Self Care - Leigh Stein Page 0,1

thong leotard and @PussyGrabsBack shared photos of her feet soaking in Epsom salt after a march.

It was the digital sanctuary where you went to unload your pain.

We earned revenue from the brands who offered solutions to that pain: serums and creams, juices and dusts, clays and scrubs, drugs and masks, oils and enemas, scraping and purging, vaping and waxing, lifting and lengthening, straightening and defining, detox and retox, the cycle of life.

Devin was the face of Richual. She was also the body. She was literally the “after” photo in a piece of branded content promoting a thirty-day cleanse. T-shirt slogans popped on her flat chest. Her collarbone was usually exposed and opalescent. She was small enough that she appeared appropriately human-size in photographs taken at red carpet launches, while I stood to one side like her zaftig cousin visiting from another country—the country of Wisconsin.

Devin hid the work it took to make that body. I wore my work like a second, visible skin. Over the course of eighteen months, I’d gone from a size 8 to a 14 and upped my Zoloft prescription twice. My thighs rubbed together when I walked in a dress. The internet told me this was normal. The internet showed me ads for nontoxic anti-chafing gel.

No one ever called us by the other’s name.

Devin went to the beauty closet and came back with a tube of Missha Super Aqua Cell Renew Snail Sleeping Mask with 15 percent snail slime extract “from healthy snails born within five to six months” for “strengthening the skin barrier in a natural way.”

“Try this and we’ll take a selfie and I’ll post it to my account so everyone knows you’re okay,” Devin said. She picked my wrinkled sweater off the floor and I held my arms up like a toddler, so she could dress me.

“The tweet is gonna be good for us, you’ll see,” I said. “Don’t worry about the tweet.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 24, 2017

RICHUAL CEO DEVIN AVERY WISHES COO MAREN GELB “GOOD VIBES” FOR HER RECOVERY

Maren Gelb deeply regrets the violent language she posted on Twitter yesterday in regards to a family member of POTUS. Her tweet does not in any way reflect the values of Richual, the most inclusive community platform for women to cultivate the practice of self-care and change the world by changing ourselves. CEO Devin Avery assures the Richual community that Maren’s joke was meant to be perceived as “dark humor,” like “Melissa McCarthy,” and not as a threat to the health or safety of the first daughter.

“Maren is the most selfless, empathic person I know,” Avery says. “I could not have done this without her as my work wife, and I’m sending so many good vibes her way.”

In the words of one of our faves, Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare,” but “warfare” is up to each person to decide for herself, and at Richual, we believe that all people are human beings. We trust the community will join us in support of Maren, while she realigns her spirit and health with our core values of respite, recalibration, and resilience. #Namaste

About Us: Richual is a pioneer in the wellness space, using social technology to connect, cure, and catalyze women to be global changemakers through the simple act of self-care.

Devin

Women are people.

All people are human beings.

Believe women.

Do better.

Self-care is not selfish.

Don’t read the comments.

You are more than a digital footprint.

The political is personal.

Stay woke.

Calm the fuck down.

With a single tweet, Maren had broken at least two of Richual’s Ten Commandments stenciled in fuchsia and sherbet on the wall by reception. How could she say she believed women when she didn’t believe that having a woman who could advocate for better family leave policies to her dad was a good thing for women? A girl I knew in college was now doing marketing for a startup using nanotechnology to build air filters that eradicate mold toxicity on the molecular level and the guy who had the job before her had a younger brother (adopted) who once dated Tiffany and that was how I was able to get a meeting with someone on Ivanka’s team about inviting her to join our exclusive sorority of Richual influencers, after it came to me in a dream one night, the kind of high-quality native content related to juggling entrepreneurship, motherhood, politics, and gardening she could put out there as @Fir$tDaughter, but Maren flushed that potential partnership down the