Amena Brown:
Oh, y'all welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown. And we are here in the living room and we have a guest and I'm very, very excited. I want y'all to welcome psychologist, theologian, author of I Bring The Voices of My People, a womanist vision of racial reconciliation, Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. And her newest book, Sacred Self-Care: Daily Practices for Nurturing Our Whole Selves. Welcome, Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Hi, I'm so glad to be here. I am so glad to be here. I hope you're watching the clock, because you know how we do when we start talking.
Amena Brown:
I mean, if it has to be a two-part episode, Dr. Chanequa, I'm not mad at it. I'm not mad, okay. If I have to be, "Well, okay, that's part one. Thank y'all so much. Join us next week for part two." Y'all, let me tell y'all something, I'm excited to have you here, Dr. Chanequa, because before your book came out, your latest book that I'm going to say the name again, so y'all can just go to y'all bookseller and order five. But before this book came out, Sacred Self-Care, I have wanted to have you here in this living room to talk self-care, because you are one of my favorite voices on the topic.
So when this cover came out and you were like, "This is my next book," I was like, "Yes, come on." We have so much to discuss y'all. Okay. So Dr. Chanequa and I actually live in the same city. We just be seeing each other mostly when we go out of town. See each other all over the country, child, all over the country. In Chicago, in DC somewhere, in Los Angeles. See each other almost every place except Atlanta. And finally within the last couple of years, we managed to be people who have tea sometimes, who take a little walk, get hydrated. So y'all, I've been working my way into being Dr. Chanequa friend, so I'm very happy to be here.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. It's too much. Yeah.
Amena Brown:
So let me start with asking you about this. So when I'm here in what we call the HER living room, that's what I like to refer to this podcast space as, because I always imagine that is... I'm trying to make this the space I gather with my girlfriends. A lot of times we just trying to get together and catch up and we will do that any way that we can. If I have some hummus I opened up a couple of days ago and you got a bell pepper you cut up a little bit, bring your Ziploc bag and just come to the house. I'll bring my hummus to your house. We just bring our snacks together. So I want to know, Dr. Chanequa, when you are gathering with your girlfriends, your people-people, what is the snack that you would typically be walking in the door with? Are you a person who wants to make a snack? Are you a person who's like, "Never. I will always buy a snack." What are your snack vibes? Discuss.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
I like to be the person who will make a snack, right? That's the person I think of myself as. That's the person I want to be. I want to be the person that will bake a cake. That's what I want to be. I want to be the person that will bake a cake, a pound cake, or a strawberry cake. I want to be that person. Increasingly, I'm not that person. I'm the person that is going to be like, "I know this nice bakery. I'm going to go grab something."
Amena Brown:
Because they already did it.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Now I do believe if I'm going to bring the dessert I didn't bake, at least let me go find somebody who does them well and get that.
Amena Brown:
I respect this as a choice.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
I mean, Publix does some good cakes though, but I'm generally not going to bring you that store-bought cake. I'm like, "Let me at least go somewhere where I know somebody put in some time."
Amena Brown:
We in a bakery-bakery, Okay. All right.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
A bakery-bakery. Be like, yeah, let me me get that carrot cake back... Yeah, that looks good. Give me the whole thing.
Amena Brown:
I respect this as a choice. First of all, I feel like you might be the first guest I've had that said cake was the snack of choice they walked in with. I have a lot of reasons to like you. You know what I'm saying? We have a lot of things in common. I think you're great. But the fact that you said, "I want to be a person who walks in with a cake," I was like, "Boy, let's really applaud that," because who doesn't need cake at the end of a long day, long week? I feel like it shouldn't just be reserved for birthdays and things like that.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
No. Yes, we need cake. Right? Yes.
Amena Brown:
I love that as a choice. I mean, I remember going through a time where if I was having a bad week, I would really go and get the half dozen cupcakes at Publix and they would be like, "Oh, it's your birthday." "No, no, I've just decided that it's a cupcake time for me. So I'm going to take all six of these to my home and I will divide them out over the next few days as I need." If they make it a few days is the thing, I'm going to divide them out as I need. So I thank you for bringing cake into the living room today. That's very great. I'm like if you inviting your friend over and you open up the door and your friend is holding a cake, like wow, that's great. I stand for that. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that into the living room today, Dr. Chanequa.
Okay, let me tell y'all something about Dr. Chanequa, and she and I talked about this a little bit, but as it relates to my own self-care journey. One of the things I really loved about this book is the amount of times that you are communicating to us that self-care is a journey. It's not something that you wake up one day and now you know all of the things to do. It's a journey of knowing how to care for yourself, that you should, and then what those things are. So Dr. Chanequa, before I knew her, knew her, played a big role in my self-care journey with Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength.
