Chapter 6
On Monday morning when I enter my boss’s office, she is hanging upside down from a metal apparatus that looks like a huge praying mantis.
“Do you want me to come back later?” I ask, unsure what I have interrupted.
“No, no. I’m just going to stay inverted while we do our check-in if that’s cool with you. Need to let my chakras breathe a little.”
“No problem,” I say.
“Don’t you ever get that urge to be upside down? It always helps energize my vessel.”
I know Gemma well enough to know that hervesselis her body. And though I generally avoid speaking in her particular patois, I am fluent in it after working at Actualize, the wellness company she founded, for the past two years. When I met her, I was at a notably low point, working in the Theater District as a merch seller atThe Phantom of the Opera. Before each show, I would traverse the aisles trying to sell as many mugs, masks, and T-shirts as I could before the lights went down and the synthesizers boomed. On my off days, I worked as a TaskRabbit doing odd jobs, and it was in this role that I was summoned to the home of Gemma Dwyer. She had just launched her company, and she needed help boxing up samples to send to key social media influencers. Gemma instructed me on how to artfully arrange the oud-scented soaps, the LED masks, the face mist infused with magnesium-rich water from a Japanese hot spring. We sealed each box with a twine bow and a lavender sprig, and over the courseof the day, we got to talking. I had never met anyone quite like her. She seemed to have a cure for every ailment, a solution for every problem, a mantra for every worry. I was impressed by her confidence and conviction—two things I was lacking. When you are full of questions, you are drawn to people who look like answers.
When Gemma asked me to be her full-time administrative assistant, I was elated. It meant finally being on the path to a sustainable career. Gemma didn’t care that I lacked a college degree and a coherent résumé. Her only prerequisite was that I believe unflinchingly in the mission of her company. And I did believe, at the beginning. After all, I was the one who applied the decal with the phraseWHAT WOULD YOURBEST SELFDO?on the wall outside this very office. I was the one who ordered the linen tote bags inscribed with the same motto. I was convinced we would help make the world a better, healthier place—and that, through osmosis, I would become a better, healthier person. I didn’t just drink the Actualize Kool-Aid—I chugged it.
Gemma was clear from the beginning: “We don’t sell products; we sellhealing.” And I cannot deny that the consumer appetite for healing is insatiable these days. Our nervous systems are rattled; our auras are dim; our energy is erratic—everyone is convinced they’re in peril. And then along comes Gemma to assure them there is hope. Whatever your ailment, real or imagined, there’s a tincture for it, and if not a tincture, then an oil, a supplement, a tea, a bath salt, a crystal that you charge under the full moon and then put in your vagina, an ionic cocoon that helps you sweat out your demons, or a red-light mask that makes you look like a serial killer but feel like a deity. There is a filler you can inject into your face to “look as young as you feel”; and then there is a treatment to dissolve that filler once you realize you have overdone it.
But after two years, I no longer believe in Actualize’s mission. I’m convinced that Gemma’s version of wellness is really just a form of narcissism, a way to divide the body—sorry, thevessel—into infinite components that all beg to be lavished with money and attention. Did you know your earlobes need their own skincare regimen? And your kneecaps, too. You could spend all day exfoliating, lifting, moisturizing, resurfacing, deep conditioning, buffing, harmonizing, depilating, andrejuvenating your myriad bodily surfaces, but at the end of that day, your soul will still ache for what it really wants: freedom from the consumptive cycle of never feeling or looking quite good enough. We’ve conflated health with vanity. It’s not that I don’t believe in healing; I just don’t believe you can buy it for $78 an ounce.
“How was your weekend?” I ask as I try to decide where to sit, given Gemma’s current upside-down orientation. The taut skin of her face has turned fuchsia and her normally waist-length hair now pools onto the cream-colored rug. (Everything in this office is either beige or cream, and all the furniture has rounded edges because Gemma believes sharp corners are hostile to the psyche.) I choose a chair that allows me to face her, or at least face her knees.
“So nourishing,” she says. “I went to a friend’s farm on the North Fork. Did a ton of foraging and forest bathing and sea immersing.” If you met Gemma today, you would assume she has always been a clean-living earth child whose energy field has been humming at full capacity since the day she was birthed. That’s what she wants you to assume. But I know that much of this identity is self-styled, as is her accent, which sounds vaguely English but also Southern Californian, even though she grew up in a voluptuous McMansion in New Jersey. “What about you, mama? What did you get up to?”
“I visited my dad in the Adirondacks.”
“Oh, that’s right!” She makes an upside-down sympathy-face. “How is he?”
That question again. “Not great, but okay.”
She puts her hand on her heart, and then her eyes light up with an idea. “Has he tried lion’s mane? I’ve heard it’s great for cognition. You know, I bet we could do a whole line for memory health. The dementia market is huge, and it’s only going to grow as boomers age.”
The dementia market. I decide not to be offended by her abrupt shift into business mode. She can’t help it. In addition to being a self-proclaimed “healer” and “seeker,” Gemma is the most cunning saleswoman I’ve ever met.
We eventually turn to the reason for the meeting, and as I give updates on our current projects—what is progressing, what has stalled—Irealize there is not one item on my to-do list that is remotely interesting to me. My motivation has run dry. After two years, I am still stuck in my administrative role, and though I do have bigger ideas I’ve tried to share recently, Gemma doesn’t see me as acreative. That’s her domain.
“Are we set for the rollout of Twelve by Twelve?” she asks, referring to the new product line we’re launching: a twelve-step skincare routine designed for tweens. Gemma believes you’re never too young to start addressing aesthetic anxieties you don’t yet have.
I check my list, feeling my moral core tremble in objection. “All set. Preview event is this Friday; digital and out-of-home campaigns roll out next Tuesday. Influencers are set to start teasing it this weekend.”
“Perfect.”
We run through a few more items and once our meeting concludes, I finally notice the objects piled on Gemma’s desk: a soap on a rope, an old-timey wooden bucket, a linen rag, and a few other items.
“What’s all this?”
“Oh! Let me show you.” Gemma raises her arms, and the plank of her body flips upright on the inversion machine. She goes completely still for a moment, and I worry she might be unconscious; but she soon regains her equilibrium, unhooks her ankles, and rushes over to the desk. “For Holiday, merch is working on a Back-to-Basics Bundle. Close your eyes.” She waits until I comply. “Okay, picture it’s the 1800s. You’re a pioneer woman, crossing the country in a wagon, sleeping around a fire, bathing in streams—but make it luxury. Now open your eyes.” She picks up the items one by one. “All you need is a gorgeous boar-bristle body brush, a natural sea sponge, a linen hair towel, and a handmade ash bucket. So fucking cute, right?”
I must be making a face because she reacts to my expression with: “Uh-oh. Our resident skeptic isn’t sold?”
“It’s just… I don’t think the pioneer lifestyle was considered to be all that glamorous—or even hygienic. I get the sense there was a lot of hunger, illness, death. They were really up against the elements, those pioneers.”
“Yeah, but aren’t we all? Who says the struggle can’t be chic? Plus, homesteading is huge right now.”
“Go West, young man…” I start to say.
“What?”
“It’s a quote from Horace Greeley. ‘Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.’ It was about westward expansion. You know, manifest destiny?”
