Tipping. It’s not a thing that’s done overseas because, ya know, people in the service industry make a decent livable wage there, unlike here in the States. So when Baekoff and I first started going out and would finish a meal at a restaurant, we’d get the check and he’d be like, “I see there’s a line for a tip. So I guess we’ll leave a couple dollars?” I’d respond, “I would rather subsidize our waiter’s loan for their business on Etsy before I roll up out of here having only left a couple of dubs for what our waiter did during a stressful brunch service because 1) the minimum wage for folks in the service industry is horrible, and 2) everybody up in here would think I left that trash-ass tip because there’s a stereotype that Black people don’t tip.” While my boyfriend doesn’t agree with the American system of people having to rely on tips because their baseline pay is offensively low, he understands tipping is a salve for those who are routinely disrespected by customers and overworked by their employers, not to mention that money is what helps them survive, so now my baby leaves a solid 20 to 25 percent tip no matter what.
Turns out I don’t know how to make tea. I thought I did after being alive for thirty-six years, but I was wrong! I remember the first time I met Baekoff’s family and had tea with them. I asked for green tea with honey. They handled this seemingly innocuous request the way I expected them to handle me being Black: colored pinwheels for eyeballs as they buffered, trying to process this information. Ya know, now that I think about it, maybe that’s why Meghan Markle didn’t get on with the royal family. Not because she’s Black, but because she asked for Tazo brand tea with honey in it and that set the tone for her disastrous relationship with Harry’s fam. J/K. It’s definitely because she’s Black. ANYWAY. The point is how I (and many Americans) drink tea is uncouth as fuck to Brits! And they are not shy about letting you know that. Every time I had tea, my boyfriend’s fam would lovingly roast me about my “concoction.” Lol. Store-brand honey and a raggedy Lipton tea bag do not constitute a “concoction.” It’s a day-two-of-your-period staple that’s good year-round. You know what’s not good? The garbage they drink on the regs: Yorkshire Tea with a spot of milk.
If you’ve never had the displeasure of having Yorkshire Tea, I’ll break it down for you. It tastes like the ends of boxed braids after your hairstylist has burned them with a lighter so as to seal and prevent them from unraveling while the braids are in your hair . . . but in liquid form. Yorkshire Tea is burnt, bitter, and b’not great (lol, I was going for alliteration and failed), yet Yorkshire or PG Tips, which is basically the same thing although British people think I’m mad for believing that, are the go-to tea beverages. Literally, Sri Lanks aka Sri Lanka and Assam, India (both former British territories), are like, “We have thousands upon thousands of flavors that are actually delicious. Wanna try?” And the UK is like, “No fanks, bruvs! We’ll stick with the two teas that taste like worn-down car tires on a Ford Fiesta. Cheers!”
* * *
Okay, that pretty much sums up what it’s like to be an American dating a Brit. Well, I’m sure I skipped over some cultural differences, such as meeting the parents. As we all know, in the States, introducing your boo to your parents is a big deal and typically reserved for when you’re dating someone special; otherwise you’re not going to waste your parents’ time or one of their Sunday best outfits for a person you don’t see some sort of a future with. It’s kind of like on Shark Tank when a contestant comes on, makes a wild-ass evaluation of their company—“I’m asking for $200,000 in exchange for 5 percent of my company”—and is unwilling to negotiate, frustrating the sharks until one of them, usually Mark Cuban, gets so indignant and asks, “Why did you come on this show when you clearly have no intention of making a deal?”
The point is, whether they’re business or personal, big-time meetings mean something, which is why it’s rare for Americans to introduce their parents to partners they’re not serious about. So, the first time Baekoff came with me to Cleveland for the holidays, everyone in my family knew this was my way of saying, “This is it. He’s the One.” Whereas when it was time to meet Baekoff’s mom and I expressed nervousness about her liking me, he simply responded with, “I don’t care if my mum likes you. She’s not the one living with you. And she’s not the one loving you. I am.” Well, damn. It’s like that? Oh. Okay. He then went on to explain that meeting the parents in the UK is more of a formality, like two people shaking hands when saying goodbye, as opposed to an approval-seeking or quality control process. Therefore, while it’s nice to get affirmation from the parents, it’s by no means a relationship-defining moment. So in the case of Mama Baekoff, he was fine if it didn’t go well or if she didn’t like me because as he (and the Brits) like to say, “On your bike, luv,” which basically means “Go fuck yourself.” Yeah . . . it’s a bit extreme, innit?