Dr. Chanequa and I've talked about this, but I'm telling y'all, because some of the things me and Chanequa be talking about, it's not for y'all, but this part is. So I'm going to tell y'all this part. I had fibroid surgery, I think I've talked about this on the podcast before, very intense fibroid surgery. I had eight and a half pounds of tumor removed and six to eight week recovery, which for me ended up being eight to 10 weeks, because I had a complication post-surgery also. So I had to choose what I was going to do. That was my first time in a long time, really having to do nothing. You can't lift your arms up beyond a certain height at that point. You can't carry certain weight in your arms at that point. Couldn't drive. So it was really like I had to really sit down, sit down. I chose three books. I chose Bell Hooks, Sisters of the Yam, to read during that time. I chose Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking. And I chose Too Heavy a Yoke. Those were my three books.
And you and I both having worked in and out of various white spaces, various white Christian spaces as well, having that time where I didn't have events to go to and I didn't have meetings I had to be at, and really just reading Too Heavy a Yoke and reflecting on all of the things that were on my plate. That was really the beginning of me going, "Here I'm in a time where nothing's on my plate, because all I can do is heal at this moment." So when it's time to, air quotes, go back to work, now I have more information to decide what should actually go back onto the plate. And you did such a great job laying that out in a very particular way for Black women in that book and just acknowledging how much we carry on our shoulders and our families and our personal lives, in our community work, and then our jobs, all these things.
So if you are listening to this and you have not read Too Heavy a Yoke, just I want you to just go to your bookseller and look up Chanequa Walker-Barnes and put all these books right here. Put them all in your cart, do that. Go to the bookstore and say her name and then say, "Whatever books are there, let me buy them," because all of these are great.
So this takes me into the journey of this book, because it was really wonderful to get to hear in your own journey now how you came to a place of saying, "Self-care is not just me going to get my nails done, although that's good and fine, but it's not just that. Here I'm actually going to have an expansive practice of this." So talk to me about the journey of you knowing, "This is a book now. This is a book that I need to write."
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah, it's wild, because I was practicing intentionally self-care for about 20 years before I wrote this book. And when I started practicing self-care, very quickly after that I started teaching it and I knew I was going to write a book about it, because when I started with a few little changes, it changed my life so much, so quickly. That immediately I was like, "I got to teach other women about this. This is the thing we need to be doing." And I knew I was going to write about it, but I didn't know when I had enough to say. I am one of those people that I reflect a lot and work things out and teach them and see how they land. And then I'm like, "Okay, now I'm ready." And so I had to go through that process of just kind of trial and error and honestly failure and recovery a lot. Then trying to teach people and being like, "That didn't land the way I wanted it to or I don't know if that was as helpful to folks," before I finally sat down and was like, "I think this is a book."
But yeah, so I was just doing it and honestly I thought a lot of people knew what I know like that. So for a while I was like, "I think people are probably tired of me speaking about self-care in all these meetings I'm at, because everybody knows this." I decided to create a course around self-care, I did this whole Instagram challenge on self-care. That's when I began to realize, "Oh, people don't actually know what I know." Part of it is because a lot of people have learned to think about self-care in these really capitalistic ways. So corporations want to market self-care to us now. They want us to go buy something, they want us to go take a trip somewhere. And those are great things. I'm not saying those are not good things, those are great things, but that's not really what self-care to me is really about at its heart. And so at some point I realized, "Oh wait, I do know something here that not everybody is thinking about it in this same way and it will be helpful for me to actually write this for other people."
Amena Brown:
Mm-hmm. I really love that you're speaking to how we actually practice self-care without the lens of capitalism. You talked about this in the book as far as capitalism is concerned, but even generally, you talked in the book about the idea that we will have inside that self-care is not attainable or that it is something that we should just keep pushing to the side. It's not something that we should make a priority of, number one. But then in some ways it can become like, "Oh, that's not financially attainable." If self-care is I need to pay for this massage, I need to be able to pay for this kind of appointment or that kind of service, then it starts to seem like self-care is leaving out a lot of people.
So what are your thoughts around how we can practice self-care? And again, not to say a girl doesn't like a foot massage, et cetera. Hey, these things also wonderful, but you going to need to care for yourself even if you are not in a moment of life where you can afford the things that will cost money. So what did the beginnings of practicing self-care without necessarily thinking about it in the ways of things we can buy or services we can buy? What did that look like for you?
