Self-care criticism
Taking time to care for yourself is needed. Even if that means canceling plans or withdrawing socially for a while.
It just means you’re taking time so you can be at your best later! It’s not fair to you if you’re not feeling good and people still expect things from you.
Your friends and loved ones care if you’re not feeling well. They can’t know if you don’t communicate.
Ask friends and loved ones if you have access. If not, don’t be afraid to reach out in online communities or look up other resources.
Exhaustion isn’t a goal. Mental breakdowns from being overworked should not be glamorized. Balance and inner peace should be.
Surround yourself with positive energy either alone or with friends. There is no set way to do self care.
Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.
It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.
Like so many other concepts built for the resistance and preservation of marginalized people, self-care has been appropriated for mainstream culture.
The narrative goes something like this: Take 15 minutes for yoga or meditation. Drink a glass of wine and watch a movie. Take a bubble bath.
And while these proposals aren’t bad, this self-care narrative does nothing more than put a band-aid on the problematic way our culture treats work and productivity.
Radical self-care, like radical self-love, pushes against the boundaries of the ordinary. It is robust, proactive, and unconditional. It is genuinely radical – it gets to the root of our bodies, hearts, and minds.
So instead of taking random bubble baths and watching TV, I pushed myself to go for runs, even if I could only make it a few minutes without a break. I wrote bad poetry. I laid in bed and listened to loud music with my eyes closed, and I didn’t let myself fold the laundry or do the dishes while I did it. I met up with new friends and pushed myself to be open and honest and vulnerable and to have fun. I didn’t do these things to be a better worker or a better activist or for the approval of others. I did them because I wanted to. It was really that simple.
Feeling bad all day, every day, is exhausting. It’s not good for your body, or your heart, or your psyche. So when I reach day 3 of feeling sad and terrible, I force-feed myself pleasure, even though depression sucks all desire for fun and pleasure out of you.
Self-care can be completely terrible. Self-care includes a lot of adult-ing, and activities you want to put off indefinitely. Self-care sometimes means making tough decisions which you fear others will judge. Self-care involves asking for help; it involves vulnerability; it involves being painfully honest with yourself and your loved ones about what you need.
The other thing nobody tells you about self-care is that it’s nearly impossible to know if you’re doing it right, until months later when you either find yourself feeling better or shittier.
Recovery means hard, honest conversations with your loved ones about what you need, and what you don’t need. It also means doing your best to love and support the people who are loving and supporting you, at the very least on your good days.
Taking care of your relationships when you’re depressed or anxious can be hard. Not always, but sometimes. I am finding the only way to do this is through open, honest, direct communication.