Rafa Kidvai is joined by Fariha Róisín, author of Who Is Wellness For? and Being In Your Body, about her own abortion and the complexities of bodily autonomy and self-care. Fariha discusses the limitations of wellness culture, the importance of addressing trauma, and the necessity of healing on both individual and collective levels.
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Rafa Kidvai: This episode contains discussions about sexual abuse. If the subject is difficult or triggering for you, please listen with a friend, listen when you feel ready or skip to the next episode in our series. This is No Body Criminalized, how the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. On our podcast, we talk with experts, activists and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. The founding mothers of reproductive justice in the United States define the term as the human rights to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. You will hear us restate the shared commitment throughout our interviews because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create. Our guest today is Fariha Róisín, author of Who Is Wellness For? and Being In Your Body. We started our conversation with her own abortion experience and how it shaped her understanding of bodily autonomy and self-care.
Fariha Róisín: A year after or maybe a couple of months after even my abortion, something shifted and I think it was this spiritual stripping away and clarification that I needed to do on my own to feel as if there was nothing that was between me and God and that nothing had ruptured the relationship that I had with God, which was very significant for me then, and it still is for me now. Because I grew up religiously in a lot of ways, not conservatively, but definitely with faith. And then after my abortion, I really lost myself. It took me a really long time to get to self-care. It took me a lot of self-harm to get to self-care.
It was not until my mid-twenties when I was really far from my body, even after years of this spiritual contemplation and having some shift in my consciousness spiritually, I still felt really far from myself physically. And that took many years to seal for me. And it wasn't really until my late twenties where real bodily autonomy started to exist. And it was because I really started to understand myself within the framework of a person who has a body and also has been abused and also has experienced traumatic experiences like an abortion. But at the same time, one that brought me deep. I'm so grateful that I was able to make that decision for myself as well. So it's I think a very complicated feeling for me.
Rafa Kidvai: Thank you, Fariha. That really makes a lot of sense and I appreciate you sharing that. A lot of your work is centered around bodies. And I guess I'm wondering what drew you to this focus?
Fariha Róisín: I mean, maybe not having any bodily autonomy as a child and also being a child sexual abuse survivor. Again, not language that I had as a child, not as a teenager, definitely not as even a young adult. It came a lot later. But I think all of my writing has been a seeking of this experience, trying to come to terms with it, trying to come to an understanding of what happened to me. And so I think I've always been searching and yearning for information. And also being a queer body, being a queer person, knowing that at a very young age and experiencing queerness at a very young age, I think is something that can be an out-of-body experience. If you don't have other reference points for what you are.
Rafa Kidvai: Yeah. That resonates. In your work, you often explore the balance between this individualized idea of self-care and community care. And I'm wondering how you see these two approaches interacting, especially maybe in the context of movement burnout and organizing.
Fariha Róisín: Yeah, I think this is a really good question. I think that it's actually such a pertinent question to what's happening right now with everything that's happening in Gaza and people's burnout with Palestine and Congo and Sudan and Haiti and everything that's cataclysmically happening together. And how do we simultaneously process the grief of not just what's happening over there, but what's also happening here in this country, in the United States, at least.
To me, the only way to exist is to be in a tandem approach to both things simultaneously. And it's very utopic. I know to believe that we can't all exist like this, but I think that we can. I think that we've been stripped of so much access to spirit, both in ourselves and outside, that we lack true vision and purpose in ourselves. But I think that the more information language, the more examples of people that we see who are able to engage with both the individual themselves in self-care and also community in collective care, which definitely is something that I think is my personal life focus, is to show that not only is it possible, but it's inherent in the practice of being human.
And it's inherent and important for us to move this way if we want to exist as a species in 50 years. I think that collectivity is the only way. We've been fed over consumption and individualization for the last few decades because of this gross Americanization and rapid expansion of capitalism. But now we are beginning to see shifts in society. We are beginning to understand that all empire is bad. We're having these large-scale conversations about capitalism and what does it look like to exist outside of the framework of capitalism, and that inherently is also about collective care.
