Is Self Care Revolutionary?
The topic of self care has been on my mind a lot lately. As someone who suffers from mental illnesses, dissociation, constant foot pain, and is a poor student — it’s important to check in with yourself and see what your body needs, what your mind needs, and consequently find ways to satisfy those needs. Self care, I would broadly define, is any action you deliberately take to take care of yourself and your body — maybe it’s buying yourself your favorite food after bombing an exam, maybe it’s putting on a face mask after getting through an episode, maybe it’s having a really bad week and having a “Netflix and Chill” date with yourself. Today, we often think of self care as those things — actively making sure you give yourself something after denying yourself/having something denied from you (e.g. happiness). The common discourse, however, is that self care is “radical” and “revolutionary” — that, by nurturing your body in a world that has mechanisms set in place to imprison, kill, and knock you down at every turn, you somehow fight against that system…but is that truly revolutionary?
Is it revolutionary to navigate through our trauma and illness by holding our survival on a pedestal? And to what extent is it radical to leave the emotional and physical labor of healing and building on the back of someone who’s faced trauma and violence instead of encouraging community-based care and support?
I don’t mean to yuck anyone’s yum. If you are able to and can afford to engage in “self care”, that’s great for you and I don’t want to shame the ways in which you survive the world. But I don’t want you to think that this is it. That providing yourself the bare minimum, a good meal or time away, is what you should indefinitely look forward to or aspire to. Let me provide the example of corporations. As Medium user @marisoli26 stated: “Corporations… make decisions based solely on which option will end in more profit, often neglecting the well-being of others.” So what happens, then, when corporations make money off the well-being of others? What happens when commercials and ads urge you to buy this or that, all because “you deserve it”, you’ve worked hard enough to treat yourself? Is it revolutionary that the ways in which we take care of ourselves is by doing the bare minimum to get us through the day, through the work week, through the pay period?
I don’t want mere survival for us, for me or for you. I don’t want your methods of getting through the day to fall trap to consumerism that hides behind a narrative of health (mental, emotional, physical). I don’t want your well-being to be profited off of and I don’t want to leave out the people that sometimes can’t afford or aren’t able to take care of themselves. We need to acknowledge that everyday self care rhetoric is exclusionary of poor and mentally ill people, especially poor queer and trans people of color. Am I really going to spend $30 on an organic and vegan avocado walnut acai wheatgrass face mask when that could get me take out for a week? Am I going to take a day for myself when I’m a full-time student with a job? Am I going to spend money and energy I don’t have on things that ultimately won’t bring me the happiness and restoration I seek? These are difficult questions, ones I don’t necessarily have answers to, ones that are draining and ask of us to choose between two halves of a whole. Growing up poor and brown, you think of anything in “excess” (of what you’re accustomed to) is lavish and a rare indulgence only given to you when you exceed demand — i.e. you get straight A’s, you work a 40+ hour week, etc. You read Marx and learn that, indeed, capitalism aims to make “everything that goes beyond the most abstract need… a luxury”. And entering adulthood, you begin to see that (corporations and businesses) encouraging people to engage in self care can often be a manifestation of capitalism; if the worker brings personal issues (that hadn’t been resolved beforehand) into the workplace, the issues then threaten productivity, consequently becoming a problem for capitalism — which depends on the constant labor of the worker. If the machine isn’t well-oiled and kept up to date, it can’t perform its duties.
I want us to abolish this idea that our sole duty is to perform, perform, perform. We are not machines to be tended to for the sake of our performance. We are not machines that do self care so that we may be presentable to the world. We are not machines that can get rid of depression through face masks. We are not machines that resolve despair and emptiness by washing all of our bed sheets and blankets and then sleeping in them. We are not machines. I want us to see each other as flesh and blood, bodies that feel and scar, bodies that don’t always know the healthiest ways to sustain ourselves. I want us to recognize that pain and exhaustion, all of it, raw and pulsing and relived — and recognize that we don’t have to live with it and heal through it alone.
Community-based care and support, checking in with each other, cooking for each other, addressing harm within the community and tips to better interact with each other — this and more can all help how you manage to grow and shape this body you inhabit. Control the means of healing and (re)structuring, reach out to people who don’t have the energy to ask for help, take care of yourself and each other, and let people know when you need an extra hand or the whole village.
Realize that the whole village is there and ready when you are.
