Self Care

by Leigh Stein

  “No more cis white men music on this road trip,” I said. “Play something motivational. Like if I was walking up to bat, what would be my song?”

  Devin put on “Wait for It” from Hamilton, our favorite, and we sang along to “I am the one thing in life I can control.”

  * * *

  ...

  If you met Devin, you wouldn’t know she was sick. Her smile looked expensive. Her complexion advertised good genes. She seemed to genuinely enjoy the taste of edible flowers. If her body appeared beside a headline about how this woman gets it done, you’d click.

  When I met her at an entrepreneur retreat, she had a six-figure business as an intuitive eating coach. This was during a period when I would photocopy proof of my income for any scholarship opportunity I could find—I just wanted a break from New York City, my $28,000 annual salary as executive director of a nonprofit organization that was going to end gender-based oppression through public sculpture, and the cage-free egg salad sandwiches that were often the most ethically nutritious food I could afford.

  They paired me with Devin as my mentor.

  “What’s your edge?” she asked. “What are you better at than anybody else?”

  “Working,” I said. “Relaxing stresses me out.”

  “You’re a total pitta,” she said.

  “I’m a what?”

  “Your dosha. Do you eat a lot of salted cheese?”

  “If I say yes, are you going to tell me I have to stop?”

  As executive director, my job was to eat salad with rich women from all over the great island of Manhattan, compliment their avant-garde jewelry and trend-driven philanthropic work, and then beg them to come on as sustaining donors for a series of anatomically accurate yet artistically rendered vaginal sculptures. Every lunch ended with me half-heartedly reaching for the check until they stopped my hand. It was the least they could do. No one ever wanted to come on as a sustaining donor at this time, but there was always someone else I should really talk to; they would make an e-intro and I had to thank them for their generosity before moving them to BCC. My future was an infinite horizon of fine dining in vain.

  “I’ve built this organization that’s supposed to be changing the world, but I’m killing myself,” I told Devin. “I’m killing myself for other women.”

  She placed a hand on my forehead like a blessing. Her palm was surprisingly warm and calming. “Your pain is sending you a message right now,” she said. “Your pain says it’s time to pivot.”

  I knew a pitch was coming. I should hire Devin as my coach. She’d tell me how much cheese I was allowed to eat (none) and make me text her photos of my treadmill workouts. After her three-month program, not only would I feel incredible, but I’d look like her. The last time I was her size, I was about ten years old. The proof of her program was written on her body. I started to sweat, preparing how I would tell this person I couldn’t afford the program. Self-consciously, I put my face in one hand, to cover the patch of acne near the ear I always held my phone to.

  “Forget the cheese,” I said. “The cheese is not the problem.”

  “You know you don’t have to keep doing this, right?” Devin asked.

  “No,” I said. “I do have to keep doing it.” Of course she wouldn’t understand. While she was selling self-improvement, I was out here trying to change the world.

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “Hold that thought,” Devin said. She opened a fresh page in her rococo floral notebook that had likely cost more than twelve dollars, and began writing. After a couple of minutes, she tore out the page.

  PERMISSION SLIP

  I give myself permission to listen to my intuition.

  I give myself permission to prioritize my own psychic space over what other people want from me.

  I give myself permission to decide when it’s time to walk away.

  Devin’s handwriting was as tiny and perfect as a font, the product of years of practicing her uppercase I’s.

  “Now all you have to do is sign it,” she said.

  I had so thoroughly braced myself to say no to her that I felt defensive about her reframe.

  “But what if my true calling is to ignore my intuition and put myself last?” I joked.

  “Uses humor . . . as coping mechanism,” Devin recited, as she wrote it down.

  “What about you?” I said. “What’s your coping mechanism?”

  “For me, I find intense physical activity to be really grounding.”

  I thought that sounded like horseshit, but I signed the permission slip so I could ask her to help me with my bigger problem, which was convincing women like her to give me money.