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah, see, when I first started talking about self-care and thinking about it, it wasn't this commercialized thing. And so for me, it started with some simple practices, because I knew I was in the habit of taking care of everybody else first. So I started thinking about what do I need? I needed to exercise. So it was like, "Okay, I need to exercise." I didn't join a gym to exercise. Like walk in the neighborhood. I did buy some workout videos and did them at home. I joined this running group where we go out and run.
I needed to spend time nurturing my spiritual health. So I started getting up to pray and meditate every day. I used affirmations. So I wrote down on some index cards, like five affirmations that I used to structure my day. And when I woke up in the morning, I repeated the affirmations to myself and at different points in the day.
Then I needed to hydrate, because I had this habit of not drinking enough water. I actually in the beginning didn't even like water. So I had to learn how to like water. I grew up in a Kool-Aid household.
Amena Brown:
Okay. Shout out to Kool-Aid-
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Who likes water? Who wants to drink that?
Amena Brown:
... which masqueraded as water, because you're watching it be made. I mean, the water to Kool-Aid ratio seemed like, isn't this water? Indeed-
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
It's water.
Amena Brown:
... it was not. I think you found.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
It was not. So yes, I had to learn how to... And so those were actually my foundational practices. None of those required me to really go out and spend lots of money. What it did require me to do was give myself my time. And that was actually the harder part, right? Yeah, I was doing massage back then. I was doing the day spas back then, but if you talk to me about the day-to-day practices, I don't have time for that. And so for me, it was learning to think about my daily time in a different way. To say, "In the morning before I rush off to work, I actually can sit down and meditate and pray and write in my journal. I can start my day with that. I can afford to start my day with that, or I can shift some things around or I can get up earlier, because that's important to me." And the other thing I started doing was taking an actual lunch break
Amena Brown:
Huh, my, my.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
So those of us who are creatives, we don't always take actual lunch breaks. We work through lunch. There's nobody saying, "Clock out, go take your 30 minutes right now." And so we just stop taking the 30 minutes and we just sit at our desk and we keep going. And so I started making myself take a actual lunch break. Even if I stayed in my office, I backed away from the computer, turned things off and sat and ate for half an hour or walked outside or something. Those were simple things. It did not require money, but it was a hard shift. It was so hard for me to do those simple things.
Amena Brown:
Right. It just makes me think about how I went through a season of time where I would have a day in my week that was for coffees. So it was like anyone that had reached out that was like, "Oh, Amena, I haven't seen you in a long time. Let's catch up. Or Oh, I had this question I wanted to ask about writing whatever." "Sure." And so I would have Tuesdays for coffees and look up and you just sitting down having coffee with people from 10:00 to 7:00 PM. You had coffee, coffee, lunch, coffee, coffee, coffee, dinner. My therapist was like, "Run that back. Run that back to me, why that's happening."
And she was like, "Especially all the other things you have going on in your life." She was like, "I want you to shut that down and stop with all the coffees. Give me 90 days of no coffees." And when I shifted that time and realized how it does take time to care for myself. So if I'm given all these hours over here, I'm not thinking about the moment that you described that I might want at the beginning of my day or the moment I might want eating lunch, because I've already given the time away in a way before I had time to think about it and account for it. So then when my 90 days is up, she's like, "Now let's go back and think about who do you really want to go to coffee with?"
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
That's the thing,
Amena Brown:
Who rejuvenates you? Who makes you laugh? Who feels... It feels refreshing? Go to coffee with those people.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
With those people. Yep.
Amena Brown:
And then that's going to narrow you down. That's two to three people. That's it. That's not everybody. That's not everybody. So the time shift, I love that you mentioned that, because just taking that away from my schedule. Then when I gave that time back to myself and realized if you are going to take some time and exercise and drink your water and do these things, it will maybe not leave time for some of the other things that you may find have been draining you.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah. Yeah. So self-care, it requires making some decisions about how you're going to spend your time. And it isn't always the fun immediately gratifying stuff like exercise. I remember once Oprah saying she still didn't like exercise, after all that she'd done to lose weight. And she was like, "Yeah, I still don't like it." I'm that person.
Amena Brown:
Same.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
I still would really rather just sit and read or watch TV or just Netflix is... Yeah, I would rather do that. But I know what happens to my body if I don't exercise. I know how many days a week I need to exercise to feel good. If I go more than a certain number of days, I know my body starts to feel it. So self-care isn't even always doing the feel good stuff, but it's about doing the things we need to do in order to sustain our health. And for me, yeah, exercise is one of those, and it takes time. Drinking water is one of those, and it takes time, because I be running to the bathroom all day, all day.
