I Sell Tea. It Couldn't Fix My Panic Disorder.

By Rachel J. Pilgrim

In the spring of 2021, a year after I finished Columbia Journalism School in the middle of a pandemic, I was diagnosed with panic disorder.

Before that, I was someone who was very good at outpacing stress with productivity. I had earned two Ivy League degrees. I knew how to be high-functioning and meet a deadline, push through exhaustion and keep going when something was hard.

What I didn't know was what to do when my own body stopped cooperating with me.

The diagnosis caught me off guard, because I had spent my whole life believing that in spite of it all, I knew how to take care of myself. I became hyperaware of what was happening in my body, wondering when the next panic attack would come and whether I would be able to stop it.

Suddenly, “pushing through” wasn't working anymore, but the irony was that I had spent my entire life surrounded by people who knew how to make care out of the ordinary things.

My maternal grandparents are from Antigua, and my grandmother grew up in a farming family. Nobody in our house called it herbalism, but I learned it anyway: the plants she tended, the herbs she chose for tea or for the pot, and the way she explained what people did with what they grew. And there was my grandfather who burned incense almost every day during his morning devotionals, when he cleaned the house, or during a football game. My father's family is Southern Black, and my elders on that side carried their own tradition of making care out of whatever was on hand. As a child, I didn't have language like “nervous system regulation” for what those sensory rituals did. I just knew what home felt like.

By the time I was an adult, I was already mixing blends in my kitchen and handing them to friends and family. In the summers, I brought them to the farmers' markets where I already shopped. That was the beginning of The Land of Milk & Honey Apothecary, and it started before the diagnosis did.

So when the panic came, I did what I had been taught. I made the tea, lit the incense, and kept up with my rituals. It’s just that none of it was enough on its own.

Strength Has a Price

When I’m not writing, I’m selling tea. And I really do believe in what goes into a cup of tea at The Land of Milk & Honey Apothecary. But I have watched self-care become a stand-in for actual care, and Black women pay for that confusion more than most.

We learn strength long before we learn rest. Psychologists have a name for it, the Strong Black Woman schema, and a 2025 study in the Journal of Black Psychology found that Black college women who endorsed it more strongly reported more depressive symptoms. At the same time, Black adults were 36 percent less likely than U.S. adults overall to receive mental health treatment in 2024, according to the HHS Office of Minority Health. Put those two findings side by side and you get a lot of women managing something clinical with a candle, a bath and a group chat, then calling it self-care because nobody offered them anything more.

For a while, that was me. My panic disorder forced me to question the version of strength I had built my life around. I had spent years learning how to perform under pressure. Healing required me to learn some things that are much less glamorous: how to notice what was happening in my body, how to ask for help and how to stop treating endurance as evidence that I was okay.

Care Is a Team Sport

Therapy became part of that care. And then, like it does for so many people, money threatened my ability to continue.

In 2024, I lost a freelance contract because of budget constraints, and suddenly the cost of staying in therapy became harder to carry. The Loveland Foundation helped keep me there, providing therapy vouchers at a moment when a change in my income could have interrupted the care I was finally learning to prioritize. That is the part of my story I most want other Black women to hear. The rituals I grew up with kept me steady enough to show up to my appointments, and the appointments did the work that rituals were never meant to do alone.

Sometimes the difference between someone getting help and going without it isn't whether they believe in therapy. It isn't whether they're willing to do the work. Sometimes the difference is simply whether they can afford another session.

The rituals I grew up with helped me come back to myself and therapy gave me another kind of support. I needed both and once I understood that, I couldn't continue to build The Land of Milk & Honey Apothecary the same way. I wanted to build a home that pointed people toward more support than any cup of tea could offer.

TLMH existed before my diagnosis. The diagnosis clarified what I wanted it to become. I wasn't interested in selling a fantasy that the right tea could heal everything. I wanted to reach people with nervous systems like mine, especially Black women who had learned endurance in environments that demanded it, but had not necessarily been taught to listen to their bodies and when rest is the most productive thing they can do.

The brand became more intentional about emotional well-being and nervous system care. Tea and incense were still at the center because those rituals were part of my story and my family's story. But I wanted the products to be an entry point into a much larger conversation about how we care for ourselves. I wanted someone to be able to brew a cup of tea and take ten minutes to come back into their body. I also wanted that same person to know when it was time to call a therapist. Those ideas aren't in conflict.

To me, that is what culturally responsive wellness can look like: honoring what our families taught us while making room for the resources they may not have had.

Care Beyond the Cup

That is why the work I am proudest of has nothing to do with a product. In April, we hosted The Restoration Ritual, which brought nearly 50 people together for wellness education, community and mental health resources. Through one of our partners, four attendees received 12 therapy sessions each, 48 sessions in all. Those sessions are the point. The tea is how I got everyone in the room.

It is also why I keep basic knowledge out from behind a paywall. I share what I know about individual herbs, how I use ritual for my own emotional well-being and the contraindications modern research has documented, because people deserve to make informed decisions. Herbs are not a blanket solution, and a plant trending on your feed is not automatically a plant that is right for you. What customers pay TLMH for is the formulation, the sourcing and a ritual that fits into a real day. The tradition itself belongs to all of us.

This year tested everything I believe about care and I had to practice what I had spent the last five years learning. My maternal grandfather died at 91 while I was in the middle of moving into my new home. Caring for him until the end was a big part of my life. He was like a father to me and I never knew a day without him. The incense line at TLMH comes from knowing and loving him. In navigating his loss, I have leaned on my rituals, and I’ve leaned on my people, and this time I knew the difference between the two.

Care is not one thing. It can be ancestral and clinical. It can be a therapist and a grandmother's tea recipe. It can be medication and prayer. It can be incense burning in the morning and a phone call to someone who knows you are not okay. We don't have to choose.

If you are a Black woman who has been told to drink some tea, run a bath and push through, hear what nobody told me: your rituals can be part of your care without being all of it. Make the tea, and then make the call. Therapy for Black Girls keeps a directory of culturally responsive therapists, and the Loveland Foundation's Therapy Fund helps Black women and girls cover the cost of care. If you need someone right now, call or text 988.

Rachel J. Pilgrim is an award-winning journalist, herbalist and host of the I Am Well podcast. She is the founder of The Land of Milk & Honey Apothecary, a mental health-centered herbal wellness brand in New York. Follow her at @tlmhapothecary.

Photo credits: headshots by Cliff Jean; product photos courtesy of The Land of Milk & Honey Apothecary.