Your Appropriation of “Self-Care” Is Terrifying. And It Must Be Stopped.

I am starting to notice that I really dislike the degree to which the term “self-care” is conflated with “fun things I would enjoy doing.” A friend shared someone’s Facebook post about self-care for when you hit rock bottom. And while most of the tips included did not particularly resonate with me, something did. I realized that a discussion of true self-care, that of making sure you can complete your own very basic needs for survival, provided such a stark contrast from the way that the term “self-care” has been adapted to suit people who don’t need such a term.

It gets co-opted by the able, capable, educated, well-off and simply privileged as a way to pass off activities for oneself as not being inherently selfish and unnecessary.

Self-care is an inclusive word. I get it. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how it has been co-opted by the able, capable, educated, well-off and simply privileged as a way to pass off activities for oneself as not being inherently selfish and unnecessary. As if you really need to convince others that getting a pedicure is something you should be allowed to do.

It doesn’t really bug me that getting a manicure or pedicure is apparently super high on the list of “self-care ideas,” according to the highest-ranking pages of Google. What bothers me is how these lists, soaked in terms of inclusivity, entrench or reinforce many of the prejudices people have toward those who struggle with mental health or chronic illness in ways that a pedicure is as far away from helping as the moon.

What Is Self-Care, Anyway?

Although the term “self-care” feels like it was coined in 2015, it is actually decades old. If you can, imagine a time when a lot of people with serious injuries or chronic health conditions had to stay in permanent care facilities like hospitals, rehab centers or convalescent homes. Technology was not sufficiently advanced to allow some people to live at home and manage their conditions without the kinds of assistance we now consider mainstream (e.g. supplemental oxygen).

In this environment came a philosophy of encouraging patients to care for themselves as much as they can. Instead of having that orderly spoon-feed you or give you a sponge bath while you’re in the hospital, you can eat and maybe take a shower on your own. Self-care was the terminology used to describe this care approach. It not only gave people with chronic health issues a way to advocate for themselves, it gave medical professionals a way to quantify a patient’s ability to live on their own and take general care of themselves. It’s a method of treating the whole person, not just a single ailment.

Self-care was never intended to apply to people who weren’t at risk for some level of serious dysfunction. And no, I do not look at your dirty kitchen and piles of clean laundry as evidence that you are not functioning. The concept of dysfunction was never meant to be used by people who could cook, clean and care for themselves and their families, but occasionally struggle to find the time.

Can’t There Be an Inclusive Definition of Self-Care That Makes Room for Everyone?

No. Because the more room there is for people who look at self-care as a call to take advantage of their many privileges, the less space there is for people like me, and for people who struggle much more than I do.

When your operating position is that you have the time, inclination, money, energy, physical ability and executive function (the last three being the ones I want to emphasize the most) to do basically whatever you want, you have a list of potential self-care ideas that exponentially outsizes the options of someone less functional. At that point, self-care isn’t taking basic care of yourself as much as it is a hobby you want to put more time into.

At that point, self-care isn’t taking basic care of yourself as much as it is a hobby you want to put more time into.

In researching this post, I came across an article making the conflicting statement that self-care never includes doing things you don’t want to do, but always involves a certain number of “basic” tasks, such as doing relaxing activities, participating in one pleasurable activity every day, and finding reasons to laugh. This article takes such a privileged perspective that I gaped openly at the presumption.

To really understand what it means to attempt self-care and fall short, you need to imagine what it’s like not to be able to eat. Not to be able to sleep. Not to be able to breathe. Proper hygiene. The executive function that allows you to keep your job, much less take time off for a “mental health day.” If your sappy professions of the benefits of Starbucks trips or hot yoga as a vital part of self-care sound vapid by comparison, it’s because they are.

It’s not enough for the healthy and able to just acknowledge that some people struggle with self-care. The concept of self-care was designed for people who struggle with it, not for people who simply have a hard time justifying spending time, money or energy on themselves. When the able co-opt the term to describe engaging pastimes, those who need the term the most are cast into the position of “other.” By the blogosphere’s collective definition of self-care, my feeble attempts to make sure that I feed myself and sleep (instead of not eating or sleeping) make me look even worse by comparison.

It says, In order to be a part the human race, you have to be healthy, and you don’t qualify. But thanks for giving me a way to explain to my loved ones why I deserve that massage.

That othering has a price that somebody has to pay. It speaks to the ways we freely borrow from advocacy by those with chronic health conditions, while preserving the stigma faced by those who battle for their lives against those issues every single day. We pay lip service to people who are trying to manage their health problems as best they can, when what we really mean is this: “In order to be a part the human race, you have to be healthy, and you don’t qualify. But thanks for giving me a way to explain to my loved ones why I deserve that massage.”

How Can We Reach a Truce Here?

Everybody needs self-care. But not everybody needs to use the term to describe things they could fairly easily do on their own, without needing a movement behind it to justify it. You can create another term for it, or use one of the many that already exist: “me time,” “socializing,” “hobbies,” etc.

Everybody’s definition of self-care is different. But if one person’s list includes the phrase, “Get to the gym four days a week,” and another’s starts with, “Make sure I keep eating,” you can see how the latter might wonder what the former could possibly need from turning their realistic ambitions into an activist campaign.