Amena Brown:
It's that part. Mm-hmm. It's that part. You really start trying to drink your water and now you like, "It's taking me time to sit here and drink this water. And then it's taking me time to go to the bathroom," which is what the body should do.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yes, it's supposed to.
Amena Brown:
That's what the body should do. But you need some time for that. You need some time for that.
Say what you were about to say again, about the time that you were not drinking water. I do want you to speak to this, because people will be having a hard time with the water and it helps to hear a little bit of some water testimonial of the people who were like, "I was a person who did not drink the water. Herein I have gone on a journey." So say the thing you were about to say.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah. So there was a time where I didn't, and it was because the bathrooms at my job, I didn't want to use them. I've always been particular about bathrooms. I don't want to use public bathrooms. I didn't want to use the bathrooms at my job. And so I would go to work all day and drink very little. I might drink 16 ounces of tea and that's it. I was talking to my doctor and I had this doctor who was this Black man my age, who was very matter of fact with me.
And he basically told me, he was like, "If you keep doing this, if you keep holding in all day when you need to go to the bathroom," he said, "Eventually your body is going to shut down on you and you will lose complete control of your bladder and your bowel." So he was like, "So that's your choice. You either figure out how to go to the bathroom so you can drink water during the day, or you recognize that later on, this is what's coming for you." And I was like, "I guess I'm making peace with this bathroom now."
And the thing is, the bathroom wasn't even bad. It just wasn't my bathroom. It wasn't that I worked at a school where it was nasty. It wasn't any of that. We had a really good team. They took care of it. It wasn't my bathroom though. It wasn't the way I would've done it, so I was avoiding it. And so I had to learn, go to the bathroom.
Amena Brown:
Go to the bathroom. That's the thing right there is just try. For those of you that are out here trying to get on your water drinking journey, I have heard, and I feel this is true, that in your initial time of trying to rehydrate, you going more often, because your body is like, "what? What's going on here?"
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
What is going on? Yeah.
Amena Brown:
Okay. But then after a while, you'll settle into more of a rhythm. You might come to a place where your body can handle, you might start off, you have a little eight ounce of water and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I feel like I had to go to the bathroom 17 times." But then you might even out a little bit, just stay with it is what we trying to say. People who are trying to drink water, stay with it. Do the things you can. It does so many good things for you, but you will need to make that time to go to the bathroom. That's true.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yes. Yes, you will.
Amena Brown:
What I love about the structure of this book is, and those of you that are about to be looking at your own purchase copies of Sacred Self-care, I love that this is a weekly experience. So each week is dedicated to a theme, and then in the week you have a reading for each day that may have some activities, some suggested journal prompts, things like this. You have devoted an entire week to practicing self-compassion. Can you talk more about this? Because when we hear self-care, this has become a buzzword. So in some ways we hear that and our minds immediately think what we've seen on an ad or in a magazine or wherever we see advertisements. But then when you start saying, "Well, we're talking about self-care, the actual definition and a part of self-care is to have self-compassion." Describe why that is important in the journey of Sacred Self-Care.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah. So as a pastoral care professor, I start my semester when I teach my intro class, breaking down what pastoral care is. And when I talk about the care part, I go to compassion, that this is an expression of compassion and empathy that we have for other people. And because I work so much with ministry and activists types, what would always strike me is that the people who can't take care of themselves are so good at taking care of other people. They have so much compassion and empathy for other people, but can't direct it toward themselves. And in my own journey of self-care, I realized that the biggest barrier to my self-care is my lack of compassion for myself.
That I treat my body, I treat myself in ways I would never treat another person, ever. I mean, all of us, we will encourage other people to be doing things and taking care of themselves in ways that we are not doing for ourselves. "You know you need to get some sleep. You know you need to rest," but we're not resting. And so I realized that the issue is not that we don't know how to care. We don't know how to turn that care towards ourselves, and that self-care meant we had to learn how to turn the care we already have, just turn it inward. Treat other people the way you would like to be treated, no, treat yourself the way you treat other people.
Amena Brown:
Right. That.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
That was the thing. I was like, "Oh, right, I'm doing it, just not for me. So let me start." Can we do it for ourselves? I talk about self-talk as part of self-compassion, because so much of the way you can see our lack of self-compassion, is how we talk about and to ourselves. The messages we send to ourselves, the way we criticize ourselves. Again, we never do this to other people. Some of the stuff I say in my head to me about me, I would never utter to another person. But why am I doing it to myself?