Rafa Kidvai: I love that response. And then in your book, Who is Wellness For?, you talk about wellness culture and how it's become a luxury good, built on the wisdom of black, brown and indigenous people and simultaneously excluding them from the conversation. And I guess that raises the question for me about accessibility. Can you talk a little bit about the limitations of the self-care narrative and who might find it particularly challenging to engage in these practices?
Fariha Róisín: Well, we live in a very ableist society that is functioned and services and preserves ableist policies and protects able-bodied people. It doesn't think about the chronically fatigue, the chronically ill, all of the things that we carry in our bodies that transmute and shift in different ways. In Who is Wellness For?, I talk about how illness is a lighthouse and that's my own personal experience. Even as we're speaking, as I'm moving through a flare up, it's constantly a reminder to center and to arrive back at yourself to come to the spiritual core. I think that we as a species, as a civilization, as humans, we have lost faith and we've been really devoided of it because of capitalism. And I think that's really connected to self-care and community care and wellness. And what's so sinister and deceptive about the rhetoric of self-care is that it presents as care when it's actually just self-servicing.
I mean, and sometimes of course there are things that are self-care. If you're talking about getting your nails done or going shopping or something, it's just a self-service. And not everybody gets to practice those things. Not everybody has a disposable income. Not everybody gets to afford to go to the nail salon or get a massage or go to acupuncture, things that are actually really necessary for some bodies, including mine. So much of my illness has been metered and healed really through my access to wellness practices that I was taught from a very young age by having a very spiritually, a very woo-woo sister. We both grew up in a very dangerous home environment, so it was very necessary what we were experiencing, but I knew what Reiki was as a fourteen-year-old.
So to me, I can understand as a person who doesn't have provision other ways, how much we create roadblocks for lower-income folks, working-class folks, disabled folks that don't have the immediate access to actually take care of themselves. We are all so connected. And the more we take time to actually do the work to heal these connections between one another and ourselves, the connections that we have to ourselves, to our ancestors, to grief, to what we feel like we are owed, all of these things that harden us or make us cold, it's our responsibility for liberation to acknowledge and to face those things.
Rafa Kidvai: I have so many questions that came from what you just said, but I think one of the things that I was thinking about is your book, Being in Your Body and how essentially it's a tool for people. And I would love to hear a little bit more about the process behind putting that journal together and why you put it together and what are some of the tools that you think people can employ?
Fariha Róisín: I think I write a lot just for myself and to myself, and I'm very blessed to be able to have an audience and people that want to read what's going on in my brain. But so much of what I am writing to is the lost little kid that was me and trying to express who I am, and the multiplicity of what I am to this child. And that's really what the book is for me. It's something that I hope brings a lot of softness to people's bodies. I had to unlearn a lot of self-hatred and a lot of negative self-talk. And it was so programmed in me because of how I was talked to as a child by both of my parents actually.
And it's criticality, especially in South Asian environments, I think is just seen as so normal. And I was just a hyper-emotional kid and porous and just sensitive to everything. And I think I want to unlearn that for myself. And the book was really a template for anybody else who is not only struggling to talk to themselves in a way with sweetness or kindness or love, but also somebody who is longing for a space where they can actually begin to roadmap a relationship back to their body.
Rafa Kidvai: I really appreciate that because you know that I have a kid and I think a lot about how that just brings up for everyone who's parenting their own parenting. And if you're not motivated by your own wellbeing sometimes, which it can be hard to advocate for yourself, it's much easier in some ways to advocate for somebody that you love more than anything in the world. And I think so much about some of the conversations that we've had earlier in the last time I interviewed you and how that shows up in my parenting and how the first six years of your life, that inner voice that you have and how loving you are with yourself impacts the rest of your existence-
Fariha Róisín: Yeah.
