It’s Wellness Vibes Week! We’re taking some time at the start of this brand new year to explore wellness culture/wElLnEsS cUlTuRe through a queer lens, specifically the kind of queer lens that you can only find at your local Autostraddle. No celery juice or vagina steaming, just some chill tips for making your spiritual, physical and mental health a little better in 2020.
Close your eyes. You’re walking along a peaceful, empty beach. The waves are gently lapping upon the shore. Think about how serene the beach is. Don’t think about how weird it is that crabs are snappy little ocean spiders that we scoop out of the ocean and rip the insides out of their arms for brunch. DEFINITELY don’t think about how you’re so close to the ocean right now and you know who else was pretty close to the ocean? The crew of the USS Indianapolis, and they all got eaten by sharks. Flee the beach.
Close your eyes. You’re walking through a shady wooded glen. High above, birds are chirping contentedly. A bee lazily buzzes past you. Weren’t all the bees dying like, a year ago? Did we all just move on from that or what? Think about the video you saw where a group of bees got revenge on a hornet by surrounding its body with their bodies and vibrating at such a high frequency that they generated enough heat to cook the hornet to death. Cancel your plans to go to happy hour and spend four hours calculating how many bees it would take to cook you to death. Feel like garbage because if you just had the energy to lose those 20 pounds you’ve been talking about losing FOREVER it would take 800 fewer bees to cook you but now you’ll never get cooked to death by bees, you monster. Just go home, you don’t deserve to enjoy these woods.
Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and exhale. You’re walking slowly along a grassy knoll under a starry sky. Think about how beautiful the planets are, how their light shines through the cold vacuum of space and reaches all the way to your weak, frail bones. Try to not think about how Leonardo da Vinci somehow invented airplanes before literally any other kind of transportation even existed and your biggest accomplishment today was summoning the energy to call a perky couple on House Hunters “some heterosexual fucksticks” 7 hours into a 16-hour House Hunters binge. Why are you always alone in these beautiful places? No one wants to even look at hypothetical stars with you, you miserable bowl of shrimp salad.
Close your eyes. You’re strolling along a gently rolling river. You think you deserve to enjoy this tranquil pastoral setting? You’ve seen Die Hard with a Vengeance like 75 times and you STILL can’t explain how they solve the water jug riddle without googling it. Get the hell out of here.
Close your eyes. Remember that time you drank too much at that party and you thought it made you charming but it just made you loud and you didn’t do anything really bad but you definitely noticed that people started treating you kind of condescendingly, like they found you exhausting? They probably think about that every day, just like you do. You fucking idiot, you forgot to establish a setting for this guided meditation. You really do deserve to be microwaved to death by bees.