So I talked about my affirmations. My first affirmation, which I still keep going back to, is I am worthy of self-care, because I realized that the reason I wasn't giving myself my time, was because ultimately I thought everybody else was more deserving of my time than I was. Job more deserving, family more deserving, church more deserving. Everybody's more deserving of my time than I am. And so for me, I had to learn, no wait, I'm worthy of my time. I'm worthy of my attention, I'm worthy of my care, and yeah, I'm worthy of my money too. The times when I do decide that I want the pedicure, I want the... I'm worthy of that. Again, I would do it for other people. I do it for other people all the time. I can give myself my own good energy.
Amena Brown:
Mm-hmm. Yes, yes, because we don't think that we are worthy. When y'all get into this book, that's the part that really starts getting into you doing some work right there. That's the part where self-care is getting underneath the pampering appointments that we can make or, I'm a candle girl, so underneath the candles we might want to buy to have in our house. A part of what I loved about the book is it has so much practicality, the questions we can ask ourselves, the things we can consider, which is why have I not felt like I am worthy of that time? What messages have been there for me to say, everyone else deserves me except for me.
Yeah. Oh, that's so powerful. I want to ask you, this is in part a selfish question, because I have a milestone coming up and I was talking to some friends and I was like, "I feel like I should celebrate this. And I'm struggling a little bit trying to allow myself to celebrate this." And I feel like we all have the friends in our lives that it's their birthday, they got a promotion, they bought a new broom, whatever the thing is that they did. We all have friends in our lives that are those people that are like, "Girl, I bought a new broom. Y'all come to the house, y'all meet me at the restaurant." And sometimes I would be like, "Wow, why is my friend so extra about this?" But then when I would really think about it, I would be like, "I mean, my girl deserves to celebrate her new broom, her new house, her new boo, her new car, she got a new dog, let's go eat some food."
I don't know. And you talked about the place of joy in our journey as self-care. Y'all, Dr. Chanequa had a momentous birthday. She had invited me to participate in one of her celebrations. What I was at, was not the only celebration. I was so honored to be invited. I put my little cute clothes on. I was ready for these balloons and whatever we was going to have, and I was so, I don't know what the word is, Dr. Chanequa. It just does my heart good to see my friends and the people I love celebrate themselves like that. Can you talk about what is the place of joy in our self-care? And can you talk about what has your journey been in learning how to celebrate yourself as a part of your self-care journey?
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah. So I think joy for me is an emotional self-care tool. So when I started talking about this and thinking about self-care and even teaching about it, and I would teach people about emotional self-care being important, but I focused on emotional self-care is taking care of the bad emotions. So go to therapy. If you have a diagnosis, handle that diagnosis. Use boundaries. It was that type of things, because I want to manage my anger. I want to manage the sadness. But then I realized, no, it's not just about managing the negative things. I actually need to be increasing the positive emotions. I need to feel joy. I need to feel laughter. I need to feel happiness. For me, that part of my self-care journey, I won't say it was accidental, but it was part of what happened during my cancer treatment. When during cancer treatment, I realized that there was so much that was so hard and so heavy that I had to be intentional about finding joy.
Especially because I was sequestered a lot, because you're worried about infection and injury and it's just like, so the surgeries, it was surgery after surgery. We're like, "Okay, now I'm stuck at home. I can't do the work that brings me joy. I got to cancel these trips. I can't even do family gatherings, because I explained to my doctor, I'm from a Black family, they're going to hug me."
Amena Brown:
They will hug.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
And she was like, "Yeah, no. No Thanksgiving for you." She was like, "Yeah, no, your immune system. No." And so I was like, "Okay, so I'm just staying home." So I had to be really intentional about seeking joy, and I was good at doing it in the small ways. I was good at making sure I'm laughing every day, and if nothing has happened in my life to make me laugh today, then let me go find some funny puppy videos or funny baby videos. Those are my go-tos, I'm like, I'm on YouTube for the next 20 minutes. I am watching babies or puppies or babies and puppies is really great. I watched some yesterday with these...
Amena Brown:
I will say I go down a guilty dog's rabbit hole when the pet owners are finding Libby or whoever messed up the house with the ears down and sulking around. Those videos do your heart good. I see that.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
They really do. And so I was good at that. And then same as you, I noticed at a point I wasn't good at celebrating myself. So I got a new job, promoted to full professor. It's a really huge deal. There's a handful of Black women who were full professors in theological education across the whole country. It's a very small number. It was a really big deal. I didn't do anything. I didn't even think about it. I'm in this Facebook group of Black women in the academy, and folks started talking about what they did to celebrate their tenure decisions. They took these grand trips.
