Selfish Care
This story references a Medium article by Deanna Zandt, titled “The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care”
“Do I know how to self-care?” I had to ask myself this a while back when I saw a comic on the internet by Deanna Zandt explaining in a more concise way what exactly self -care is, specifically in the context of a larger society. In her comic, she highlights how individuals often have to prioritize themselves in light of their marginalization and how self-care as a concept falls short of all the other kinds of care we need to be well-cared for. I began to realize the more practical meaning of self-care. It can look something like this: Your job or your family, or your boss who makes offensive jokes about your identity because he thinks he’s hilarious, is really getting you down personally (apart from the systemic ramifications). So, you find little ways to take care of yourself. That can be through actions like diverting funds to your own personal interests and enjoyment, taking time away from these people who drain you and make you feel terrible about yourself, or simply putting plans in motion to leave your racist, unsupportive workplace (parents, significant other, or landlord) in the dust. You might do this by saving up for a new place or seeking out a therapist who shares some of your identities to whom you can relate, or dumping your partner who refuses to share the physical and emotional labor load in your lives together in the ways that you need.
Self-Care, as I have come to understand it through that wonderful comic and other online discourse: is the process by which we provide for ourselves holistically in order to thrive. It can be a great thing but it is not the only way that we need or can receive care. Before knowing all this I would often feel shortchanged by my attempts to replicate others’ methods of self-care. As it turns out, the bubble baths and the overspending at Target and the buckets of iced coffee I was consuming did not make me feel cared for but more so distracted. These things by themselves did not cater to my needs. The author, Deanna Zandt gets at this idea of distraction vs. care in her comic by illustrating the difference between self-care and self-soothing; explaining that soothing denotes being “distracted”, like a hungry baby being given a pacifier instead of a bottle. “care”, on the other hand, more so means that we would provide “growth and groundedness” when we care for that baby. We feed it as soon as we can because we recognize that eating well and often is essential to their growth. We build that trusting relationship with them as their caregiver, by making sure their needs are met which will improve the relationship over time. Therefore, much like infants need to be cared for in order to develop trust in their caregivers, we as individuals also need to care for ourselves in order to have self-trust. We are that baby. We need to be able to count on ourselves as we are often our own primary caregivers. Despite knowing that I must care for myself, I learned that self-care cannot be a cure-all. Deanna discusses this in her comic and defines community care and structural care which work in tandem with self-care and self-soothing to create a whole picture of how an individual should be holistically cared for. The concepts of community care and structural care are not as easily sold via face-masks or cute loungewear, this fact speaks to their relevance in mainstream discussions about what self-care really means. Personally, I knew very little about these other terms let alone how they could be used to empower me. In the comic, she talks about how some facets of these four categories can be interchanged depending on the person and their specific needs but the important part is that we need all four to lead healthy lives. We can use face-masks and comfy clothes as self-care but we cannot override our need for long-term stability that things like healthy boundaries, access to financial and physical resources, and the social connection in our communities provide. Furthermore, very few of us can override the need for structural policies that ensure our basic needs like paid family leave, reliable and accessible public transport, and comprehensive free healthcare and education. After looking more deeply into what self-care could look like especially as it relates to the social ramifications, I slowly but surely began to learn that in order to practice good self-care you must know that it is not the end-all, be-all to solving life’s woes, if for no other reason than the fact that all our problems are not in our power to fix. Any random group of 20 individual people may be able to save enough to afford their medical bills and avoid bankruptcy but not all of any random group of 20 million individual people can. And certainly, not all of the 328.2 million people that live in the US can. Similarly, you, unfortunately, cannot journal away micro (macro) aggressions that are justified in company culture and you can’t burn away the icky feeling from over-giving to loved ones and resenting it, with a hot bath and Epsom salt. Self-care is knowing what not to do in the present as much as it is damage control for the effects of the past. Self-care means knowing what is in your power to do all by yourself and what isn’t.
Zandt recognizes in her notes on the article featuring this comic that too much of any one thing can be detrimental and that one of these types of care cannot fully compensate for the absence of another. For instance: Structural and Community care often contain the long-term solutions we need and seek from self-care and self-soothing. I often found myself putting an incredible amount of pressure on myself to do self-care exactly right to avoid being dependent on any kind of community or structure. If I didn’t have time to do an exhaustive journaling session about everything on my mind (like one might do in therapy) I often found that I wouldn’t do it at all and would instead hold on to that tension way past the point when my neck and shoulders started aching. In Zandt’s comic, she includes things like healthcare where one would access therapy, under community and structural care. For me when putting off journaling or chalking up my failure to do so as a personal failure it rarely used to occur to me that my lack of access to affordable mental health care was a result of the breakdown of the community and structures around me. When I was provided with access to a therapist, I saw that there were things I could not have known how to fix myself. While journaling certainly acted as an effective and poignant method of self-care for me, I had to recognize that I could not battle my mental health issues successfully without some kind of long-term help. Whether that meant reaching out to reliable friends and family for support (community) or using my limited healthcare and financial resources to find a good and accessible therapist (structure) I had to learn through trial and error that it was not just up to me to solve all my problems. Some problems I didn’t even recognize as such until I started fixing the things around them. Strangely enough, the more I recognized this interlocking of the concepts of care, the more I realized that I still have much more power than I thought I did when I believed everything was up to me. Using things like journaling to fill the gaps of therapy rather than replace it helped me feel like the self-care I was doing was actually making a dent rather than staving off the worst.