  Devin seemed so perfect that I became obsessed with finding out what was actually wrong with her. That night, back in my hotel room, I installed a new WordPress theme on the nonprofit website to meet Devin’s aesthetic requirements, and I opened YouTube in another tab, so I could watch and rewatch a video of her slowly eating half an avocado with a tiny souvenir spoon as I tried to figure out what was so sad about how much she savored each bite.

  I binged on all her social content: her YouTube channel, her Insta, her recipe blog. The story she told her followers was that she had recovered from an eating disorder and from her perfectionism and her mission on earth was to help others do the same. She posted Love Yourself memes to inspire women to do what I suspected she was incapable of, like maybe that love would travel in a game of telephone and one day make it back to her, in a form she was capable of understanding. Everyone seemed to be buying what Devin was selling except Devin herself.

  I thought I could be the girl sitting next to her in the telephone circle, the one to whisper the message, the smart friend who would help her see how much more she could achieve professionally if she redirected all the time and energy she devoted to controlling her body.

  We spent all weekend together at the retreat. Periodically, a fan would come up and ask to take a selfie with Devin and she would happily pose (always on the left—her good side). Everyone knew Devin Avery. I kept telling her it was okay if there were more important women she needed to talk to; I could graze at the Luna Bar buffet and wait for someone to try to network me. But Devin insisted there was no one else she needed to spend time with.

  Between her platform and message, and my vision to help women on a global scale, we brainstormed what a self-care social network might look like. It might have remained just a bunch of random ideas scribbled in a notebook except that Devin’s dad died and she had the cash to hire a developer. I resigned from my nonprofit with a gust of relief. I started saying, This will work, trust me, to Devin and to John, even before I believed it was true. It was too late to go back.

  We had a hundred thousand users by the end of our first week. One million by the end of 2016. We moved from two desks at a coworking space in an old button factory near a toxic canal in Brooklyn to renting an office for a staff of twenty (with room to grow) in Flatiron. The election was a gift to us. So was the cover story in Fast Company: “Paltrow, Meet Steinem: How Millennials Devin Avery and Maren Gelb Are Making Wellness Woke.”

  * * *

  ...

  There was no traffic on the two-lane road, bordered by bare trees, that cut through a rural county I imagined had once been Native land, before assholes like me came and stole it. We passed gas stations and farms, a cemetery and a vacant baseball diamond, parcels of land with fading “For Lease” signs. Leaving New York was always a reminder of the millions of people who would never choose your life or your lifestyle, the one you fought so hard to have, to prove how special you were.

  “Oh hell no,” Devin mumbled, staring at her phone.

  “What?” I said, my pulse quickening in a way that was so familiar it almost felt good.

  “Nothing,” she snapped. “You don’t need to worry ab
out it.” She flipped her phone horizontal and started typing furiously.

  Without thinking, I pulled my own phone from my FiveThirtyEight tote so I could follow along. Did we get a wave of account deactivations? Were women talking about my tweet on Richual? Maybe Elizabeth Warren or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Silverman posted something in my defense on Twitter and now people were piling on them and that’s why Devin was outraged.

  When I unlocked my home screen, I was reminded that Devin had removed Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, Snapchat, Slack, my work email account, and even my Richual app. This was the digital detox deal we’d made. I admitted I was powerless over social media and that my life had become unmanageable and surrendered myself to Devin’s higher power. Now my phone was brain damaged, as useless as a floppy disk.

  I’ll download Richual later at the house, I thought, just to check. And then I’ll delete it again. If there’s wifi? Will there be wifi? I’d forgotten to ask Evan. Shit. By this point, I wasn’t even chasing a good high, just the dopamine jolt I’d get from knowing what people were saying behind my back, followed by the righteous indignation that they were all wrong.