Rafa Kidvai: And I think learning that much later in life is so hard, or unlearning that voice is so hard, but so important. And I'm just really grateful for you doing that work for yourself and giving us all a space to be able to do it for ourselves.
Fariha Róisín: Thank you. I'm honored. I really am.
Rafa Kidvai: So, Fariha, I believe for you, your creative pursuits are inextricably linked to your activism, and I have two questions about that. One, why do you feel like those two things are so connected? And two, what sustains you as you continue to do this work?
Fariha Róisín: Liberation sustains me. The movement sustains me. Palestine being free sustains me. The belief that it can happen and it will sustains me. Yeah, I'm so moved by people who commit principled action and people who commit to a principled life, and those two things are an activism for me. I went to law school, I didn't finish, I dropped out and I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. And I was thinking about this recently because it's just so wild that I had the knowing even as a young person, also because I was seeing it in my peers, I started to see this grotesqueness and this detachment and debaseness that I guess now we're seeing unleashed in society. And I think it's just really just a product of just full-scale capitalism, colonialism of the beast, the monstrosity that is the two intertwined.
I think the Lakota have this word, it's like being. It's called the Windigo, and I write about it in Who is Wellness For? And I always think about this image of it. It consumes everything around it. And that's what we're in the epoch of that people, of that era of people thinking it's totally chill and cool to own yachts and do all of these things at the expense of literally everybody else. And not only do I not find that interesting, I find it so boring that I think I've always sat something outside of that because the world that was being presented to me was so boring, but I knew that there was something beyond what I was being shown and I wanted to go see that for myself. And I think that this love that I have of the world, of the earth, of humanity, I struggle with people, but I love humanity and I love the potential of who we could be.
I hope, and I stay hopeful and I remain sustained because one, I've done a lot of work. I have changed eons beyond eons, and if I can do it, I know that it's possible to do. I survived one of the most horrifying things that a person has to go through being sexually abused by a parent and then having to live your life through this lens of this abuse. And I had to do so much healing to even think that I had a body that deserved autonomy. And I think that's why, to be able to now come to this place where I'm like, not only do I deserve autonomy... You said this earlier, it's always easier to fight for something else, but what if you fight for yourself? When you actually start defending yourself and you start believing that you're worth defending, something changes.
And I think that is something that we haven't yet come to as a society that we're worth defending because a lot of us don't care about ourselves. We don't think we're actually that special. We want other people to validate it for us, but we don't want to do the work ourselves. So we lean on other people to do all of the work for us. But actually when you do the work yourself, you realize that it's actually quite easy and it's actually just also really valuable. And if you can do it for yourself, then why not show other people how to do it?
Rafa Kidvai: Oh, I love that so much. You're so brilliant. The last question for you today is that our podcast is called No Body Criminalized. What does that phrase mean to you?
Fariha Róisín: It literally means No Body Criminalized. I love the title so much because it speaks for itself. All bodies are welcome, loved. No bodies are criminalized.
Rafa Kidvai: I love that, succinct. I'm just really grateful for your time and I learned so much from you. Thank you for joining.
Fariha Róisín: Yay. I love talking to you, Rafa. Like yeah, I'm grateful for you.
Rafa Kidvai: Here are some takeaways from our conversation. Fariha's abortion experience showed her the importance of self-care as a form of reclaiming one's body and identity, especially after trauma. Fariha also discussed the intersections of wellness, community care and justice. Emphasizing that true wellness is not just individual but a collective responsibility. She examines wellness culture and reminds us to challenge any system that excludes marginalized communities from accessing holistic care.
Fariha Róisín is the author of Who Is Wellness For? and Being in Your Body. You can learn more about her work on her website, fariharoisin.com. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for people being punished for abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and other pregnancy outcomes. Learn more at Reprolegaledefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call 844-868-2812. No Body Criminalized is produced by Phantom Center Media and Entertainment for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and mixed this episode. And remember, keep your community safe and don't talk to cops.