Sometimes a person comes along who helps you see life through a different lens, like an unexpected “Aha!” moment. For many who have met her, that person is Portia Preston, an Associate Professor of Public Health at Cal State Fullerton and Founder of Empowered to Exhale. Dr. Preston is earthy. Strong. And she is not afraid to tell you when she’s feeling vulnerable. “Strength is vulnerability,” she said.
She didn’t always subscribe to this credo. For a long time, Dr. Preston, who is the author of an upcoming self-care book, “Hustle, Flow, or Let it Go? A Guide to Shame-Free Wellness that Honors Your Reality and Gives You Life” (Revell Books, August 2025), lived by a different creed where (inner) strength was associated with external success and vulnerability was a liability. But her perspective started to shift after she earned her Doctorate of Public Health from UCLA in in 2012 when she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease; a few months later, just as she began her career as a management consultant, she had a blood clot. These experiences were isolating and overwhelming for her to navigate, and she knew she had to slow down. But it took until she was diagnosed with fibroids two years later and enduring great pain that interfered with her ability to teach as an Assistant Professor of Public Health at Cal State LA, that she started to.
It wasn’t easy. Not only was slowing down anathema to her work ethic, but as a Black woman who opted to have a hysterectomy to address her fibroids, she felt isolated from her peers who chose less invasive means and did not understand her decision; she realized that her health journey was her own. Rather than aiming for perfection or approval, she needed to meet herself where she was and ask, ‘How can I best take care of myself?’
In “Hustle, Flow, or Let It Go?” she provides an in-depth guide to three main practices for “shame-free” wellness whose “ingredients” include self-care rituals she began developing around this time. The three practices are: navigating the hustle, finding the flow needed to thrive, and knowing when to let go. Dr. Preston notes that her book is not a guarantee that life will become easier, but rather it’s about “detaching from the expectation that conditions in our lives must be perfect or under our control.” In other words, instead of striving for perfection, the goal should be agility – and hustle, flow, or ‘let it go’ help with this.
Dr. Preston defines ‘hustle’ as any factor that hinders a person’s wellness or makes it hard to care for oneself. ‘Flow’ is the ongoing cultivation of one’s well-being and connection to themselves, their loved ones, and the world around them; and ‘let It go’ is the means to release what is not working so that they can shift from hustle to flow.
In “Hustle, Flow, or Let It Go?” Dr. Preston also reflects on what first inspired her to get a PhD. “I thought about what first ignited my passion for public health…I wanted to understand how cultural and social factors shaped the health of Black women. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, I’d experienced firsthand how preventable medical conditions, like high blood pressure and diabetes, were ravaging lives of not only Black women in my community but my own family.
I had grown up around strong female role models. Many of them the first ones to attend college…Some worked in environments where they weren’t always treated fairly or with respect, and I realized the same strength I saw as admirable was also a burden, a survival mechanism that often meant their own needs came last. Health problems often took lives early or prematurely or compromised their quality of life.” Dr. Preston was determined to break this unhealthy cycle.
She eventually did when she became ill with the fibroids and began implementing a weekly regime of wellness practices that focused on the following themes: physical (exercising); psychological (writing in a journal for self-reflection); emotional (having compassion for herself every single day of her life); spiritual (connecting regularly with her own source of faith and hope as well as her faith community); relational (regularly spending time with her husband, family and friends); and professional (pursuing work that she found invigorating and setting boundaries around it as well as establishing peer and mentor support groups). These practices and more are included in “Hustle, Flow, or Let it Go.”
As Dr. Preston pursued self-care, she realized that people from all walks of life could benefit from her wellness practices and her personal struggle that inspired them. She started to share her health journey with people in local settings, including her classroom, where she espoused the importance of self-care in a success-at-all-costs world. “In our quest for success, we often lose sight of the need to care for ourselves. We believe that a time will come when everything is stable, and we can finally enjoy the fruits of our labor. However, life offers no guarantees. Wellness requires ongoing attention and maintenance,” she writes in “Hustle, Flow, or Let it Go?” “I came to define self-care for myself as anything that helped manage my stress and promote my wellbeing.”