  “Almost there,” John said, reaching back with his right hand to squeeze my knee. It was startling how much gray there was in his hair at only forty-one. So much of the time we spent together was at home, in the evenings, in the yellow lamplight or in front of the indigo glow of our screens, pale human blobs eating takeout adjacent to each other on the couch. I hardly ever saw his face, and he hardly ever saw mine. Closing my eyes, I could picture him more clearly by recalling the images I’d committed to memory—the boyishness that attracted me to his dating profile years ago, his snub nose and full lips, the tiny space between his two front teeth that he tried to hide by never smiling. The ten-year age difference had never really bothered me because, irrationally, I kept thinking that as I got older, the gap would close. But I remained somehow the “girl” in girlfriend.

  “Do you mind pulling over at that liquor store?” I asked.

  Devin turned around in her seat. “I thought we talked about doing this cleanse together?”

  “Is wine not a liquid?”

  She sighed in a way to let me know she was now going to do her “breath work.” I calculated how many bottles of wine I’d need to get through the weekend. I could hide one or two in my tote bag, and carry the rest in a shopping bag. I could say I was leaving the best bottle for Evan’s parents as a gift. I could say, “I got enough for everyone,” even though I was the only one who drank.

  * * *

  ...

  The old house was dark and imposing from the road, elevated on a grassy plot bordered by a low stone wall, miles from the nearest village. Square windows wrapped around the brown-shingled exterior like the panes of a lantern. There was no light inside. The house and the garage and the barn were all on different levels, connected by uneven shale paths and obscured by shrubs and shadows, so it was hard to tell how big the house was, but it was at least two stories with an attic, the roof peaked and topped with a chimney. A single light had been left on for us, above the yellow front door.

  We’d spent too long at Evan’s apartment and the daylight was fading around the edges, but our legs needed a stretch, so we walked around back. Tall evergreens surrounded and shaded the house, and the yard pitched downhill, becoming a large grassy meadow with a pond the color of slate. The grass was dead and straw-colored. A damp red hammock hung motionless between two barren trees. Behind us, a dark tarp dusted with snow covered the swimming pool. I took a deep breath of the crisp bitter air. It was like entering the setting from the gothic novels I loved as a little girl: orphan gets sent to bachelor uncle, mysteries ensue on his estate.

  “Stand right there,” Devin said. I was on the front porch, pulling the key ring from my bag. She snapped a picture and narrated the caption aloud, “Hashtag Victorian . . . rest . . . cure . . . hashtag bae.”

  I staggered into the dark entryway, putting my hand out to reach for anything that might be a light switch. Before my eyes could adjust to the dark, I banged my shin into the corner of something cold and sharp that clattered when I touched it.

  “Fuck.”

  From behind, John shined his iPhone flashlight at the floor near my feet. I’d walked into the fire poker stand. “Technology is our friend,” he said.

  “You’re telling me!”

  “Poor Maren,” Devin said. She proceeded to turn on all the lights and open the curtains.

  Rolling up my pant leg, I was confronted with the fact that I had not shaved my legs since the Obama administration. My shin was scraped, but not bleeding. We were standing in the living room: a few wrought-iron floor lamps, a wood-beamed ceiling, a white wicker sofa with upholstered cushions patterned with strawberries, and a large brick hearth for cooking children in fairy tales. Evan’s taste was futuristic compared to the Mary Engelbreit cottage aesthetic and wooden duck decor of his family’s manor. John dusted off one of the mallards and held it up for a better look.

  “Homey,” Devin declared, satisfied.

  It took me a couple of minutes to recognize the familiar smell, almost like popcorn, of historic homes I’d visited as a child. I was pierced by the memory of a tour guide in a period costume bending down to tell me how privileged I was to not have to spend all day gathering pails of water that were most likely contaminated with cholera-inducing bacteria.

  Through the living room, there was a dining room decorated with nautical wallpaper and framed oil portraits of Evan and his siblings Josh (director of audience acquisition at a chain of elite concierge medical providers in the tristate area) and Zack (single dad of a toddler named Walter [as in “White”] and ringleader of a self-sustaining Libertarian enclave in the Green Mountains).