One woman, she had ended 10 years as dean or department chair or something. And so she bought herself 10 bottles of wine to celebrate ending a position. It was like, "And I am going to be working my way through these 10 bottles of wine over the next few weeks." And I was like, "Oh, was I supposed to celebrate something?" And so I thought about that. I was like, "Yeah, that's part of what I want to do." And so I went from, "Why are they doing all this? To wait a minute, they should be doing this, and I should too." The funny thing though was when I got ready to start celebrating myself, I didn't know what to do.
Amena Brown:
Okay, speak to that, Dr. Chanequa, because there's the phases. It's like the first phase of, "I should celebrate myself." Then the second phase of realizing, "I don't know how to do this." Speak to this.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
I don't know how to do this. Yep. So my 49th birthday was approaching, and I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to celebrate myself this year. I'm going to do a great, great birthday celebration." The date is approaching. I'm like, "What? So how do I do that? What do I do?" And I ended up being so overwhelmed that I essentially did nothing, because I was just like, "I don't know what to do." And then I realized the other thing, that word again, time. I hadn't given myself time to plan anything, and my schedule was packed. I didn't have time. And so I basically decided, "Okay, I failed at this." But I started looking ahead. I was like, "Okay, 49, next year is 50." And next year it was also my 25th wedding anniversary. I was like, "Okay, those, I can't let this happen again." So what that meant was I realized I need practice. I need practice to celebrate in small ways. So when I get up to the big one I know how.
Then I also knew, okay, and clearly I need time. So I'm not supposed to wait till a month before the birthday to plan the birthday party. I actually need to start thinking now. So I started really just marking out time. I'm going to need this time around this event. I'm going to have to cut off on some other things, because I need to be planning my own celebrations. I need to make sure I'm going to have energy for my own celebration. Are there small ways I can practice celebrating myself? Oh, I get a book contract. What's my celebration for that? No longer than let me just sign it and post on Facebook. No, something needs to happen. Yeah, and sometimes that is when I'll go full capitalist. Right now I'm going to buy myself something to celebrate that. I can't do that. I want a trip. And so over the past two years now, I have been practicing celebrating myself.
Initially I had to really think about it and plan it. And then it started happening more spontaneously like yesterday. So today is the fifth anniversary of my second cancer diagnosis. So as of today, I'm officially five years in remission.
Amena Brown:
Yes, Chanequa, yes.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Right. And five is a huge number. The chances of recurrence are smaller if you reach five. So I reached five. Yesterday, all of a sudden I was like, I'd already planned I want to do stuff. And then Sunday I was like, "I think I want to wear a breast cancer shirt every day this week, but I don't have enough shirts. I need to go to Michael's. I need to make some shirts." I should be doing other things, but I want to make some shirts.
And then I'm like, "Is this shirt really appropriate for work?" I'm like, "They going to deal with it, because I'm celebrating. I'm wearing my shirts." And so I did that. And then yesterday I was like, "I need a balloon." A balloon to me, if you'd asked me a few years ago, I would've said, that is the most frivolous, useless thing to spend some money on. You blow it up, it stays up for a few hours and then it deflates. And then what it is just [inaudible 00:40:11]. I thought that was dumb. I used to say flowers, why do flowers? They're just going to die.
Amena Brown:
Okay. It's the practicality for me, it's the, "Let's make that make sense."
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
So yesterday I was like, "I think I want a balloon. I'm going Party City. I'm getting a balloon." And so there is now a big five in front of my house. Huge. Nobody knows what it's for unless it's my neighbors who really know me. But it's there. I was so happy all day yesterday looking at that balloon, and I just kept walking around and being like, five.
Amena Brown:
I know that's right. I love it. And you talked about this in the book in a way too. You talked about the need for us to play, but also I think celebration involves sometimes us letting ourselves get silly, get to where we're enjoying so much joy that we experience just feeling silly with being happy. And that is what things like balloons and cake and things like that make you so happy. You're just like, "Oh, I'm so happy. I feel silly in the best way. I love it."
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Right. Yeah. I mean, that's why the joy of children is so infectious, because it's so innocent and it is not self-absorbed in any way. It's just, this is joyful. There was a kid in a coffee shop the other day, everything he passed, he was like, "Mommy, look at that pumpkin. Mommy, look at that." And I was cracking up, because he was genuinely thrilled by everything and needed his mom to look at it too so she'd be as happy. And I'm like, "Yes, I want that."
Amena Brown:
Yeah, okay, yes, please.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
I just walked past that same stuff and barely looked at it. But to see it through his eyes, he's like, "Wow, somebody put that skeleton up there. Look at that."
