Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
Illustration by our Illustrator, Ariella Elovic
Dear friends—present and future,
Welcome! This re-launch has been a long time coming. Ever since the original début of The Thirlby back in 2015, I sensed that this platform was more than just myself. With my words, it was more than just me speaking and for a larger audience than what I could have envisioned. As I said at my book's New York City launch at Rizzoli Bookstore, this digital platform and consequently the book could not have been born without this audience. I created The Thirlby with you.
And that's the primary reason behind the rebirth of The Thirlby . . .
Over the past three years, and especially after graduating from college the year I founded The Thirlby, I felt a sense of disconnect. Until this past year, I had been unable to put a finger on it. That disconnect was a void that I felt was present in the World Wide Web of Wellness, so to speak. This web, albeit interwoven in hopes of connecting us to one another and ultimately ourselves, has holes.
Those holes, to me, are our respective human experiences. When we speak of wellness as it is right now, it's predominantly—read 99 percent of the time and spaces—composed of the following: click-bait articles on how to lose weight or "fix" some other aspect of ourselves; quick & expensive cures of snake oils and dusts; unrealistic expectation of our finances & time; and more.
Wellness is portrayed as weekly bubble baths. It's seeking out the next "cure" or "hack" of immortality for a seemingly broken body. It's the transformation of foods into esoteric or removedly poetic names like "moon milks" and "fat balls," the humourous ineuendo of the latter is surely not lost on most of us. Here, we encounter unscientific claims such as "toning brain waves" to be as sleek as the mental version of a Victoria's Secret model. We paradoxically end up wasting time in this quest for products that "light up [our] brain" that indrectly signify to us that we are dim. This is time that we could instead spend on experiences, thoughts, and enrichment of ourselves & our world that do feed our brains.
Here is a visual of how most of us feel in this tragicomic sketch of our quest in wellness . . .
Wellness is a microcosm—a rosy bubble—in which we all float on by ourselves, for ourselves. More often than not, it's individualistic, self-oriented, and isolationist. But there's a world beyond it and beyond us.
In a world where the gestalt of our news is deplorable, it can be tempting to gravitate towards escapist articles. To contemplate about whether you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome over how the world itself is fatigued. But I, along with my audience, cannot escape the reality of our lives and what composes our health anymore. Ignorance is not bliss and what we continue to suppress despite facing it everyday is what makes us unwell, whether that's in our lives or those of others. The current wellness space does not acknowledge how our daily lives beyond our physical bodies is what affects our health. These include experiences like that of my own with facing immigration nightmares in Trumpland and others' stories such as the mental health of a veteran coming back home, a single mother with two jobs, being a creative freelancer, or paying off student loans while looking for a job. These have direct impacts on our mental and effectively our physical health.
When we are well as a world, we are well as individuals.
When we are well as a world, we are well as individuals. Our health is an anthropology, a constant field work of investigating one another's stories. And through these stories, we create a community for and with you where we feel well by being heard in our shared human experience. It is the mission of this new platform to show the truly holistic aspect of what it means to be healthy: heal(thy) world.
To do so, The Thirlby will embody its community more. We are opening it up for submissions of stories, which you can read more about here. We have a team to support these voices, and you can meet all of us here. We have a team of medical contributors, including N.D.s and M.D.s, because we strongly believe in providing you with well-researched expert opinion on complementary medicine. They will be answering questions about health that you can submit through our Submissions form in our upcoming column, Myths About My Body. We have a shop coming in late Summer 2018 to benefit the greater good, for which you can have early access by signing up for our newsletter. And not to fret, we will still have our original content such as recipes in Beauty Bites, remedies with Farmacy, and more, which can be found in The Journal. We look forward to a new chapter, not only for The Thirlby but optimistically for the world of wellness, for all.