Her commitment to self-care prompted a shift in her view of success or “wins,” which she delves into in her book. “My greatest wins come when I am willing to engage in the uncertainty of life and risk defeat. One step forward, two steps back. Progress is not a linear journey. It only appears to be because our society does a great job of stripping success from its context. People see my accomplishments but not the circumstances I’ve had to navigate to achieve them. They catch the highlight reel but miss the private meltdowns,” she writes.
Dr. Preston decided it was important to expand her reach and shared her health care journey with the world in a 2019 Ted Talk. In “Hustle, Flow, or Let it Go,” she explains why. “Although it seems there is an unspoken agreement in society to conceal our flaws, I can’t afford to. I don’t want to silence the pain because I know that when it is held in safe spaces and allowed to heal, it can be transformed into triumph,” she writes in her upcoming book. “As I have shared my lived experiences with my audiences, clients, and students, the response has been overwhelming, leaving me with a sense that there is a hunger for greater transparency and reassurance that we are not alone in our struggles.”
Dr. Preston was diligent about her self-care regime, but it became challenging to sustain in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic; between adjusting to educating students online (she started teaching Public Health at Cal State Fullerton in 2019), helping others embrace self-care, and indulging a newfound obsession for baking, she was beginning to drop the wellness ball for herself and decided to reboot and do a deep dive into self-care. “My baking was getting out of control!” she said with a grin; and then more seriously: “I needed to stabilize myself. I was compelled to find an outlet in the wake of the pandemic and the relentless fight against systemic racism and societal injustices…I needed reassurance that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.”
She renewed her commitment to self-care by setting two intentions: to heal and grow. “The reason I talk about intention is that most often we are not living with intention,” she said. “(Instead) we’re living in a reactive or responsive way, or we’re just kind of doing the default, ‘This is my approach to life,’ and so intention is an invitation to disrupt the daily narrative and actually connect with yourself and ask, ‘What is truly important to me?’”
Let that sink in for a moment.
During this time when Dr. Preston was contemplating her renewed commitment to self-care through healing and growth, she was also casually following a Black-owned urban farm on social media when a specific post caught her attention. It was a photo of a Black hand grasping a yam from the soil, and it moved her. “I recognize the yam as a beloved dish at family gatherings and as a daily staple in my own home. I recognized the hand, Black, like my own. However, it was the land that I was disconnected from, the labor of this hand fully immersed in the soil; the process of nurturing and growing this yam were completely foreign to me,” she said in a 2021 Ted Talk.
The post went on to explain the aversion that many African Americans have to working with the land, given its painful association with slavery and sharecropping. The post also spoke of gardening as a lost art, which resonated with Dr. Preston because she associated it with her own family, who has owned farmland in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, since the 1800s. Her family’s connection to the land began with her great, great, great, great grandfather, Robert “Free Bob” Vernon, who was born into slavery in Mississippi and who later married and had three sons and then endured the pain of watching all of them being sold to another plantation.
“Free Bob” worked hard to earn his freedom. When he finally did, he moved to Louisiana where he joined his father, a white man, who offered to give “Free Bob” 165 acres of land in exchange for cultivating it for five years; “Free Bob” agreed. At some point, “Free Bob” learned that his wife died, and he returned to Mississippi, got his sons and brought them back with him to Tangipahoa Parish, where he went on to have 14 more children.
Over the span of his life, “Free Bob” expanded his land ownership to 2300 acres through real estate. It became known as Vernontown, and he gave 100 acres of it to each of his 17 children as they married. He also donated land for the first school for Black children in the area, and a church and cemetery that stand until this day. “Only a remnant of the land remains in our possession but that does not diminish his legacy,” said Dr. Preston. “We have persisted through racism, poverty and natural disasters. When I stand on Vernontown Road in Vernontown, Louisiana, the town that bears our name, I feel a strength greater than my own. This land speaks to our resilience and fortitude, which flows through my spirit today. This is what I feel when I connect with the land.”
