Coconut Oil Is My Savior
Coconut oil is my everything. I spread it over my body in the shower like a shield. I stand under the water and watch it dew over the oil. I know it’s soaking in. I also know that when I step out into that post-shower steam, I will feel like a silken goddess. Fortified. Utilitarian. Soft as fuck. All I have to do is not slip on the oil slick at the bottom of my tub.
Growing up awkward in too many ways to count, it’s not often that I feel like a goddess of any kind. I invoke the word, using it on other women with ease but having too close a zoom on my own imperfections to dare aim it towards myself. Day after day, week after week I examine the blemishes on my face. The rough patches whose origins I can’t trace, the pimples everyone told me I’d eventually grow out of. (This was a lie.) I am a corporeal being like any other, and so I’ve spent my adulthood staring into the face of the marks the world left on me inside and out. I can feel the wear and tear of existence in the flakes on my elbow. There are few things with the power to really let me feel new. The ones that can stick with you.
I grew up in a part of the U.S. where the main color scheme was green (the trees), grey (the sky) and white (the people). My little corner of the world had no idea how to deal with my particular color scheme — brown but something obviously in-between — the kind of color that would likely have been searching and lost anywhere but which was especially puzzled in Oregon. My tangled puff of hair was alien to them, and more often than not, to me as a result. My skin and my features alike were often regarded as trinkets, held up next to whiteness with an “ooh” at the difference. I doubt many children go through adolescence at ease with their bodies — all I know is that I grabbed frantically for something to help me understand my body in all that it needed and appreciate it for all that it made me. For much of that adolescence I was blind to all it could give me, because all I could see was what I wasn’t. Under the surface, I’ve always been laced with jealousy for those who grew up with a closer understanding of where they fit and “what” they were.
It’s possible that coconut oil had already been congealed from centuries-old go-to into Affluent White Trend by the time my first jar crossed my path. But regardless of its presence in co-op beauty aisles, I felt connected to my skin — not to mention my hair — the first time I watched a small chunk of the oil dissolve in my palm and spread it over myself. It was something that my white mother had never thought to give me, but that I was somehow certain had been in my black grandmother’s cabinets. My mother’s hair was too thin, too light, too weak to carry that weight. But ours wasn’t. Mine came alive. It had a spring in its step. It wasn’t weighed down or complaining of grease — it was reveling in it. I smelled like paradise and felt like satin. I ran my hands over my skin and it felt like a newborn baby’s. I, however, finally felt like a grown-ass woman.
By that time, white hipsters in Trader Joe’s nationwide were already eschewing coconut oil as a worn-out fad, but I knew that what I’d just tapped into wasn’t unique, or new, or capable of being run into the ground by anything but history. It was old and powerful, and bigger than me, and my tiny corner of its sprawling world had just given me another line of commonality with the parts of my heritage I’d been accidentally locked out of for most of my life.
I spent so much of that life in search of a glow. I continue to spend so much of this life in search of the vitality of those connections. Growing up in my corner of green, grey and white, most of my friends would rarely touch lotion — my skin, though, would drink a bottle whole. My body wanted to fry an egg in oil and then spread what’s left in the bottle from head to toe. Coconut oil was just another addition to my routine, but it was one that left me feeling reborn and one modicum less alone. I spread it over myself like a shield, and my body and I have struck a deal: This is good. This works. This is what you’ve been looking for. This is you doing you. We’ve reached an understanding.
Sometimes I lean my head against a window and when I pick myself back up I’ve left a streak of oil behind. That’s okay. I’m fine leaving marks.