But if that doesn’t sum up British cultch, I don’t know what does. All I do know is that I’m having the time of my life discovering all his cultural idiosyncrasies and vice versa. Sometimes they make us laugh, other times they open our eyes to a new way of seeing the world, and sometimes we may never fully understand them, yet they end up being a thing we inexplicably grow to love (witnessing Baekoff’s excitement any time he has baked beans on toast makes me so happy). Whatever the case may be, dating each other has been one of the most enriching experiences of our lives in that whenever we go out and I’m rocking a brand-new ’do, he’s lovingly on “edges duty,” making sure my hair looks just as fresh at the end of the night as it does at the beginning, while I’m falling deeper into the Wings musical library.
They’re really fucking good, you guys.
Self-Care Is Not a Candle and Therapy Is Not a Notebook: How We Are Doing the Most and the Absolute Least at the Same Damn Time
Whenever conspiracy theorists or folks skeptical of authority utter the phrase “Big Brother is watching,” I’m like, “Hopefully in 4K Ultra HD! I mean, have you seen un-remastered TV shows from the nineties? The film quality is hot garbage!” Kidding! But for real, when I hear this warning, I usually roll my eyes. Look, I agree that government surveillance is no bueno, but I’m in too deep! I have a phone, computer, multiple social media accounts, I use the internet, and I would let Big Bruth spy on me AND use me as a pawn to capture trifling heauxes in exchange for an overpriced sal. Like, if they told me I’d get a lifetime discount from sweetgreen, I’d go, “Drop a pin on your locaysh, boo, and I’ll meet ya there in fifteen minutes like I’m Deep Throat with some tea to spill on Watergate.”
Point is, the gubment’s got my number and it’s fine, okay? Having them watch my boring little life is better than me pulling a Henry David Thoreau, who, at twenty-eight, moved to Walden Pond in Massachusetts (never heard of it) and built a cabin with his bare-ass hands (my ancestors built the White House, so I feel like I’m exempt from ever having to do anything architectural for as long as I live). Anyway, he did all of this because, as he wrote, he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” and being off the grid allowed him to do that. No. Fucking. Thanks. I’m into living sha-ha-sha-la-la-la-lowly on the grid with the modern-day comforts of Face ID and Gravity Blankets because life is not actually a delicious marrow, but a lukewarm Fear Factor smoothie that’s comprised of wheatgrass, insects, and a splash of lemon. I will take two courtesy slurps then ask the bartender to keep the whiskey neats coming until the day I die. I am remaining firmly on the grid, so, Big Brother, put on your bifocals and enjoy the show! Now . . . with that said, I do have one small grievance: My phone needs to mind its damn business and quit eavesdropping on me, because every time I open Instagram, I’m presented with some goofy-ass ads, loosely based off something I’ve said.
One time, my friend and I were discussing beach season, and Instagram showed me an ad for a brand selling hydrating masks made to counteract dry bikini lines. Uhhh, my pelvic region isn’t parched, but thanks for the concern? However, if it were, I’d simply drink some water, put a d
ab of Aveeno near my coochie, and keep it moving because I’m an adult. Then there was the time I mentioned to Bae that I was going to start bringing a packed lunch to work, and the next time I went on Instagram, there was an ad for a lunch box that looked like a purse and cost SEVENTY DOLLARS. Plus tax! Lol, I love how I write “plus tax” as if that’s the thing that crossed the line. But for real, who’s dropping a Ulysses S. Grant and a half to house their generic ham sandwich and bag of carrots? But these instances were just the tip of the iceberg.
