Self Care - Leigh Stein Page 0,3

entire floor of my small but dedicated kingdom, a dozen ladies wearing noise-canceling headphones, sitting at long marbled-pink tables, or ruining their thoracic spines on jewel-toned velvet couches. Emerald and sapphire, garnet and citrine. Even the girl we hired to be the receptionist was usually wearing headphones, which someone should really do something about.

Last night, I told Maren she needed to take some PTO and the office definitely felt more chill without her. Probably because nothing was on fire. I put some lavender essential oil in the stone diffuser on my desk and took a deep breath. In between a lilac Pusheenicorn I got from Secret Santa and a vase of pink ranunculus, I had a little inspiration library: The Glitter Plan, Big Magic, Sparkle, You Are a Badass, You Yes You Are a Unicorn, Style Your Mind, Mind Your Magic, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself,” and I knew that Maren must be suffering deeply. She definitely didn’t seem as grateful as she used to be. I slipped on my therapeutic gel toe separators, curled up in the papasan chair in the corner of my office, and googled burnout or depression which more dangerous and leaky gut SSRI addiction and pitta-deranged panchakarma and acting out behavior alkaline reset hormone imbalance clean recipe juice fast greens tonic.

“Is now a good time?” Khadijah was knocking on the glass wall to my office.

I waved her in. “Did you see the press release?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought it was pretty good, right?”

“Do you want to start with the editorial calendar for the rest of Black History Month or do you want to see the slideshow of your morning routine?”

“Slideshow! Here, you sit at my desk,” I said. I pulled my chair closer so I could see her laptop. Khadijah was SVP of editorial strategy and she’d earned every letter in that title because she did the job of, like, ten people: writing the copy, editing the copy, taking the photos, editing the photos, A/B testing the headlines, publishing eight posts a day. She was almost better at writing in my voice than I was.

Ladies, I have a confession to make. When I was in college a hundred years ago, my morning routine used to go something like this: I would hit “snooze” two or three times before jumping in the shower, put my wet hair in a bun because I didn’t have the time to blow-dry, and grab a bacon, egg, and cheese from a food cart on my way to class. My chin kept breaking out and my legs were covered in patches of scaly eczema. I always felt like if I could just find an extra thirty minutes somewhere, I could catch up, but I never found it.

Now I know that anyone who wants to actually get anything done today needs to get up before dawn, so let’s get dark with this dinacharya.

“Damn, girl,” I said. “That sounds just like me.” We knew from Maren’s analytics that posts that started with “I have a confession to make” or “I have a secret to admit” or “There’s something I’ve never told anyone before” got the most traffic and elicited the most emotional responses in the comments section. “But I wonder if the eczema bit is TMI?” I was so in tune with my body that even thinking about eczema made me want to itch until I bled.

She deleted it.

“And we’re going to define dinacharya somewhere?”

“In a sidebar,” she said.

I watched over her shoulder as she flipped through the slideshow. There I was, smiling at my own reflection in my bathroom mirror, holding up my silver tongue scraper (not my actual scraper but a new one for the shoot); me in a white crop top doing ardha chandra chapasana as the sun rose above the East River, light dappling my yoga mat. In the next slide, I’m watching the sunrise out the window, holding an earthen Kintsukuroi bowl of overnight oats and chia seeds with coconut sugar.

“Is there anything we can do about my jaw?” I tapped her screen with the tip of my nail. I hated how my underbite looked in photographs. Having spent the entirety of my twenties sharing my life on social media, I was very aware of my angles, conscious of the face I allowed the world to see.

In Photoshop, Khadijah fixed