Taking It Into Your Own Damn Hands

Reaching out after a long hiatus, being the master of my own fate, expensive yoga outfits, spray bottles etc.

At a retreat in the mountains, I found self-love. It was in a blue glass bottle, and it was $26.

I don’t consider myself the type of person that yoga retreat centers in the Berkshires were made for (though on appearance alone, I am EXACTLY the type of person that yoga retreat centers in the Berkshires were made for). But the opportunity to spend a weekend learning from one of my favorite authors had brought me here, to a roughly 500-person capacity building in which I was pretty sure I was the single least flexible person. I’d come alone, a fact I was viscerally aware of as I walked down the hall and dropped my backpack (packed, surely, with all the wrong things) on a bunk bed in an as-yet-empty dorm room. Instead of waiting all afternoon to see if roommates would appear, I left my backpack and went to wander the halls and grounds of my new home.

This is how I wound up in the center’s gift shop, a place so unabashedly new-age that I would have laughed if I wasn’t perversely enjoying it. There were chakra-aligned cookbooks. There were loose crystals. There were pictures of the Dalai Lama’s face next to memoirs of white women who went to Indonesia. There were yoga clothes - the kind that are all vaguely sweet potato colored and organic and non-toxic and over $100 a piece. All of these things, laid out in sections across the shop, were appealing at once. Such is the power of 30 minutes at a yoga retreat, I imagine. 

But across the wall near a side entrance, there was another book section, and this one was full of books on creativity. All the books that have ever taught me anything about writing were there, and so many more I’d never heard of. And it was on my way to those shelves that I ran across “Self-Love Potion.”

“Self-Love Potion” lived in a TSA-compliant 3 ounce spray bottle and featured a label that someone probably drew by hand in their living room. The ingredient list, when I turned the bottle around, was minimal and mysterious. The potion contained something called “gemstone extract.” There were no directions for use. Presumably, once you sprayed said potion, the self-love did the rest of the work for you. Gemstone extracts and what not.

The bottle I’d picked up was the tester, and I figured a good dose of self-love wouldn’t hurt things. What is a weekend writing retreat if not a labor of self-love, and if so, why not add a bit more, for insurance purposes? 

The bottle looked to be about a third full. I rolled up my sleeve and sprayed. 

Nothing. 

I sprayed a few more times. Nothing. The self-love potion was jammed. 

No self-love for me, I thought to myself, and stifled a giggle as I left empty handed.

That night, in the company of a writer we all adored, 300 of us sat in a gigantic hall and wrote about our deepest wishes, untold stories, and fears. We shared them with one another, though we’d never spoken before. We talked about shame and bravery and magic and letting the truth be true. I went to sleep in my bunk bed with three other women around me, feeling webs of connection beginning to weave among our bodies and hearts. I fell asleep tremendously and achingly grateful to have come.

The next morning, wandering the grounds with a mug of coffee in hand, I passed the gift shop again. The day before, I’d seen a copy of the very first book I’d ever read on writing, and I’d thought about it intermittently throughout the night. I wandered back in, set on buying a copy. On my way out of the side entrance, I found myself, once again, eye to eye with the small blue bottle of Self-Love Potion. 

They probably check all the testers when they close, I thought, and today’s a new day. I strode over to the bottle, determined to spray some hard-earned self-love onto my skin. 

Nothing. 

I thought of calling the cashier over, before realizing how ridiculous that would be. What was I going to do, whine about how I had tried twice now and still couldn’t experience the complimentary self-love I was rightfully owed? I walked away from the bottles and into the day.

Later, on a silent walk alone through a Buddhist labyrinth garden, I started to think of the bottle with something like resentment. I had come all the way here. I was baring my soul for hours a day. I was spending the weekend alone and fully devoted to my creative pursuits. And I couldn’t even get one spray of gemstone extract from a fucking spray bottle? 

A woman passed me in the labyrinth, giving me a serene, empty-mind smile. I remembered that a zen garden is maybe not the place to be angry at an inanimate object, and tried to wipe my mind. It just isn’t meant for me, I decided. I’m letting it go.

After a full three days of writing and walking and meditating and mindfully contorting my limbs and eating roasted beets, I woke on the final morning to a dizzying headache and snuck into a private bathroom to swallow Ibuprofen and splash water on my face. I wandered bleary-eyed out to the grounds, where every surface was wet from a hard rain, and where a heavy curtain of fog over the horizon was slowly peeling back across the distant lake. I sat for over two hours in a wet adirondack chair, my world hazy with pain, and in those hours I was absolutely, utterly present. I was nowhere but there, with last night’s rain soaking my clothes and my head throbbing and the fog lifting everywhere all around. The weekend was a small thing, but I had done it alone and I had done it for no one but me. I was here and it was ending and I wanted every second of it no matter how it hurt.

That day I said my thank yous and farewells to the author I adored and the other writers I’d probably never see again: Lisa from Boston. Bo from the coast. Alyshia from Vancouver. Jay from Texas. Kitty from Maryland. The writers who would carry my deepest truths home with them the way I now carried theirs. I packed my bunk, turned in my nametag, and headed for the exit.

On my way back down the hall, I walked past the gift shop doors, stopped, and backpedaled. Inside it was busier than I’d seen it all weekend. I clomped awkwardly through clusters of chatting women until I reached the little wooden shelf with the dark blue bottles. I picked up the tester bottle of Self-Love Potion, tilted it into the light and squinted. One small moving line of fluid, elusive and apparently magical. I held it to my wrist. I sprayed.

Nothing.

Fuck. This., I thought almost out loud. Knowing that I was probably being watched by some enlightened middle-aged gaggle of women, I twisted the entire nozzle furiously off the bottle, removed the hard plastic tube that was supposed to channel self-love potion through the sprayer and into my general aura, and dragged it sharply back and forth across my wrists until they were damp. 

Victory.

I replaced the nozzle, set the bottle back on its shelf, walked out of the gift shop and all the way out of the building. Outside, the air was heavy and still, and I caught a whiff of something stale and astringent wafting from my skin, like a car air freshener made of incense and witch hazel and old gym towels. 

As the last of the fog lifted over the mountains, I brought my wrist to my nostrils and breathed it all in.