An Interview With Self: Re-imagining the Wellness Fairytale

Note From The Author: I like to write my blog posts in the format of an interview I’m having with myself. I find it more empowering to both myself and others to know we may have different points of view and that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to decisions, values, and framing experiences. If you like, you can reflect on the questions at the beginning of each post for yourself – they might make good journaling prompts or topics for contemplation. (If you care to share, I’d love to read your responses in the comment section below.)

Here is me – you do you!

Q: What is something you have worked hard to overcome or change? What were some challenges involved and what helped you to get past them?

A: Well, there are certainly a few things that come to mind! LOL. The one I’d like to talk about here, though, is the subtle form of self-rejection that the wellness industry can perpetuate. And it’s hard to really even say I’ve totally overcome it. I find I have to consciously identify and reject it from time to time still. There are probably still gaps I haven’t identified yet in my work.

I feel like simply identifying the phenomenon was a huge step. I remember listening to all these well-known wellness practitioners; taking their workshops or reading their books and learning what their philosophies were, and wondering if the claims they made were really accurate – if the picture they painted of wellness was really achievable. And you know, they kind of made me feel like it was.

This “perfect partner (or perfect partnerless existence), perfect job, perfect mind/body/spirit” image – I realize now how it seems to parallel the picket fence/ nuclear family image that would be maybe a mainstream North American version of the ideal life we are all supposed to strive for and need to achieve in order to be seen as “good enough.”

Ugh, even as I’m writing this I feel this judgement like, “Well, if you worked harder and were good enough, then you would see how this is actually achievable and fulfilling. You’re just not there yet.”

And then I guess once I really became quite confident that this “wellness” image was kind of a sham, I began to notice that more authentic wellness practitioners shared about their own vulnerabilities, challenges, and experiences. How they didn’t need to embody some kind of perfection. How it felt significantly better to associate with them and how much more at ease to be myself around them I am. And I think that has helped catalyze my own ability to unravel some of the self-rejection that striving for “wellness” has really fostered in me.

A major challenge in recognizing, admitting to, and working to dismantle the self-rejection has been actually being a wellness practitioner myself. In some ways I suppose I have really internalized this idea that I should look, act, and be a certain way to be a wellness practitioner. Every time I take a step towards authentically presenting the things that are not “ideal” about me, it feels like a risk – like I might be seen as not good enough because of what is true about me. You know, I think we can get kind of caught up in this idea that we need a certain image to be wellness practitioners. I definitely felt it reinforced in any kind of marketing training I attended. Does it need to be that way though?

When you really look at “wellness” from a marketing perspective, it can become just like beauty, wealth, coolness, credentials, or whatever anyone is selling. It’s a commodity that you can never truly obtain enough of to reach the marketed image, because the marketed image is exaggerated.

So I think – something that I would like to do is continue to redefine just what the “wellness” I want in my life might actually look like for me. I don’t think it needs to be this fairytale, archetypal life the way we sometimes see it portrayed. I feel like it’s been very important for me to realize the ways in which wellness can be turned into a commodity, and discern between the genuine and the fake, the important and the inconsequential.

And realize that maybe I already have the wellness I seek, in many ways.

How about you – what is something you have worked hard to overcome, and what helped you?