And it was this profound connection with her ancestral land that stirred within her as she studied the photo of the yam in the social media post as well as the words written below it and inspired her to build her own garden in the back of her home in Long Beach, CA. But cultivating it wasn’t always easy. She encountered challenges, such as pests eating her crops and having to start from ground zero. Again and again. But she persevered, and through her perseverance learned that gardening unexpectedly provided her with what she had been seeking: inner healing and emotional growth, self-care that not only rejuvenated her but also nurtured her inner strength for the challenges of life. “Learning to grow the food I consumed taught me important lessons about resilience,” she said.
Dr. Preston realized that these lessons of resilience could also be learned through other wellness practices, which she goes into in more depth in “Hustle, Flow, or Let it Go.” These self-care practices include reconnecting with your foundation (for Dr. Preston, that was her family’s history with their land in Louisiana); embracing a beginner’s mindset (this is a Zen Buddhist concept known in Japanese as shoshin and refers to approaching new experiences with an open mind, like a novice); nurturing what you want to see grow (this can apply to your personal and professional relationships, your ability to play tennis – and everything in between); letting go of control and perfection (approaching life with a beginner’s mindset can help with this.); and finding healing in community.
According to Dr. Preston, while finding healing in community for self-care is extremely important, it’s unfortunately not something that our society supports. “Societal self-care is flawed. It focuses on the individual, but a larger vision for self-care is communal, with the individual benefitting from the lived experiences of others,” she said. This approach helped her with a relatively recent diagnosis of AuDHD, a non-clinical term used to describe someone who has both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). People with AuDHD often have difficulty processing sensory information as well as focus, memory, and controlling impulses. This can make everyday tasks that are afterthoughts for others more challenging.
Dr. Preston discovered she had AuDHD when she was being treated for ADHD. “Once I started treatment for ADHD, other symptoms emerged. Through reading lived experiences of others, I learned these were related to autism,” she said. “The diagnosis is just the beginning; I can’t imagine not being on this journey with other people who understand the intense internal pressure, the complexities of unmasking and unlearning internalized ableism. When we help each other embrace compassion and acceptance, we help ourselves.”
Engaging in a supportive, compassionate community is also integral to self-care because community can be there to lift a person up when they’re spiraling. “In the book I talk about the importance of community-activated compassion because I’m not going to (always) be able to start the engine with having compassion for myself; I’m not this person that walks around and says, ‘Ohh I am worthy, and I love myself.’ I get mad at myself all the time, and sometimes the quickest way to help with this to help with this is to identify one or two people in my life who are willing to allow me to be human, and they’re willing to absorb my flaws, and if I can talk to them, I can take that shortcut back to finding my connection to compassion again,” she said. “That’s what shows we are really meant to be an interdependent culture – not codependent, not individualist – interdependent; sometimes we find our connection back to ourselves by engaging in community.”
The importance of community is also an integral component of self-care because it can be a healthy answer to the onslaught of social media that most of us experience, with virtual reality creating a skewed world in our minds. “If the only interaction that we’re getting is online, then we’re getting a very biased perspective of the world, and the antidote to that is to be in community,” said Dr. Preston. “Each week, I sit down with my husband to check in, and we answer a few questions that mirror the content in my book: ‘How am I feeling right now, mind, body, and spirit?’ I get to acknowledge my struggles. I think about ‘What are my priorities, my concerns, and my needs?’ I go through everything, including ‘What am I being intentional about? What am I saying ‘yes’ to right now? What am I saying ‘no’ to?’ We review our appointments and resources, and the closing questions include “How do we need to support each other? How are we showing up in community this week? I go through all of my different appointments and whatnot, and the question I ask myself and my husband is ‘How are we showing up in community this week?’ And the goal is just to do something, something beyond the two of us. Individual wellbeing is incomplete if it doesn’t feed into the collective. Feeding only yourself harms humanity.”
This information is for educational purposes. Please consult your physician regarding any medical issues. The Visiting Nurse Association of the Treasure Coast (VNA) is committed to bringing trusted and quality home health, private care and hospice to Indian River County patients. For more information about VNA services, call 772-567-5551 or visit www.vnatc.com.
