Adina Glickstein
"This year, I learned how to cry. Crying well is essential for good health, I think."
#7: Adina Glickstein
Welcome to Health Gossip. Today’s guest is Adina Glickstein, a brilliant writer and editor who kindly offered herself as a guest contributor. You can read more of her work on Spike (perhaps most relevant: her essay on the Girl Dinner), the Times, Mubi, and more… in the meantime, enjoy.
Location: Boulder, Colorado
Astrology: Taurus/Gemini/Leo, but I “don’t do astrology.” My college boyfriend cheated on me with a girl who was an intern at Co–Star, and that was the end of that.
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
To me, being healthy means being resilient — having a foundation and a consistent set of practices that serve you, but also being able to deviate from them and then course-correct as needed. The times in the past when I’ve been super dogmatic about “wellness” have actually been some of my least healthy, in retrospect. The impulse to control, to master, to dominate can’t be the foundation of good health. Health, for me, has looked like getting more comfortable with being less “in control” while still keeping some structure and integrity. Learning how to navigate this apparent paradox has been the trajectory of my health journey, lately.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
I’m a student and freelancer, so my schedule can be quite erratic. I try to keep things grounded with simple routines. Lots of tea! Being in grad school gives me permission to be shameless about my caffeine consumption. My favorite teas are on the “interesting” end of the basic spectrum: hojicha, genmaicha, lapsang sochung… This year, I want to become more knowledgeable about other, more out-there varieties.
I walk as much as possible, which is still less than I’d like. The adjustment from being in walkable cities like New York and Berlin to a car-centric one like Boulder has been hard for me. I’ve never been huge on biking as a mode of transport — usually just as a recreational activity, taking long, aimless rides — but one of my other goals is to get into biking to school this spring so I can be less car-reliant and breathe more fresh air.
A nice thing about being a student is that I have more control over how I structure my time than I did when I was working a 9-5. One of the greatest luxuries is being able to pause whatever I’m working on in the afternoon and stream a Katonah Yoga class via The Studio. Katonah Yoga has become so dear to me in the last few years; I first practiced it when I was living in Berlin and a friend was doing PR for an upscale gym that had just opened [Editor’s note: Hagius in Mitte, though the instructor, Toni, doesn’t teach there anymore], so I got a free private Katonah Yoga lesson, which consisted of this modelesque German woman essentially Shibari-ing me with yoga straps and putting her foot in the middle of my back with extraordinary, indescribable care as she cooed quotations about the Magic Square. Divine. I mostly practice at home now because I don’t know a Katonah teacher in Boulder, but when I travel to other cities, I love to take class and practice in community.
How do you start and end your days?
I’m bad in the mornings. I usually wake up and immediately check my email. I’m working on this by keeping a book next to my bed — poetry or something short and digestible — and reading that, first thing, instead. Right now I’m working my way through Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. I try to get sunlight on my face pronto, even if it just means going outside to take out the recycling. If I know I won’t be home later in the day, I’ll do yoga in the morning, but I prefer it later in the day. My housemate has immaculate sleep hygiene (ily Warren, healthy king!) and he recently replaced the bulb in our living room lamp with a warmer-toned one to limit blue light exposure in the evening. I love it. I turn on a red lamp in my room at night; I don’t know if it’s legitimately therapeutic, but it sets a ~vibe~. Trying to get better at nighttime laptop-screen-avoidance but honestly I love to drift off watching lectures on YouTube. Last night: Adrian Piper talking about Hume. Embarrassing, but Slavoj Zizek is in the regular rotation, too. Something about his vocal cadence knocks me right out. Otherwise, I wind down by listening to music and staring at the ceiling. I have a strong preference towards falling asleep in someone’s arms whenever the situation allows.
Do you have any recurring dreams?
I have one recurring anxiety dream where I’m in my car in some kind of resort town, driving through a grid of low, stucco buildings. But the car is really driving itself; I’m at the wheel, but not in control. Sometimes it drives itself into a shallow pool, with me inside, but I always escape un-harmed — an augury of resilience? Another is not so much a recurring dream as a motif that keeps coming up: escalators.
Do you believe in the concept of self-healing, or that one can heal oneself?
I think self-healing is the only kind of healing. At least in terms of big-picture, holistic, lifelong stuff. I owe my life to certain allopathic medical interventions, so I don’t say this to discount that kind of thing where it’s needed. But regarding the less acute, more systemic stuff: people can offer you tools and insight; they can hold you, guide you, hand you something you need. But everyone’s healing journey is so individual. It's a process of gathering knowledge and metabolizing it. So I'm inclined to say that really, all healing is, by necessity, self-healing.
