self-care

In high school I had this one teacher who was kind of intense—he made too much eye contact and would sometimes jump in on student conversations, wanting to know the gossip—but he meant well, I think. Once I was standing in the lobby on a Friday afternoon, waiting for my friends after school. There was something I had to do but I remember I was really tired, slumped against the wall with the weight of my backpack pressed painfully against my spine. This teacher came up to me and struck up a conversation. He sensed something was off with me, and I said I was tired. He replied: “Why don’t you go home right now and just lie down and take a nap? Sometimes you just have to pause and give your body what it needs.”

Now when I think about “self-care,” I always come back to this earnest recommendation. I don’t consciously engage in self-care; I mostly use the gospel of self-care as an excuse or an explanation to wield when part of my brain makes me feel bad for spending all day watching TV or looking at Airbnbs for hypothetical trips. I mean, anything can be self-care if it makes you feel good.

(Spending hours scrolling through Reductress posts is self-care)

On the most recent episode of The Cut’s podcast, writer Evie Ebert discusses her envy of other people’s circumstances during the beginning of self-quarantine in March:

Of course I could be much worse off, but I was green with envy about people whose homes are much larger, who were living in better climates, maybe who had outdoor pools. And I had a real inclination to judge myself for becoming obsessed with who has it better basically. So I just was like, ‘No, this is part of my self-care practice: allowing myself to be annoyed by people.’

Ebert justified feeling envious and annoyed at other people by identifying her annoyance as a self-care practice. I think there is something to this. I like the idea of taking something that people might deem a negative or ‘unhealthy’ behavior, such as intentionally indulging in pure envy of someone else by just gawking at how beautiful their pool is or big their foyer is (or just the fact that they have a pool or a foyer), and accepting that it is a part of your wellbeing.

In her brilliant essay, “self care and the institution,” journalist Mary Retta describes the complexity of disliking the oil diffuser her aunt gifted her, despite its supposed capacity to be a self-care tool:

I was so hesitant to tell my friends I didn’t like my oil diffuser… because deep down I knew that if my version of self care cannot be curated, if it does not make me more beautiful or my aesthetic more pleasing, it is less valuable, and not worthy of speaking about.

In the multi-billion dollar industry that self-care has become, caring for your own physical and mental health is about face masks, yoga, meditation, and juice cleansing. It requires you to buy something to become the best version of yourself that you can be, and it tells you that you’re not caring for yourself if you don’t buy in.

Thus caring for yourself becomes one more thing on your to do list, something that you can accomplish if you have all the right tools. Capitalism trains us to think that any second not spent doing something to make money or spend money is a second wasted. It is inherently bad and more than that, allowing yourself to spend time like this makes you a bad person.

Listening to that same episode of The Cut’s podcast, I found myself struck by the advertisements in between segments. One second I’m listening to the host talk about celebrities’ tone-deafness, the next, I’m hearing her say, in a somber tone: “If you think you may be depressed…” in an ad for a therapy app. The ad ended with a recommendation to “get help today.”

The next ad was for a meal service of sorts:

When it comes to eating healthy, it’s not about what we take away from our bodies, but what we put in them. Sakara gets it. Rather than restricting your diet, their organic, ready-to-eat meals are all about nourishing your body to improve your overall wellness… along with delicious plant-based meals, Sakara also offers daily wellness essentials like supplements and herbal teas to support your nutrition. Like their best-selling metabolism super-powder, made with organic raw cacao. It works to boost energy, eliminating bloating, minimizing sugar cravings, and reduce fatigue. And right now, Sakara is offering our listeners 20% off…”

I rolled my eyes hard when I heard this. I find this ad particularly evil, along with most other wellness brand ads, because it preys off of the listener’s desire to speed up their metabolism, to eat less sugar, be less bloated and have more energy. All in the name of “wellness” and “support[ing] your nutrition.” As if that can be accomplished with a cacao powder. As if the underlying implication isn’t that these supplements will help you lose weight and feel lighter. It purports to be about “nourishing your body,” when in reality it’s still psychologically policing people—not just women, although The Cut does call itself a “site for women”—and the way we eat and move through the world in our bodies. That is not self-care.

Self-care is different for everyone. It helps me to see it as more of a frame of thought rather than another finite activity on my to do list, another thing to feel bad for not doing. I don’t want to allot time to rest just so that I can maximize productivity the rest of the time. Sometimes I just need to do nothing, like my teacher said.

Jenny Odell, artist and author of How to Do Nothing, offered a way of thinking about your days that I appreciated. When asked how she measures her days—if not by number of tasks completed, then how?—she replied:

One thing that is important to me is: was there a time in the day when you were fully aware of the fact that you're alive? Were there even five or ten minutes where I was able to drop out of the stream of productive time? A lot of time it's just closely observing something. If you're really lost in observing something, you lose yourself. You're just very aware of that thing and those are moments where it's like, ‘Oh right, this isn't just the same day over and over again. This is today. It's one of a finite number of days I will be alive.

I’m going to try to spend more time getting lost in something—whether that be a TV show, a stranger’s conversation on the street, or the story my sister is telling me on the phone. I’ll take the little moments that remind me I’m alive for what they are, and appreciate them. That’s self-care, right?