Writer Nneka M. Okona on the Importance of Self-Care While Grieving

When Nneka M. Okona began working on the manuscript that would become her new book, Self-Care for Grief, she knew she wished to create a guide for readers to center their needs wherever they were in the grieving process.

“I wanted to give people a framework for kind of personalizing their own self-care — kind of a choose your own adventure type of book, and I know that sounds a little weird,” Okona told the FBomb. “But I didn’t want to write a book that was prescriptive at all. I wanted people to just take what resonated and use it to build what felt right for them personally.”

Self-Care For Grief is filled with tips, guidelines, and recommendations for how readers can honor their loss through personalized rituals, cooking, and art. It also offers practical advice on how to care for your mental health and body when all you feel like doing is shutting down. We had the chance to talk to Okona about her personal definition of self-care, how she is honoring her own losses, and the power of returning to the original, Black feminist concept of self-care.

What does self-care mean to you?

Self-care, to me, is a discipline. It’s all those things that go into taking care of yourself that you should be doing on a regular basis. Funny enough, I think a lot of the things that I do to take care of myself are not usually things I want to do. But that’s where the discipline part comes in.

In general, I’m a very disciplined person, and I’m a very disciplined writer. One day I was talking to one of my dear friends — Evette Dionne, who is editor-in-chief of Bitch Media — and she said that ‘self-care is a discipline.’ That really shifted something for me because I never really thought about it like that before. It helped me see self-care in a different light and essentially be able to translate the discipline that I applied towards my writing towards myself.

I didn’t at first think that’s what I needed to do — I just thought that one day I would just wake up and do all the right things for myself, but that’s not how it works. It often just takes a lot of deliberation and habit forming and consistently doing the things and always thinking about your future self.

The popular perception of self-care on social media seems to be doing things like taking fancy bubble baths or indulging in really nice clothes. While those things are nice, you make it a point to talk about the original definition of self-care in the book as defined by Black feminists like Audre Lorde. Why was it important for you to center that original definition of self-care in this book?

I wanted to really go into that history because I felt it’s the truth. I also think people just get really bogged down with these capitalist and consumerist ideas of what self-care is. I wanted to just be very clear that self-care is really not just something like the bubble baths you mentioned or a good massage. Those sorts of things are definitely nice things that you can do for yourself, but self-care is much deeper than that. It was important for me to lay that out before I began giving different practices throughout the book.

We also learn in this book that you lost a close friend at a relatively early age. Younger people often don’t know how to talk about grief, especially when they haven’t experienced it themselves.

Absolutely. My very best friend died four years ago — it will actually be four years at the end of this month. At the time, I was 31, and she was 30. For most people, they might say that’s an older age or more of an adult, but, honestly, I was really young. I felt that at 30-31, like I was just really kind of ready to settle into myself as a person and a woman. And it was traumatizing. You don’t want to have to think about a very close friend dying that young.

Unfortunately, many people just really didn’t know what to say to me or what kind of support to offer. I think that sharing that my friend had died so young was inadvertently triggering for a lot of people — they didn’t want to have to put themselves in my shoes and think about what they would do if they had lost a really close friend like that.

But I just really had to lean in to not being ashamed to grieve openly and publicly; that was something I just committed to doing. I tweeted a lot about it, and as I was processing my grief I was able to write pieces about it. But really it took me just being open about it and sharing what it feels like, what it looks like, and just describing all the little things that happen when you’re grieving — like, for example, the physical manifestations of grief, how it impacts your body. Then I realized that this was going to be a long-term kind of healing process, and that was OK. I just wanted to make other people feel comfortable talking about grief.

What would your advice be for a young person who hasn’t personally had a loss and therefore is uncertain about what to say when a friend loses a loved one?

I think the main thing is to just really tap into what you know about that friend. I think a lot of people get really stressed out trying to provide the “perfect” support for someone who is dealing with something hard. I don’t think that typically exists, but we still put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do things perfectly. The truth is you might mess up, you might say something completely unhelpful or hurtful or triggering, and that’s OK. Just apologize and move on. But don’t make it into a big thing where it becomes about the other person having to manage your emotions. Just apologize, move on, and keep it moving.

The main thing is just to show up for people; the more practical things you can do, the better. I find that those who are grieving struggle with things like sleep disruptions, and you might not be eating the same way and in general. When people are dealing with loss, there’s a lot of brain fog and a lot of tiredness. All those things are really normal. If we know people who are grieving losses are dealing with all sorts of things, it makes sense to do some grocery shopping or to be like, ‘I know you’re tired and don’t feel like talking, I’m just going to drop off some food,’ or ‘I know you love this restaurant, are you going to be home at this time? I’m going to send a meal to your place.’ Just practical things like that, I think, are really, really helpful.

You could also just ask your friend what kind of support they need. I think even before things reach a crisis point, it’s a really beautiful practice of vulnerability to have those conversations with friends about what you need when you’re going through something hard. How do you want to be supported? If you can have those conversations in advance, then it becomes a little easier.