In terms of power, as it relates to self-care, an important part of using it as an actually helpful tool is to recognize that you have to make time to do it. As I mentioned before I used to be very bad about holding things in until it became emotionally debilitating. I wouldn’t want to take the time to journal, meditate, or do anything I knew would give me relief. I didn’t want the responsibility of managing my mental health. I was often under the delusion that no one else really had to, to the extent that I did. And I felt guilty for adding more to my metaphorical plate. Needing even those things or anything felt weak (as if I wasn’t already immobilized in bed, right?). Ignoring my self-care responsibilities or deciding that something wasn’t bad enough yet to take action caused the stress of my daily life to build up and eventually avalanche over everything else, preventing me from having enough energy for hardly anything. Avoiding getting caught in the emotional deluge that is high functioning mental illness means that I need to do self-care often. It’s easy to blow off yoga or journaling or eating when I feel like there are so many other things I feel I have to worry about almost all the time. They seem like trifles, luxuries. However, not holding myself accountable for doing it regularly means I won’t have the staying power to outrun the avalanche (not to mention prevent or lessen it) which is going to demoralize me that much more when it catches up. Some key signs of the avalanche look like this: My loved ones start to seem especially irritating and ambivalent about my problems. I feel shorted in my close relationships. I withdrawal from receiving help. I tend to treat myself poorly. And if you’re anything like me, when you inevitably close yourself off from everyone because you feel wronged you may realize that by neglecting to take care of yourself, you were wronged — by you. That isn’t to say that your friend wasn’t being inconsiderate or that your mother in law isn’t insensitive but it is to say that by not establishing boundaries with them and by not taking time out to actually do loving things for yourself when you can, you begin to feel unloved more so than if you were only being neglected by others. A hard lesson I’m still learning is that in order to feel completely loved I still have to love myself. That work is for me. I don’t mean that as some fake deep platitude like “love yourself or no one else will” because I don’t believe that or think that’s true. Everyone deserves love whether or not they can “love themselves” through the struggle of being communally or systemically deprived. I do feel though, that in order to be properly and fully loved that you yourself must complete the circle, we can’t wait for others to connect the ends for us. I’m learning that I can’t rely on others to fill every single one of my needs. I certainly can’t expect them to know what my needs are without me telling them or them even knowing me enough to know what those things are for me. If my community is to help me, I have to allow myself to be connected to them. I have to accept that I need help. By holding ourselves accountable to self-care and self-love we can more easily hold people accountable for not treating us with the love we deserve when they are clearly fucking up. I also find that it is easier to discern feeling unloved and actually being unloved when you learn how to regularly acquaint yourself with what love looks like.
For the last month or so one life-saving piece of self-care I’ve done for myself is to make sure I go outside every day and get whatever sunlight is available. I sit in my car with the AC on or I go for a walk or I just stand in the driveway for a few minutes watching the squirrels and people walking their dogs. The immobilizing feelings pass. Not all at once but bit by bit, while I’m writing in my journal or feeling the sun on my face or sipping an ice-cold coffee real slow. I used to think self-care was about burying the bad feelings and ignoring everything that made me feel shitty and pretending nothing bothered me. I used to think it was about being invincible, about being perfect. Having perfectly manicured hands and feet, having perfect skin, wearing perfect clothes, and letting anyone who got too close to hurt you know that you didn’t need them — that you never needed them. I recognize that’s a bit severe. But, as explained by Deanna’s comic, self-care is a way to fill in the gaps not deny that they exist. The idea of only worrying about or needing myself was very appealing to me. Having to fend for yourself for years gets addictive. There’s something very satisfying and safe about the thought of providing everything effortlessly; I assumed I’d get better at being perfect with practice. Looking at it this way knowing what I know now, deciding to not need anyone seems like a petulant, embarrassing way to think. Like the slightly more evolved thoughts of a toddler who yanks their shoestrings away from you to tie their shoes themselves only to tangle them so absolutely, they can’t undo them. Except even most toddlers will eventually come to their senses, let you help, and just take credit for doing it themselves anyway. I’m learning to not ignore the gaps and not be so attached to getting all the credit.
Natalia is a writer, aspiring to write professionally and currently blogging @ theproblemwithlemons.wordpress.com. Click Here for more of her work.
