ow do you feel right now? Angry, mad, enraged? Sad, abandoned, ignored? Maybe fearful, anxious and overwhelmed? Whatever it is, Bria Royal’s Pocket Healing Zines ask you to pause, breathe and say out loud: “Right now, I feel _________.” Royal (Comm ‘16) calls her wallet-sized pamphlet “My Unapologetic Emotional Awareness Guide” and offers it for free on her website. It’s meant to give marginalized communities the chance to work through “moments of overwhelming emotion,” a tool to let readers confront adversity head-on. Royal has been diagnosed as bipolar, a disorder she says limits her ability to give to social justice movements in physical ways, such as marching in the streets. Instead, her art is her mode of resistance. Royal hopes her zines can help others find better methods of self-care, or the practices people use to ensure their well-being. Toward the end of the zine, she offers some examples: taking a nap, cooking from scratch, coloring, making some noise, even sexual fantasies. The guide concludes with four blank boxes for readers to fill in with their own ideas. “I know what seeing what my self-care practice looks like might help someone else figure out what their self-care practice wants to look like,” she says. The concept for her self-care zine series came to her while she was taking psychology classes and seeing a therapist at Northwestern University. Though she was thankful to be exposed to so many mental health resources, she felt that they were too individual-focused. In contrast, the Afroindigenous spiritual practices she learned growing up on Chicago’s West Side taught her to see her well-being as connected to the health of her community. “I wanted to make those contents [of the zines] a little more community-focused, putting into practice the restorative justice and transformative justice things I was talking about outside of class,” Royal says. “I wanted to integrate those components a little bit better, but in a way that’s accessible to anyone.” She hopes her art will empower others to seek support from their communities, an aim that directly challenges the isolating tendency to treat mental health struggles as a personal problem on Northwestern’s campus. Now graduated, Royal, who is AfroLatina, works with For the People Artists Collective, a radical Chicago-based group of artists of color ”actively envisioning a world without prisons or police.” Her involvement in activist communities pushed her to reconsider how mental health is traditionally understood, and the friendships she’s cultivated through protests and organizing have helped constitute a support system.
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