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh, I love it. We need that reminder.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yes. So yeah, so whatever we can do for ourselves with that. We recognize balloons make kids happy, they make grownups happy too. What's the thing that we do to be happy? We tend to socialize ourselves away from that and think we're not supposed to want that stuff, but it's just how we're wired. You look at all animals playing. When I noticed dogs playing, especially when dogs play with each other and you see the joy, you're like, "This is really how we as mammals are wired." We're wired to need this. Dogs don't outgrow it. They might get slower with it, but a dog can be 12 years old and they still will try to play.
Amena Brown:
Still be ready to play, mm-hmm.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Ready to play.
Amena Brown:
Be like, "You got a ball, somebody got a ball. I thought somebody brought a ball in here. Did somebody bring a ball in here? I'm ready to toss the ball. You going to throw it? Are you throwing it? Because I stay ready to play."
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yes. And so we need that too. We somehow convinced ourselves that we don't. We are all trying to be cool teenagers still. I don't want people to see me being happy. I'm too cool for that. It's like we're caught in adolescence forever, and we're still thinking people can't see us happy.
Amena Brown:
Right. I think that's what came to my mind when I was thinking about my friends who I have somehow deemed lovingly extra. My friends who I know when her birthday come, it's going to be like a three-part weekend. If she had the money of Sean Puffy Combs, Morocco. It would've been like, "Lets all of us all jump on a flight and go to Morocco." And for so many years, I would just be like, "Oh, look at my friend who is so lovingly extra." And then I would get by myself and be like, "It's beautiful to celebrate yourself." But y'all, here's the part where you start digging into self-care and you pick out your favorite nail polish, and before you know it, you crying about why you were raised to believe that you shouldn't celebrate yourself. I'm telling you, it comes at you fast.
It comes at you fast, where you're like, "I thought I was polishing my nails. For some reason I'm crying about something somebody said to me at church. What's that about? How did that happen?" But that's a part of it, because when you can dig under there to say, "What is it that makes me feel I shouldn't celebrate myself?" And this is just us using this as an example y'all. You'll find different examples here in the book too. But to ask those questions, what is it that is the barrier there for me? Why do I feel it is extra to celebrate oneself?
Why is that an extra thing to do versus just a standard? I mean, everyone's going to have different versions of what celebration looks like, but just standard that you would celebrate yourself. I love what you said about practicing that. I'm really going to take that home with me, because I do think there are things that we feel should come naturally to us. We should naturally just be able to start playing again, even though we haven't been playful in 10 years, or we should be able to just start planning a celebration. But you actually need moments to practice so that you can feel how the win of those smaller moments may feel that will help you have the skills to be able to go further.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah, because sometimes we learn to celebrate ourselves if we come from families that value celebration, that can help us. But a lot of us, I know for me, I realized, oh, my mom doesn't celebrate herself. Oh, there's a whole track record here of not celebrating herself. So I didn't learn how to do it, because she didn't know how to do it. And so then it becomes, "Okay, so now I know what my barrier is, so how do I change this?" So I don't have ideas. I need to look for inspiration, because this doesn't come natural to me, because I don't have a whole track record. I don't have a family history of this. I mean, I'm the same way, like the cousins who got a birthday party every year.
Amena Brown:
Not just for the big birthday, but every year, honey.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Every year? Your mama do that every... Even as a kid, I'm like, "But why? Why?"
Amena Brown:
Exactly, why? That's the question.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
And now I'm finally like, "Oh, right." That was great that they were teaching them that your birthday is a special occasion and it deserves to be marked. And I wish I did have that message. So now I'm trying to give that to myself now. But a lot of times we do have to do some digging to try to figure out what's the barrier here. And sometimes it lies in our family history. It lies in socialization. Its not even just, it lies in money family history, because there are families that struggle, but they also try to figure out a way.
Amena Brown:
Exactly.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
For a special day to feel special. And so sometimes it's other stuff, and it's not necessarily money, but to figure out, "Oh, I just don't have practice, because this isn't what we've been doing in my family, and I don't have to stay there." I can develop a skill. I think for me, self-care is just that. It's a skill. For some of us, we weren't taught it. For most of us, we weren't taught it. This is not what we learned. Nobody gave us a handbook on how to take care of us. They didn't say, "This is what you pay attention to. Pay attention to your body's signals. Learn to respond this way." Nobody does that. And so for many of us, self-care then does become this skill. For me, it's a skill in learning how to pay attention to myself. What is my body telling me it needs? Oh, do something about that little stuff. Taking medicine.
I had a vaccine. I got my shingles vaccine. You want to talk about good marketing? That shingles commercial, that's some good marketing right there. Shingles doesn't care.
Amena Brown:
Right, I was like, "Damn, [inaudible 00:49:14]. Let me figure out something."
