Now You Get To Raise Yourself: A Creative, Autoethnographic Inquiry Into Wellness

This paper is an autoethnographic study on how myself and others in the Boone community define and enact wellness. This paper explores the myriad ways in which wellness becomes integrated into one’s life. My body of research includes key academic texts and studies related to the theme of wellness, literature I have found essential in my own search for wellness, and numerous in-depth, interpersonal interviews with varied participants. This project is a creative, literary-style, and reflexive blend of my experience with wellness and the insights from my interviews and literature review. Each informs the other and culminates in an ethnographic account that synthesizes a broad swath of topics that fall under the term of wellness (including the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritualcharacteristics of the term). This project also brings together my educational background (incommunication studies and English) and a research orientation that finds productive overlapsbetween the personal, cultural, aesthetic, and scientific, following a rich transdisciplinarytrend of narrative and ethnographic research in the academy.