“How #SquadCare Saved My Life”
“Distilled into bath bombs and marketed to the consumer class, self-care can come off as a collection of hipster luxury items — a visible manifestation of excess time and resources spent massaging trigger points and pushing back cuticles. We are rarely asked about the labor conditions for those rubbing our feet. The stench of economic inequality is not exactly relaxing aromatherapy…
Self-care validates as good and noble all of those women with sufficient resources to “take a break” from the hustle and bustle while it censures those who seek relief from the collective care of the state — through child care subsidies, food assistance, low-income or subsidized housing, or health care. In so much of our political language, the black, brown, and poor women who seek care in these ways are still represented as bad, fraudulent, lazy, and wasteful.
And so instead, we turn to squad care, a way of understanding our needs as humans that acknowledges how we lean on one another, that we are not alone in the world, but rather enmeshed in webs of mutual and symbiotic relationships. Sometimes our squads are small, intimate, and bonded by affection, like the bestie squad Blair and I have shared for decades. Sometimes our squad is enormous, impersonal, and bonded by geographic and historic identity. As Americans, our national squad care is most obvious in moments of natural disaster or through public policies like social security.”
“SquadCare” is definitely how my friends and I survived the mental-health-toxicity of growing up in the heart of silicon valley. These days I’ve been struggling with the concept of self-care, because it’s not what I need, it’s never been what keeps me healthy, and it isn’t the advice I want to give to friends. But society shames us for needing others.
I’ve reimagined self-care as “giving yourself the directive to do the thing that feels nourishing to do right now”. It’s come with recognizing that what I can do for myself is limited, but I’m allowed to do everything I can.
Related: “Happiness Is Other People”; “The self-reliant individual is a myth that needs updating”; “Coregulation ‘for better or worse’: The transmission of positive and negative emotions in close relationships”
