I recently came across an Instagram reel that talked about the connection between self-care consumerism as a tool systems in power utilise to distract women from continuing to fight against those systems.
This is such a valuable contribution to the conversation. The academy can be a stark and harmful place for women and people of color. I hadn’t thought to view it through Lorde’s self-care, but now I can’t unsee it. The empty preaching of work-life balance when there’s no room for such, or even sending students to counseling to get patched up after being abused by supervisors, aren’t real self-care, they mask the environment’s corrosive aspects. Finding deeper self-care in such spaces is indeed radical.
Thank you for engaging! very glad this post provided an additional perspective that is often overlooked, and I couldn’t agree more with your point about how the academy often preaches work life-balance (touting writing retreats, “social” events and the like) and yet this is often unmatched with actual progressive and sustainable change. The abuse and abusive environments seem unrelenting, and not because they can’t be changed/improved but simply because there hasn’t been real effort to remedy the problems. And still being able to find (make) time for self in all this, especially as a woman and person of colour is imperative for our survival, so so imperative. Thanks again for reading!
When I saw the video you referenced, I felt like “finally, people are having this conversation.” I have a lot of ideas about this conversation but one of the very first that comes to mind, as a black African woman, is what is “taking care of myself” when my people are not well? Is it not selfish to be so deeply concerned about the self when my community is not well? This is a concept I’ve come across when reading about mothers in African literature written by the African women. And I deeply resonated with it because of my view on consumerism, not necessarily from my life as an African woman myself. When people talk about “self care” and that “self care” is in the form of a purchased product, I often challenge people to look at the full product line of whatever it is they have purchased. I can guarantee that something in that product has come from the exploitation of another woman of color somewhere across the world. And that should bother us all. That should bother us deeply. But it doesn’t, because inherently “self” is the opposite of a collective and “self” has been marketed to us under the idea of “if you don’t take care of self, how do you pour into another’s glass” but what people don’t seem to realize is in a hyper consumeristic world, the catch is most of us will only ever have enough to only get to the first part of the statement, take care of the self. By the time you’ve done that, you’re in need of more money to survive, so we don’t always get to the “pouring into another’s glass” part.
Thank you for taking the time to read. You raise very interesting points. You’re right, exploitation is often deeply engrained in the the production of products and experiences that are then marketed towards the wider populace as “self-care”, which as you pointed to isnt discussed enough if at all. In confronting not only our consumerism and overconsumption habits it remains important still to question whose lives may have been disrupted and harmed to bring us the “luxuries” or “self-care” practices that we engage in/with. I believe that true self care must be conscientious at its heart, always, and caring for ourselves must include questioning those practices and who they exploited in order for that product or experience “to be”. Our self care cannot and should not be detached from our ethos (be it as individuals or as a community) and I think fundamentally how we go about engaging with such practices must stay rooted in the questions we ask and the ways in which we choose to spend our currencies (if the self care we choose to engage in is in the form of a purchased product), like buying chocolate from a company known for exploiting their cocoa farmers in western Africa or roses/tea imported from eastern Africa or where workers from those regions are being exploited in parts of Europe for farming certain flowers, or the women exploited in south Asia for the production of human hair wigs. These questions are so important and I’m very glad you brought up the consideration of exploitation and its connection with purchased self care. Where you talk about self-care having the propensity to center “self” at the detriment of wider community, I think it can be linked back to Anna’s (another commenter here) perspective on the way self care can be peddled as hyper individualistic rather than looking at it as a community practice, I agree with you both. However, I also we might consider in tandem that it needn't be strictly one or the other, that if you care for yourself that means you aren’t caring for your community or vise versa. What if in some instances caring for yourself is exactly what may be needed to care for your community? (again if we take self care out of the lens of a purchased product, might it mean making time for sleep/rest?, taking a walk to clear your head?) or perhaps not, perhaps caring for community is exactly what will fill your cup while you tend to your community, or perhaps even thinking about filling your cup at all is intrinsically selfish. And I suppose it could then open the discussion to is all selfishness morally wrong? To be honest, I don’t have the answers for these questions at a wider level, but I think self-care or community care, can be and should be whatever it means to each individual or community values. And as you rightly noted sometimes in this hyper consumeristic world, in the pursuit of self care incredible amounts of money may already have been spent, leaving you with little to forge ahead or even think back to the community. In all, I think a possible solution is to keep self-care as a conscientious practice, to continually question, pause and think about what it means to us (questioning individually or within our communities) and whether we actually wish to partake, whether to us its an individual based practice or a community led one. Thanks again for engaging! it really made me think critically about the role of exploitation in purchased self-care as well as how the “self” in self care can become again hyperindividualistic.