I had recently started going to therapy to deal with, oh, you know, the dumpster fire that was 2020. My phone overheard me talking about it to a friend, and lo and behold, the next time I logged in to Instagram, a sponsored post appeared for a company called Bloom. The caption read: “Be your own therapist with cognitive behavioral therapy.” Last I checked, I’m not a raggedy chair from a flea market that’s begging to be reupholstered, so why in the Sigmund Freud hell would I attempt to DIY my life? One of the reasons for going to therapy is because one isn’t capable of getting their shit together on their own, so they bring a highly trained outside source into the fold who can provide a much-needed analytical and objective perspective. So why is Bloom acting like my boo-boo-ass liberal arts college degree, the fact that I’ve seen the end credits—not a full episode mind you, just the end credits—of Frasier (“Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs” is a bop) and I have a therapy notebook app are, together, a sufficient stand-in for what a licensed professional can provide? Y’all, we both know it ain’t. Think back to the last time you tried to be an impartial supervisor of your life. How did it go? I’ll tell you how it went for me. Literally every single time I had to answer only to myself, I sent me to voicemail (the mailbox was full, naturally) and carried on with the bullshit.
Food diary? I’ll eat healthy all day and then not record the Rice Krispies Treat I had before bed because if I don’t write it down, then the calories don’t “count.” Monthly budget planner? January 1, I’m on my “new year, new me” ish, so I’m keeping track of everything down to the penny, but by MLK Day, I’m like, “The $95.69 I spent buying emergency U2 concert DVDs? I’ll just file that away in the old noggin and remember to deduct that from what I allocated for entertainment.” Cut to me absolutely forgetting that purchase (I legit have the memory of Dory from Finding Nemo) and proceeding to blow more money on buying the Die Hard and Rush Hour movie collections from iTunes—#TrueStory—thus overspending in the entertainment category. Piano lessons? I bought a keyboard during Covid, certain that I would practice three hours a day and, by the time quarantine was over, I was going to be the next Alicia Keys. I kept that practice schedule for the first month, then I skipped a day, which turned into a few days, then a week later I’d get back on the wagon and then promptly fall off again until I eventually stopped playing completely. Suffice it to say, I’m not the next A. Keys. At best, I’m a mediocre wedding band pianist who only knows “Uptown Funk,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance,” and I’m praying that everyone is too drunk at the reception to notice I put those songs in the rotaysh three times. Point is, self-discipline is hard. Accountability is harder. Therapy, at times, can be the hardest. And, at the rate society is going, actual and legitimate mental and emotional wellness is damn near impossible to achieve and sustain because the rebellious nature of self-care has been lobotomized and replaced with something far less complicated and much more toothless. Or at least that’s how it seems. Beneath the soothing energy of modern-day self-care lies a world full of deliberate flaws designed to get and keep us on the distractingly pleasurable hamster wheel of self-care so that we don’t actually notice the ways society has failed us.
Self-care is, according to the Harvard Business Review, an eleven-billion-dollar industry. With that much money on the table, coupled with the societal shift toward obsessing about the self—e.g., constantly thinking about and tweaking the self—it’s no wonder why what began as an earnest preservation of the health of the individual, and, equally, of the community (more on that later) has been reduced to yet another form of labor, which is right in line with our work-obsessed culture. Only instead of it being a nine-to-five day gig where you can clock in and clock out, caring for onself is an around-the-clock gig in which ABI aka Always Be Improving is less of a light suggestion and more of an addiction that’s aided by technology and fueled by monetization. Charlotte Lieberman analyzes this in her Harvard Business Review article entitled “How Self-Care Became So Much Work.” In it, she discusses how the dogged devotion to self-care and self-improvement is eerily similar to the oppressive energy that many of us put into our careers:
Our focus is shifting away from the actual self—our bodies, minds, and spirits—and toward data about the self. With iEverythings around us at all times, we expect our steps to be enumerated, our REM cycles to be recorded, and our breathing patterns to be measured. It’s not enough to just feel better—we need our devices to affirm that we are doing the work. . . . This raises the question: Are we genuinely interested in feeling healthier and happier? It seems likely that the values driving us to be workaholics in the first place are also encouraging us to “optimize” ourselves by using metric-driven “hacks.”
And if we’re not accumulating data, we’re spending money, which means that self-care is no longer accessible to everyone except the privileged. Furthermore, it’s that being able to afford self-care is sometimes, in and of itself, also self-care. Disposable income then becomes visible proof to the world that you are working hard at your job so as to be able to work hard at your life. To be clear, I’m not saying this as a finger-wagging, omniscient narrator who’s pointing out all the ways everyone else is wrong. I’m right there with you, stuck in pursuit of the instant-gratification trappings of shiny new things that, ultimately, end up having increasingly diminished returns.
