RACHEL CARGLE'S RADICAL JOY

Discovering the value of pleasure in the pursuit of a better world with the author of A Renaissance of Our Own

- JANELL ROSS

THE MOMENT RACHEL CARGLE OPENS her Brooklyn apartment door, I see the signs of relaxed living. There is the time to greet me slowly on a Monday morning. There’s the letter board displaying not an overcrowded schedule but the affirming words “This Too Is the Living.” There is the sunshine streaming in from a balcony where salad greens hang from a pocket plant wall. And there’s the soft, brandy-colored leather couch where we sit and talk over steaming cups of dark-roast coffee, served Jamaican style with thick condensed milk. Jamaica ranks among her happiest places.

Cargle, 34, is a Black woman leading a modern, multihyphenate life, improbably filled with “an abundance of ease”—another of her favorite phrases. Her career as an influencer, speaker, and writer began about six years ago with the Insta gram account @rachel.cargle; her posts on grief, self-care, and liberation have earned her 1.6 million followers with over 1 million more following side accounts like those for her businesses: a bookstore in Akron, Ohio; an online self-paced learning platform; and a foundation bringing mental-health support to Black women and girls.

Cargle built her brand on her commitment to racial justice, but what makes her approach— and her life—particularly remarkable is her insistence that joy and pleasure are as essential as equity and justice in the making of a better world. “Racism causes our bodies to be weathered,” she says. “The repair of that requires being able to sit squarely in your values: you can find more peace when you are spending your time and energy doing the things you want to do, no matter how extraneous they may seem to anyone else.”

Her debut book,