Thank you for this. The distinction between self-care as consumerism and self-care as political survival is exactly the conversation we need to be having.
Living between countries has taught me something about this. In the Netherlands, one of the most hyper-individualistic societies in Europe, self-care was everywhere as a consumer practice and community was almost entirely absent. You could be surrounded by people and profoundly alone. Then I came to Brazil, where community appears spontaneously, in the street, in the neighbourhood, in the way people move through shared space, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't known was tight.
That is self-care too. Not purchased. Not individual. Just the radical act of being held by people around you.
Which connects back to Lorde for me. Her radical self-care was never about the individual body in isolation. It was about sustaining yourself enough to keep showing up for collective struggle. Community is not separate from that practice. For many of us, it is the practice.
Thank you for this beautiful comment and for reading!
Self-care as being in community with others is also an incredibly relevant perspective to the discussion of self-care. Its interesting to see how different cultures approach it and what importance is given to forming and maintaining community as an integral part of sustaining well-being. And I am very glad you got to experience that lightness and loosening in your chest! We often don’t know what may be missing until we experience something new to us.
And exactly that! How self-care becomes synonymous for purchased and individualistic modes of care, I love how you connect Lorde’s view to building and being in community. It remains important in hyper-consumeristic and hyper-individualistic spaces to continually question what ‘care’ and ‘self-care’ mean beyond societal messaging and to consciously seek more sustainable ways of being, individually, through community and/or both.
Oh my god this is absolutely brilliant! Thank you for writing this and giving that reel so much thought. You’re keeping the conversation going in such a meaningful way! I would love to read the pieces you cite here, and I especially like the critical thought on race
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and engage thoughtfully with this piece! And thank you for your original work that inspired my thoughts! I’m so glad I was able to contribute in some way to the conversations. I hope you enjoy the other readings.
This is such a valuable contribution to the conversation. The academy can be a stark and harmful place for women and people of color. I hadn’t thought to view it through Lorde’s self-care, but now I can’t unsee it. The empty preaching of work-life balance when there’s no room for such, or even sending students to counseling to get patched up after being abused by supervisors, aren’t real self-care, they mask the environment’s corrosive aspects. Finding deeper self-care in such spaces is indeed radical.
Thank you for engaging! very glad this post provided an additional perspective that is often overlooked, and I couldn’t agree more with your point about how the academy often preaches work life-balance (touting writing retreats, “social” events and the like) and yet this is often unmatched with actual progressive and sustainable change. The abuse and abusive environments seem unrelenting, and not because they can’t be changed/improved but simply because there hasn’t been real effort to remedy the problems. And still being able to find (make) time for self in all this, especially as a woman and person of colour is imperative for our survival, so so imperative. Thanks again for reading!
When I saw the video you referenced, I felt like “finally, people are having this conversation.” I have a lot of ideas about this conversation but one of the very first that comes to mind, as a black African woman, is what is “taking care of myself” when my people are not well? Is it not selfish to be so deeply concerned about the self when my community is not well? This is a concept I’ve come across when reading about mothers in African literature written by the African women. And I deeply resonated with it because of my view on consumerism, not necessarily from my life as an African woman myself. When people talk about “self care” and that “self care” is in the form of a purchased product, I often challenge people to look at the full product line of whatever it is they have purchased. I can guarantee that something in that product has come from the exploitation of another woman of color somewhere across the world. And that should bother us all. That should bother us deeply. But it doesn’t, because inherently “self” is the opposite of a collective and “self” has been marketed to us under the idea of “if you don’t take care of self, how do you pour into another’s glass” but what people don’t seem to realize is in a hyper consumeristic world, the catch is most of us will only ever have enough to only get to the first part of the statement, take care of the self. By the time you’ve done that, you’re in need of more money to survive, so we don’t always get to the “pouring into another’s glass” part.
