650: Notes on Self-Care
650: Notes on Self-Care
Transcript
I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.
Lately, there is a lot of talk about self-care and the traps of commercializing self-care. Self-care has become a buzzword and an industry. Buy this $30 candle and feel healed. Buy this $100 kitchen appliance and feel healthy. Buy this $200 cozy sweater and feel rich. I admit this is appealing to me at times. I can try to throw money at the problem as much as the next person. I too can fill my shopping cart like it’s filling my soul.
Still, the self-care that I most gravitate towards is free. Like napping. Maybe a walk. Maybe a little cry on the couch. Maybe just lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling and not answering anyone but myself for a whole ten minutes. There’s a beauty in silence, in the need to shut out the world for even a moment.
Once when I worked in a high rise, I would shut my office door sometimes and just visualize myself in a green field, a breeze on my face, birds all around, and I’d try to hold that in my heart. Then, I’d open my eyes and remember my office was literally inside the curve of the scrolling Nasdaq sign in the middle of Times Square and go about my day. That fantasy saved me though. I’m a firm believer in fantasizing as self-care.
Today’s poem praises the act of fantasizing. For me, this poem is not only an ode to the subject of the speaker’s fantasy, but also an ode to the pleasure of igniting the imagination. This poem honors the value and power of the mind’s ability to find something, anything, that helps us survive.
Notes on Self-Care
by Yesenia Montilla
For Hikmet & Girmay what better way to forget that the world is burning than by imagining me in London Town with Idris & his Luther wool coat with its deep pockets where both my hands fit as he walks me to his flat & the décor is ridiculous: French chic with some touches of Kentucky country but it’s my fantasy & there’s no room for black leather couches or 70-inch TVs—no bachelor’s Shangri-La here. No beer in the fridge, only rows & rows of vintage Bordeaux I chase Idris across my forehead whirling into bed with him like a wrecking ball envisioning his scruff face against my neck, his beard better than any exfoliator I’ve ever owned his languid fingers like rakes against my plump body & he loves my poems— all of him, his 40 trillion cells at attention to every stanza I write & what better way to live than to desire this way? & this is not escapism it’s survival— One day, this earth will rot or worse be made good & there will be no need for this sort of daydreaming One day, this earth will be good or worse we’ll be good & Idris will be a faint taste of something I once wanted like trees shedding against a November sky I’ll sit down to write a poem about the time I fantasized I made love to Idris Elba not remembering how in my sorrow he held me like one of my metaphors between his fingers as though my poems were just delusions foliage falling to the earth routine & dying thin as rice paper tender as paper cranes—
"Notes on Self-Care" by Yesenia Montilla. Used by permission of the poet.