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
I was like, "Honey, go get this appointment, because shingles doesn't care."
Amena Brown:
It doesn't care.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
And so I got it, and oh my God, the thing makes you so sick.
Amena Brown:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
You're in pain. Yes, you have to prepare not to do anything for 24 hours after that shot, because you're in so much pain and chills. And I was really proud of myself, because early in the pain, once I realized it was there, I was like, "I can take medicine for that." And that for me is huge, because I used to just suffer without medicine. Then it started hitting me, "Oh, there's a thing called pain medication. You can take it."
Amena Brown:
It can provide you relief. My my.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
But for me, the self-care part is first noticing. And literally, I had to notice I was in pain, because my husband and I both did the shot. And later on he said, "And how are you feeling about the vaccine?" And I was like, "Oh, well, now that you mention it, that's what that is." And so I had to notice it and then once it got... It was like, "Okay, that's increasing now. I'm aware. Okay. That is really uncomfortable now." And for me to realize, "Okay, I think I'm kind of past my threshold of just sitting with this and then realizing there is a thing called pain medication. We have some, it's right there in the bathroom." Just go get that.
Amena Brown:
And we have some.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Take that little pill. You'll feel better.
Amena Brown:
That's it. That's it. That's why it's there to help you. My my.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
It's there. Again, I would do it for my son in the heartbeat, in a heartbeat. The moment my child says, "Mommy, I feel-" "Oh, what's that? Let's see what that's about."
Amena Brown:
I'm about to pull out the drawer. Where's the sick box?
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Everything stops. Yes. How serious is it? Do we need to go to the doctor? We will drop everything if necessary. But at a minimum, "Okay, you have these symptoms. We have this medication. Okay, here, take this, son." And then I'm putting a reminder on my phone to like, "All right, come back and give him another dosing in four to six hours." I'm going to do all that by myself. I'll just be in pain. And it doesn't occur to me. There is relief.
Amena Brown:
There is relief. I didn't know that we was going to get a word today, but there is relief.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
There is relief.
Amena Brown:
Oh, yes. You don't have to, in some things, sit and suffer through.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah.
Amena Brown:
That is a way you can also show compassion to yourself. If I sit up here with Dr. Chanequa, do y'all understand that me and Dr. Chanequa, if y'all want a 48-hour episode, that me and Dr. Chanequa really sit up here? Do you understand? I want to ask you two more questions. My second to last question is, when you think about people now having this book physically in their hands, in their devices, however they're reading this, what are you hoping the reader feels or experiences when they get to the end of this book?
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Well, I want to change people's lives with this book, and I want to save people's lives with this book. So what I hope is that people in this book committed to starting a journey. That when they end that it's just the beginning. That when people, they're like, "Okay, I've been practicing some little tidbits here and there, but now I'm about to really put this together into my own plan for self-care and that I'm about to try to live into this and walk into this." So I really want this book to not just be something people read and then put down and forget about it, but I want it to be a therapeutic book. This was me trying to put my clinical skills onto a page and saying, "If I was your therapist and we were working on self-care, by the end of our time together, you will be practicing self-care consistently for yourself." That's what I want.
Amena Brown:
I love it. Where can the people find out more information about you, follow you so that they can have links to buy five copies. Y'all know how I do? Don't just buy one. Listen, buy five copies. Why? Then you have yours. Then inevitably, when other people are like, "Oh, what's that book you was telling me?" You have an extra copy, you can hand over to somebody. So where can they follow your work and also buy five copies of this?
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Yeah. So you can find me online at drchanequa.com, and I have a Substack that I write in weekly, and you'll find the link to that. You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at Dr. Chanequa. Yeah. So find me, follow me, reach out to me, follow me. I hope that we will continue to have the conversation, because really, I'm still learning about self-care, and so I keep writing about the next phases of what I'm thinking about and the ways in which my journey is stretching and growing and I'm learning new things. Yeah.
Amena Brown:
Oh, I love that. Y'all make sure you go to these things. We're going to have these links in the show notes. Dr. Chanequa, I just want to thank you for being here and agreeing to this time. I appreciate that so much, and thank you for sharing your journey with us. I think it helps us. I know it helps me, and I hope it helps your readers and the listeners here to know that self-care is a journey. It's a skill You could be continuing to learn for the rest of your life. You don't have to have all of these high barriers to keep you from it. There's always a small step we can take to care more for ourselves. And one thing you said in this book that I really loved, is when we care for ourselves, it also helps us to care for other people too. So Dr. Chanequa, thank you so much. I appreciate you.
Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barne:
Thank you so much.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.