The world is burning, do I still deserve my Iced Matcha Latte? The news is too disturbing, should I just switch it off and do some skincare to relax? We’re here to have a good time, why bring up politics and ruin the night? I could go on forever about the dichotomies in daily lives – and a choice at every step: to ignore or to engage. We’re familiar with these black-and-white choices that sneak their way into unassuming places. Nuance has officially left the chat. So now we find ourselves in a world more polarized than ever, where our choices reflect more than our individual whims but larger systemic constructs that are insidiously at play (whether we choose to acknowledge them or not). But why do I care, not like it’s affecting me in any way, right?
What we know about self-care
Ah, if it isn’t scented bath bubbles or overpriced coffee from the fancy cafe we think of when we think of self-care. What does self-care mean anyway? If you listen to the 2024 (self-proclaimed) self-help “experts”, the TLDR for self-care is: don’t worry, be happy. The fix to that becomes straightforward when we skip the complexities and use a very simple formula: happiness = self-care and self-care = capitalism, It’s no wonder that we are left with no appetite for the ugly or uncomfortable, the messy and the miserable parts of our world when self-care can only be aesthetic and pretty, just like our feelings (no “bad” parts allowed here, sorry).
Activism VS self care
So naturally, when we talk of activism, it can only come to mean being angry, protesting on the streets and if not, ruining every dinner party conversation because someone was feeling a little bit “touchy-feely that night”, right? Activism (by which I refer to not simply political activism but the part of us that chooses to remain active and engaged with the world) stands in direct contrast to what we know and think about self-care. It’s not glamorous, not endorsed by the people and institutions we look up to – so there goes external validation out of the window and it’s not even… fun. So what’s the point of making yourself feel miserable, and feel negative about the whole world when you just have to look the other way to find out that there are some places where nothing hurts? Self-care = hacked. In the battle between self-care and activism, the former wins by miles.
But… what if?
But what if self-care and activism aren’t two dichotomies after all, but rather, two sides of the same coin? What if activism IS self-care? At least one of the many forms of it, but when being happy can be easily correlated with taking care of yourself, it may be hard to think of other ways that can represent looking out for yourself that aren’t all about gratification. To even entertain this seemingly wild idea, let’s take a step back from all the capitalistic, hedonistic and simplistic notions of self-care we have and look at what the ‘self’ even is.
Who looks back at you when you look into the mirror?
Bear with us as we get a little meta for a second…Is your self just the self you see in isolation in the present moment? Is the self it-self without any context to its being? Our ideas of who we are are so generously adopted from individualistic and one-dimensional notions that our histories, eccentricities and complexities are erased in favour of palatable, well-assimilated cookie-cutter versions of individuals. Is self-care only caring about that one part? What of our collective selves that thrive in communities and fight to protect them, of our ideological selves that hold our values and hopes and demand to live through them and of our whole selves that lie on various intersections of positionality in society, are they not worthy of self-care? The self is inextricably woven into the fabric of the world and people, it cannot be decontextualised.
To clarify, this isn’t about making you a revolutionary but rather to revolutionize what we think of self-care and mental health. Per the previous logic, mental health would mean seeking only happiness and avoiding all other “negative” emotions. We’re trying to widen the narrative of what taking care of your-self can look like. Your therapist would tell you in response why there is a whole wheel of emotions in the first place, and not just one big yellow blob called happiness.
Is this not self-care?
Think back to June of 1929, when New York City found itself in the grips of riots and unrest. On the outside, one might say it’s best not to get involved in such volatile situations. But what of the young queer person who had just heard about the happenings at Stonewall Inn, where the police raided LGBTQ+ gatherings and arrested people for merely exercising their freedom? What did self-care look like then? Turning the news off or showing up? The Pride parades we celebrate today wouldn’t have been a cause for celebration if it weren’t for the self-care that transcended the narrow ideas of the “self”. Or the suffragette movement, the 1857 uprising, the climate movement today, the list goes on. So the question is then: how can we talk about mental health without talking about the world? And what is the world if not our collective self?
Redefining self-care
While we’re talking about all these various spectrums of self-care, it’s important to highlight that this is not to demonize taking a step back when you need to or force yourself into engaging when you can’t. Some days you cannot and there is power in acknowledging that too. This also isn’t a holier-than-thou lecture on how to be a better human but just to show that you can show up for yourself and your mental health in more than just one way. By all means, have your face masks and iced matcha lattes (you do deserve it) while also knowing that your inner world is much more complex than over-the-counter luxuries used to placate our feelings in a sometimes hopeless world.
Making sense of a broken world
One might argue, isn’t the world always burning? Isn’t it the end of the world every time something goes wrong, given we are fully capable of that? To which I’d say, fair, in some way or the other it is and I’m sorry for having no warm fuzzy words this time. I guess we kintsugi the shit out of this world we’re handed and maybe our revolution is to patch it, and this time not just to just make it look good but also so it can work, hold more than just what comes easy and be robust enough that no matter how many times it shatters, we don’t let it break.