition education and affordable healthcare and the ability to safely be outside. Wellness is bodily autonomy, which is tied into every structure in the United States. Practicing wellness is a form of protest and it is your right to be well.