Thank you for taking the time to read. You raise very interesting points. You’re right, exploitation is often deeply engrained in the the production of products and experiences that are then marketed towards the wider populace as “self-care”, which as you pointed to isnt discussed enough if at all. In confronting not only our consumerism and overconsumption habits it remains important still to question whose lives may have been disrupted and harmed to bring us the “luxuries” or “self-care” practices that we engage in/with. I believe that true self care must be conscientious at its heart, always, and caring for ourselves must include questioning those practices and who they exploited in order for that product or experience “to be”. Our self care cannot and should not be detached from our ethos (be it as individuals or as a community) and I think fundamentally how we go about engaging with such practices must stay rooted in the questions we ask and the ways in which we choose to spend our currencies (if the self care we choose to engage in is in the form of a purchased product), like buying chocolate from a company known for exploiting their cocoa farmers in western Africa or roses/tea imported from eastern Africa or where workers from those regions are being exploited in parts of Europe for farming certain flowers, or the women exploited in south Asia for the production of human hair wigs. These questions are so important and I’m very glad you brought up the consideration of exploitation and its connection with purchased self care. Where you talk about self-care having the propensity to center “self” at the detriment of wider community, I think it can be linked back to Anna’s (another commenter here) perspective on the way self care can be peddled as hyper individualistic rather than looking at it as a community practice, I agree with you both. However, I also we might consider in tandem that it needn't be strictly one or the other, that if you care for yourself that means you aren’t caring for your community or vise versa. What if in some instances caring for yourself is exactly what may be needed to care for your community? (again if we take self care out of the lens of a purchased product, might it mean making time for sleep/rest?, taking a walk to clear your head?) or perhaps not, perhaps caring for community is exactly what will fill your cup while you tend to your community, or perhaps even thinking about filling your cup at all is intrinsically selfish. And I suppose it could then open the discussion to is all selfishness morally wrong? To be honest, I don’t have the answers for these questions at a wider level, but I think self-care or community care, can be and should be whatever it means to each individual or community values. And as you rightly noted sometimes in this hyper consumeristic world, in the pursuit of self care incredible amounts of money may already have been spent, leaving you with little to forge ahead or even think back to the community. In all, I think a possible solution is to keep self-care as a conscientious practice, to continually question, pause and think about what it means to us (questioning individually or within our communities) and whether we actually wish to partake, whether to us its an individual based practice or a community led one. Thanks again for engaging! it really made me think critically about the role of exploitation in purchased self-care as well as how the “self” in self care can become again hyperindividualistic.
Thank you for this. The distinction between self-care as consumerism and self-care as political survival is exactly the conversation we need to be having.
Living between countries has taught me something about this. In the Netherlands, one of the most hyper-individualistic societies in Europe, self-care was everywhere as a consumer practice and community was almost entirely absent. You could be surrounded by people and profoundly alone. Then I came to Brazil, where community appears spontaneously, in the street, in the neighbourhood, in the way people move through shared space, and I felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't known was tight.
That is self-care too. Not purchased. Not individual. Just the radical act of being held by people around you.
Which connects back to Lorde for me. Her radical self-care was never about the individual body in isolation. It was about sustaining yourself enough to keep showing up for collective struggle. Community is not separate from that practice. For many of us, it is the practice.
Thank you for this beautiful comment and for reading!
Self-care as being in community with others is also an incredibly relevant perspective to the discussion of self-care. Its interesting to see how different cultures approach it and what importance is given to forming and maintaining community as an integral part of sustaining well-being. And I am very glad you got to experience that lightness and loosening in your chest! We often don’t know what may be missing until we experience something new to us.
And exactly that! How self-care becomes synonymous for purchased and individualistic modes of care, I love how you connect Lorde’s view to building and being in community. It remains important in hyper-consumeristic and hyper-individualistic spaces to continually question what ‘care’ and ‘self-care’ mean beyond societal messaging and to consciously seek more sustainable ways of being, individually, through community and/or both.
Oh my god this is absolutely brilliant! Thank you for writing this and giving that reel so much thought. You’re keeping the conversation going in such a meaningful way! I would love to read the pieces you cite here, and I especially like the critical thought on race
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and engage thoughtfully with this piece! And thank you for your original work that inspired my thoughts! I’m so glad I was able to contribute in some way to the conversations. I hope you enjoy the other readings.