Wellness Confessions #1: A 34-Year-Old Tech Manager Plans for Period Symptoms & Regrets Skincare Purchases

Wellness Confessions is a series of anonymous submissions from real people about their authentic wellness truths, with a special focus on identity and culture (since that’s often left out of the wellness conversation). Each confession may be edited for brevity but is otherwise true to the submission.

Submit your own wellness confession here.

The Confessor:

• Age: 34
• Location: Charlotte, NC
• Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
• Racial/Ethnic/Cultural Background: Black (Half African American, Half Jamaican)
• Occupation: Tech Industry - Customer Success Manager

The Confession:

What does wellness mean to you? Wellness means to me being mentally, physically and emotionally well enough to do the things I want to do without limitations. In an extremely simplistic example, if I wake up next Saturday morning and think ‘I want to drive to the beach,’ I feel well enough to go do that and won’t have to deny myself those reasonable types of desires. Now financial constraints are a whole other story.

What wellness habit has completely changed your life? Tracking my period. I know it sounds silly, but back when I used to let my premenstrual symptoms sort of take me by surprise (like why am I so shocked that I feel moody and crampy all the sudden… this happens every month!!!) I would get very derailed with eating super poorly, not sticking to a routine and just overall feeling terrible. Now I kind of pre-plan for my period by meal prepping, cleaning up my apartment and trying to think of what kind of comfy things future me would want. It makes the transition each month a lot more manageable and I feel better mentally.

Is there anything about your cultural background that influences your wellness outlook? I wish my mom would have passed along a few more of the natural, holistic remedies that my Jamaican grandmother used to use for her and my aunts and uncles. My mom knows a few of them for when you’re getting a cold and need to boost your immune system, but I think a lot of remedies were lost along the way after my grandmother passed. There are also certain ingredients that she used that are a bit harder to find here in North Carolina. On the other hand, the conversation around mental wellness was non-existent in my household growing up because of the more traditional way of thinking among a lot of West Indians.

What’s a wellness product or service that you would purchase over and over again? A really solid air purifier. I think that saved me quite a bit once everything started blooming and a pollen bomb basically exploded over Charlotte.

What’s a wellness product or service that you regret spending money on? SO. MUCH. SKINCARE. Geez. On one hand, all that experimentation did lead me to a couple of my favorite products, but my overall skincare routine is pretty simple now. I don’t need half the products I currently have in my medical cabinet because I was following the trend of a complicated 10-step routine.

What’s a wellness trend that you think is overrated? I’m not even sure if this qualifies as wellness, but skin filler. Yikes, don’t shoot me!! I’m just concerned how injectables are going to look and feel long-term.

What’s an aspect of wellness that you want to learn more about this year? I don’t know why it took so long, but I only recently learned the difference between a dietitian and a nutritionist. I’ve been interested in finding someone to help me identify food that keeps my skin happy (as a lifelong eczema sufferer) and will be looking more into that this year. I already know diary is probably a culprit, but it’s been difficult to give up!

What is something you wish you could change about the wellness industry? Less focus on aesthetics and more on actually feeling good!!

Twenty years from now, what do you wish for your well-being? I hope that I am just as mobile as I am now. It gives me joy when I see videos of older people being super active and still dancing, hiking, etc. I’ve seen a lot of my older family members live with chronic pain and experience limited mobility once they reached their 70’s and older, but I want a different experience for my future myself. This is my wish for all Black people—to age gracefully. Not just in the ways we typically discuss like “black don’t crack,” but to actually live free of disease and pain for as long as possible.

Thank you for reading our Wellness Confessions series. To become the next confessor, submit your thoughts here.