In my estimation, I own fifteen notebooks / life planners, a couple dozen candles, three yoga mats, a few pieces of crystal, and subscriptions to meditation and self-affirmation apps, as well as buying myself a small bouquet of flowers monthly, and I consume self-help books the way some folks eat Pringles. My apartment is basically one introduction-to-crochet kit and several dream catchers away from being the equivalent of a fully stocked Etsy shop. As much as I am loathe to admit it, a massive part of me LOVES commercialized self-care. Each purchase gives me a hit of endorphins that scream, “Yes, honey! Keep gathering evidence that shows how you are constantly becoming the new and improved version of you.” Then days (or truthfully, mere minutes) pass and I’m still the same me I was before I spent that money. Still saddled with the same issues. Still living in the same environment (some of it self-created, some of it not) that creates the anxiety that we’re led to believe present-day self-care can fix, but, as we all know, it rarely, if ever, does. Instead, it keeps us locked in the same counterproductive cycle. Writer Shayla Love ruminates on this very conundrum in her 2018 Vice.com article “The Dark Truths Behind Our Obsession with Self-Care”:
At the time this issue went to press, there were 9.5 million posts on Instagram* about #selfcare, which is hundreds of thousands more than when I first started thinking about the topic critically. . . . But self-care has been appropriated by companies and turned into #selfcare; a kind of tease about the healthcare that we are lacking and are desperate for. . . . You can’t actually treat an anxiety disorder with a bubble bath or a meditation app, and the supposition that you can is a dangerous one.
If we lived in a world in which we were being properly taken care of, would self-care have the same appeal?
Furthermore, many of these things Love mentioned and more—unwinding for a couple of hours by watching TV, going on a walk, reading a book, drinking a glass of wine, calling a friend—should be the bare minimum. Utterly unremarkable to the point of being unmentioned. Which raises the question: If doing these lightweight activities is oft accompanied by a touch of pomp and circumstance so as to let e
veryone know we are, indeed, taking care of ourselves, isn’t that a major red flag? Like, if you were dating someone and every week, they declared, “Just letting you know I’m not cheating. #SoupsMonogs,” you’d most likely respond with, “Okay, Dick Van Dyke. How many chimneys are you sweeping aka who you fucking?” The constant need to make an announcement starts to feel a bit like that whole “the lady doth protest too much” thing. And when it comes to self-care, so many of us are that lady! We’re screaming at the top of our lungs about how we’re reclaiming our lives and taking care of ourselves, but I’m starting to question whether any of us actually believe that. If the numbers have anything to say about the matter, I think the answer is we don’t.
Last year, ASD, the Affordable Shopping Destination, which is a fifty-plus-year-old consumer trade show that started as two associations joining forces to create a trade show and product expo group for the general merchandise market, began tracking the growing interest in self-care. They found that between 2019 and 2020, self-care-related Google searches increased by 250 percent. Mental Health First Aid, a program that teaches people how to “identify, understand, and respond to signs of mental illness and substance disorders,” stated that “the most common mental illnesses in the U.S. are anxiety disorders, which affect 40 million adults (18.1 percent of the population).” And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that our healthcare system is an unmitigated disaster and that is, say it with me: by design.
Mental Health America, a nonprofit organization, revealed in 2017 that around 56.5 percent of U.S. adults who have a mental illness received no past year treatment, and 64.1 percent of U.S. youths who suffer from major depression never received treatment. Why? Well, as Love writes, “Another study in JAMA [Journal of the American Medical Association] found that in 2009 and 2010, only 55 percent of psychiatrists accepted health insurance, compared with nearly 89 percent of other specialist doctors. People on Medicaid have even worse luck: Only about four out of ten psychiatrists accept Medicaid, according to research published in JAMA Psychiatry. The only lower rate for Medicaid acceptance is for dermatologists.” Ooof, pretty grim, and if you’re hoping things are looking up now, you’re about to be disappointed. Mental Health America conducted a report in 2021 on the state of mental health and found that the number of uninsured adults with a mental illness (5.1 million) increased for the first time since the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, was passed, with New Jersey coming in first with only 2.5 percent uninsured and Wyoming bringing up the rear with a whopping 23 percent who are uninsured.
Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes Page 22
