Fariha Roisin - Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

This is dedicated to

Samia, my apu, you saved me.

This is for my comrades

&

to land, earth, and water

protectors & defenders.

Thank you.

We are in a space without a map... on shifting ground. Where old habits and old scenarios no longer apply. In Tibetan Buddhism, such a space, or gap between known worlds, is called a bardo. It is frightening. It is also a place for potential transformation.

Joanna Macy

My life, alongside my wellness journey, has been an uncomfortable uttering at times.

I find most inner work for and about the self, especially in realms of healing, to be inordinately excruciating. We expect life-altering transformation in a weekends worth of workjust a skip, jump, and a head-first butt into evolution, but what they wont tell you is this game of healing is a messy business. It requires a tenacity of self, a willingness to walk into the fire, again and again. True healing means that, at some point, youre willing to die, cyclically, only to be resurrected as your truest self; its an understanding that the journey doesnt end, you dont just one day find enlightenment, much like how you dont just arrive at happiness. Its not a destination as much as it is a state of being that needs consistency as well as a desire to adapt. To become again and again and again, this state of unraveling is the nexus point for change.

I am one of those rare masochists who loves hard work. My specific astrological placements would explain that through my Capricorn stellium, i.e., specific placements that have determined my love of climbing a never-ending mountainright, right to the topdedicated to the self and evolution with a reverential hunger for spiritual edification. I always played it off as a quirk, but, in recent years, as Ive come to understand myself more wholly, Ive begun to question what came first: Was it nature or nurture that made me so determined to get better, be better? Sadly, the more I unpacked that question, the fractured layers of a childhood I was so quick to forget, eject, and escape became clearer.

Some of us, maybe many more than are willing to admit, dont have pleasant memories of our childhoods to return to. The more I sought answers in my own life, the more the question became more global. If a lot of us can relate to immensely traumatic childhoods, what does that say about us as a species? As a society? Shouldnt this warrant more questioning and investigation?

When I was young, I thought I was the only kid with a bad life. I saw other children have simpler family dynamics, yet all I knew was raging catastrophe. Violence was a norm, because I had a mentally ill parent and my days were saturated by my mothers shrill screams. If I wanted freedom, it wasnt worth challenging. My mother proved time and time again that if she didnt get her way, she would punish you for it. She was domineering, the type of mother whose stare would knock you out, sweaty and gleaming with artificial regret for something you didnt even know you did. My childhood was punctuated with her physical violencerolling pins, remote controls, she loved the bottom of shoes and sandals to hit me with. My body, our bodiesmy sisters and minewere hers to oppress and control. Yet the more she took away my power, the more I let her.

As the youngest, my role in the family was to keep it together. I was the sun, and I felt that for them. I felt that in how my energy diffused my mothers anger, or how taking a beat for someone else (usually my father) was a way I wielded a power that I understood I had as a child. The power of diplomacy. Im naturally willful, which is a strange paradox. I was a sick child in so many ways, always bent with allergies, forever frozen, bloated, out of my body. Because there was no refuge anywhere, I believed that I had to adapt to my shitty life, so every year I tried to accept it, accept the turmoil, the suicidal ideation my mothers presence left me in. The way her groping fingers left my body forever in a state of distress. I didnt know peace or reprieve. I only felt an anger I couldnt express, and the more I wanted to, the more I grew fearful of doing so, inevitably shutting down. It took me a long time to understand that I was psychologically groomed and gaslit from childhood to adulthood about what kind of life I had been living. I dont blame anyone for this, and Ive come to understand many of us were raised in familial dualities.

* * *

On the outside we were a normal family, while inside there were multiple times (including two really dire situations) that made me realize I could die inside my own home. I was obsessed with John Wayne Gacy the year my mother tried to burn the house down. It was 2003, Bush had just entered Iraq, and I was a politically active kid, having formed the social justice club at school with my friend Manna. We went to protests and read Malcolm Xs biography.

Im lucky that I found organizing communities young, because it gave me a resource to sublimate my pain. This was around the same time I began writing Like a Bird, a novel full of grief after the protagonists respective suicide and rape. My mother, that same year, like Virginia Woolf herself, walked out of our pale blue house after an argument with my father and told us that she was going to disappear and kill herself. Nobody stopped her; I knew my life would be easier if she were dead. Like Gacy, a clown turned killer, I saw my mother as a monstrous beast who tortured her victims lives with near constant fear... but on the outside, in public, she was on best behavior. She was charismatic, enthralled by laughter, beautifulmy own Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Because I saw her hidden parts, I saw her as remorseless as a murderer, a Medusa type, sick over all the bad things that life had dealt her. The bifurcation of self (the belle versus the monster) and because she is a Libra, meant there was a performance of self in public, a place where she could be free, she could thrive on the romance of that moment. Yet at home, in private, juxtaposed against her public self, she was a tyrant. I lived every day concerned by how her moods would swing, but there was no way to know. From a young age, I learned that I had to accept this burden of discomfort, this tragedy my life had become.

I didnt grow up with socioeconomic advantages that allowed me access to a therapist or healers, and back in the 1990s in Australia there were few resources and little explanation of abuse and how one overcomes it. So, instead of getting the primary care that couldve saved me, my early childhood life was so loveless that the only way to confront it was to pretend it wasnt happening. If I could have no authority of my own, I would disassociate. I guess I never questioned how much of this discomfort was a necessity of my circumstance and simply relied on frying myself out of my own lifes details. My favorite film from my teens was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a story about erasing memories that haunt us and leave us incapacitated. I romanticized this painit was the only way to understand it. How else to metabolize a mother who cant show you love, who also finds time and ways to hurt you in the interim of a beating? Some part of you has to harden or detach. I chose the latterI forgot for my own survival.

* * *

My name means joy in Arabic. I learned that from my father, who, whenever anyone asked, would exaggerate the ha in Fari-ha and mutter how my name made sense, pointing out that I was such a happy child. When she came home from her first day of preschool, he would gallantly tell anyone who would listen, she had a hundred new best friends. I learned young what my duty was, what my passport was to be in this family; I had to transform into my name for everybodys sake. I learned that my birth, in some ways, had sedated my mothers hysteria. As if she was some strange tempestuous, unsolvable mystery, and I somehow the missing jigsaw piece. So, I became a subdued court jester. Always happy, always bright. I really did want to befriend everyone, and I did. I was a cute kid, too, cuter than most kids. I knew this because I was always adored for certain things: my eyelashes, my hair, the cuteness of my face. My fathers favorite story of me is on a bus at three, when I turned to a bunch of white grandmas who were staring at me, looked them dead in the face, and asked, Are you staring at me because Im beautiful? The story ends there, usually punctured by my dads slight chuckle. Ive heard that story so many times throughout my life, the way parents always recycle stories to an audience, but whenever hed say it in front of me, Id sit, dumbfounded. What happened to that young girl? Where did she disappear to?