I Thought I Could Cure My Depression With Green Juice And SoulCycle
According to millennial myth, the algorithm for mental and physical peace is simple: You ditch your desk job and predictable boyfriend to hop time zones. You experiment with tropical yoga retreats. Maybe you microdose mushrooms at Burning Man. Maybe you climb Kilimanjaro. You document your journey one #nofilter sunset at a time. You rejoin society drunk on self-awareness — certain of your place in the world.
When reality resumes, you watch your henna tattoo fade as you scroll through Instagram.
If the road to self-love is that direct (and I followed the GPS), why did I spend so many years feeling worthless?
Since legal adulthood, I’ve concealed a mind-numbing depression. The kind that some days I could suppress and some days pinned me to the bathroom floor, spinning the wheel of emotional roulette. Which version of me will appear today? I hoped for the good version of me that was sweet to a fault and saw the potential in everyone. But I might be the other version: filled with self-hate, a prisoner of her own subconscious, incapable of stumbling out of bed except to binge Ben & Jerry’s and force it back up.
Having been raised in the “don’t air your dirty laundry” South, I believed the world would only accept me if I were discreet about my issues.
So I did the things I was told would make me healthy and whole: I bought my war paint at Sephora and my armor at Lululemon. I fueled myself with the holistic nutritionist-approved lowwholecarb30ketoSouthBeachjuicefast. I “found myself” through breathwork workshops and crystal healings in musty Brooklyn tenements. I invested thousands to GOOPify my life ― clawing my way toward an effortless exterior.
Every time I thought I’d escaped, depression barged back into my life.
I was doing everything Wellness Culture instructed: boiler room yoga, hygge-ing my home, choking down a fistful of daily supplements. So why was I still giving into “U up?” texts and numbing myself with Tito’s as...