  “Oh my god, look at baby Zack,” Devin said. I knew that she and Zack had hooked up in college, and I’d traveled deep enough into her Facebook photo albums to know what she looked like back then, which was shockingly average, like so many other sophomores, with bodies bloated by beer and Doritos. She once had rosy apple cheeks and a silly, unpracticed smile. You couldn’t tell Devin today that anything she was doing wasn’t working because the evidence proved the opposite true: she had tamed her body through her will and now she was the face of a startup with a multimillion-dollar valuation.

  “We had sex here once,” she said, still staring at the baby portrait. “In the outdoor shower. It was weird.”

  “I’ll bring in the bags,” John said.

  “Come on! I’ll show you the master.” Instead of leading the way, she stood behind me and put her small pinkish hands over my eyes. I climbed the stairs, gripping the dusty banister, until she said to stop and swung me around by my shoulders, like we were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

  It was the biggest bedroom I’d ever seen, a room that would qualify as a studio apartment in Manhattan. The only downside was the wallpaper—an ugly pattern of green and orange and yellow flowers and flourishes, clustered in a way to look like waving pineapples or, if I squinted another way, disapproving owls. It made the spacious room feel sickly claustrophobic. But there, in the corner, was a huge bed draped with a gauzy cream canopy, conjured by my inner six-year-old. I flopped onto the bed and plugged my nose to keep from sneezing. Devin had her phone out again, snapping pics of the books shelved on the white built-ins as she read the titles aloud to me: “Women Who Run with the Wolves, Women Who Love Too Much, Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: When Loving Hurts and You Don’t Know Why. Don’t plug your nose like that; you’re going to give yourself an aneurysm!”

  “That’s not even true. What do Evan’s parents do?”

  “His mom’s a therapist. Zack said she sent each of them to therapy from the time they were twelve. His dad works in pharma.”

  “I need both of those,�
�� I said.

  “Both of those what?”

  “Therapy and pharmaceuticals.”

  Devin sat at the foot of the bed, crossing one tiny leg over the other. “I’ll be your therapist,” she said. “You can talk to me. I’m being serious! Don’t make that face!”

  “I’m depressed,” I said.

  “When’s the last time you had your vitamin D levels checked?”

  “It doesn’t even seem to bother you,” I said, wiping my nose on my shirtsleeve.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Every other day another racist cop shoots an unarmed black man or refugees drown in the ocean or a mother of four is murdered by her husband because she wants to leave—”

  “Babe,” she said, closing her eyes. “I know. Believe me. I get the Times alerts on my phone, too. But I wouldn’t be able to do my job if I got emotional about everything. And then what would happen to Richual? It would stop helping so many women, right? This is why we make such a good team.”

  “Because the world makes me cry and it doesn’t make you cry?”

  “Your job is to cry and my job is to help you stop crying by reminding you how we’re leading the revolution by helping women take care of themselves. This is your moment to lead by example, like Gandhi.”

  “I read something in the Guardian that said he used to sleep next to teen girls to test his chastity.”

  “Fine, don’t be Gandhi! Be Michelle.”

  “When they go low, we go high,” I sniffed.

  * * *

  ...

  For dinner, I ate the yellow porridge that was supposed to reset my digestive fire and also my brain. John had a baguette smeared with Brie that he smuggled me pieces of when Devin wasn’t looking. I kept the bottle of sauvignon blanc near my plate and told myself, You’re on vacation, each time I refilled my glass.

  Devin told us about a comedian she knew who now had a job writing for a more famous comedian with his own TV show and how it was so great that her friend was bringing more diversity to the writers’ room by being a woman, but what would be even better was if her friend had her own TV show, but the problem was that she didn’t think her friend was very funny, actually, because her jokes made Devin feel guilty for being a white woman, as if that was, like, anything she could control?