Was there a specific moment in life that made you more conscious of your health?
Moving to Berlin shifted things a lot, for me. When I was living in New York, I was much more regimented and restrictive. I thought I had a very clear idea of what I “needed” to do, and I forced myself to follow it, often to detrimental effect. Not to sound like a total cliche, but something about the more relaxed, European sensibility felt much more spacious. (Maybe also the stricter regulations against glyphosphate.) Now I’m back in the US, living in Boulder, which is basically a theme park for wellness culture. It’s too easy to get sucked into trends here, many of which are geared towards selling you something.
My mom getting diagnosed with brain cancer last summer was a major upheaval which also changed my approach to health, if I’m being honest. I wish I could say that it made me re-evaluate some of my unhealthier habits or get really longevity-pilled like the Vitalia tech bros or something, but it didn’t exactly do that. My mom always lived a healthy lifestyle, and taught me most of what I know and practice: cooking nourishing meals at home, walking miles every day, getting acupuncture. This was a total freak diagnosis, a complete shock. Witnessing it all unfold has sent me to hands-down the darkest place, mentally, I’ve ever been, so I’ve had to hold a lot of grace for myself as I often fail to live up to my “ideal lifestyle.” The immensity of grief has brute-forced me into a kind of recognition that genuine self-care entails a lot of grace and acceptance, even and especially when things are terrible and you’re functioning badly. This year, I learned how to cry. Crying well is essential for good health, I think.
Where do you look to for information and guidance?
I recognize that this has been a divisive point in this newsletter in the past, but I am hugely indebted to psychoanalysis. I had a crush on this Russian film curator when I was like twenty and one night, over Negronis, he told me he was in Lacanian analysis and I decided it was the sexiest thing in the world to be an analysand, so I got on the couch. Jamieson Webster was my first analyst, and then when I moved to Berlin, she referred me to a different hot female analyst with manic pixie dreamgirl bangs who I had to stop seeing after I read one of her papers on Aliens and Anorexia and Deleuze’s wife’s eating disorder, all of which hit a little too close to home in ways I wasn’t, at that particular juncture in my life, quite ready to confront.
Nowadays, I’m especially drawn to work that brings psychoanalytic thought into dialogue with more embodiment-focused approaches. Reich and Lowen; Jamieson Webster’s Conversion Disorder; that sort of thing. I’m so, so fortunate to have found an exceptional therapist in Boulder who’s psychoanalytically inflected but also attends to the somatic. I found him randomly on the internet when I moved back here and at first I wasn’t sure about him because he looks like he’s about sixteen years old, but one day I walked into his office and saw a Bracha Ettinger artbook on his table and realized that he’s into all the same shit I’m into. He’s, like, my therapist twin flame and I trust him with my life. I don’t think anyone else can really give you “advice” on what’s healthy, beyond the obvious stuff — but they can help you cultivate the inner compass to know what works for you, and that’s part of what psychoanalysis has helped me with.
Fuck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.
Fuck: Colon hydrotherapy. Game-changer, but it kicks up a lot of old “stuff” and I’m always so emotional afterwards that it fucks with my life if I do it too regularly (sensitive bbs, use this one sparingly). Marry: Pickled vegetables. Kill: Raw veganism.
What are your grocery staples? What meals do you find yourself returning to?
Grocery staples: high-quality eggs, tinned fish, sourdough, some kind of dark leafy green, whatever fruit is in season, raw goat milk cheese, rice, white beans, chickpeas, kimchi, red sauerkraut, lemons to keep cut up and ready to squeeze into water, 100% peanut butter (the saltier, the better). I cook for myself as much as possible. I am not good at elaborate cooking, so feeding myself tends to look like: sardines on toast or throwing all the veg in my fridge into a bowl. Sometimes, homemade onigiri. I made Ottolenghi’s herb fritters the other night because it was starting to feel like springtime.
What do you think is the most pressing health issue of our time?
It’s hard to pinpoint one specific issue, but my general sense is that many of the problems contributing to poor health today have to do with our lack of connection to production and process. Factory farming; bullshitty and labyrinthine regulatory frameworks; too much information constantly available at our fingertips. I guess we could summarize all of that as "over-complication.”
What advice would you give to the person reading this?
Keep it simple and do you, boo!
that's mother