I shared this reflection on August 8, 2020 at Community Christian Church as a response to the commodification of self-care, the federal government's continued mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impacts on vulnerable populations, especially essential workers. It is lightly edited.
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I have a difficult relationship with the term self-care. On the one hand, it’s been wonderful seeing self-care become more widely discussed and appreciated. In many cases, it’s become part of our everyday conversations with each other, and there’s more acceptance than ever that self-care is not only legitimate, it is essential to both personal and social well-being. On the other hand, self-care has become (predictably) commodified, and self-care is increasingly discussed in terms that have a price tag in time, money, and resources that (also predictably) make it mainly available to those with the privilege of financial and social stability. Self-care is also increasingly weaponized against people, such as working class folks, who are told that they need to do a better job of self-care so that they can endure what are essentially unhealthy, unjust working conditions. But the goal of self-care is not to become better at accommodating injustice. Self-Care in the Time of COVID-19
When it comes to self-care, COVID-19 has intensified both the needs and the concerns. There’s a proliferation of web pages and news programs about how self-care can help you get through the pandemic, such as these words from the Mayo Clinic:
"The COVID-19 pandemic can feel overwhelming due to new information, long work hours, and caring for your family and yourself. It's important to pause for a moment and collect your thoughts, as worldwide pandemics can be taxing. Remaining calm can help. / It is normal to feel stressed or overwhelmed during uncertain times. Emotions in response to uncertainty may include anxiety, fear, anger and sadness. You also could feel helpless, discouraged and, occasionally, out of control. Physical responses may include headache, muscle tension, fatigue and sleeplessness. / Taking care of yourself is important so you are equipped to help your family through this time.” (https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/self-care-tips-during-the-covid-19-pandemic )
The page goes on to list strategies for supporting your physical and mental health, symptoms to watch out for, and links to other pages, including one for helping children cope with the pandemic.
And it appears that this is exactly what people are doing. Last May, the Harris Poll surveyed over 2,000 adults who reported doing many of the types of things that show up on those self-care lists: doing creative activities, praying, having meaningful conversations, using technology to stay connected in new ways, spending time outside, and eating healthy foods. But that is not all the survey revealed. It also described that, despite all the self-care, people are generally struggling with the uncertainty of living in a global pandemic. 46% said they are having difficulty maintaining “their whole health (i.e., physical, mental, and spiritual health)”. I suspect none of this will come as a surprise, but 30% reported a lack of energy, 29% were having trouble sleeping, and 29% were “exercising less”. Moreover, 45% “of all U.S. adults say they have failed to get preventive healthcare (e.g., wellness visits, standard vaccinations, screenings, etc.) during the pandemic.” (https://drwaynejonas.com/covidsurvey/ )
These survey results fit with the words of the Mayo Clinic, who told us that, during a global pandemic, “You also could feel helpless, discouraged and, occasionally, out of control.” What they didn’t mention is that it is reasonable to feel that way when:
- The US economy “contracted at a 32.9% annual rate” in the second quarter and the nation “is still down nearly 15 million jobs since February” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/economy/us-economy-2020-second-quarter/index.html );
- 40% of renters in the USA are facing eviction (https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/07/28/report-more-than-40-of-us-renter-households-are-at-risk-of-eviction-infographic/ ); and
- “more than 10 million Americans are expected to lose employer-sponsored health coverage between April and December 2020” (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lost-health-insurance-coronavirus-pandemic-125934943.html ).
Heroism or Human Sacrifice?
I mentioned that self-care is also being weaponized against us. In particular, people experiencing unhealthy and unsustainable circumstances are often being asked to do extra work, at their own expense of time, money, and energy, in order to accommodate those who profit from not providing humane conditions at work or in society. In this way, the powers that be encourage self-care as a way to prop up unjust systems, allowing them to survive while avoiding accountability for exploitative practices. But the pandemic is pushing even this to absurd extremes.
Kim Kelly, writing in April 2020 for the Washington Post, summed up the situation well with the headline:
“Essential workers don’t need our praise. They need our help. Calling essential workers ‘heroes’ makes it easier to pretend that they signed up to sacrifice themselves for the rest of us.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/essential-workers-dont-need-our-praise-they-need-our-help/ )
Like with so many other issues, the United States’ mishandling of the pandemic hasn’t created a new problem in this regard, but it is most certainly amplifying these problems. Our economy has a long history of mistreating and exploiting workers, with poor working conditions and poor pay leading to misery and death. COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that this philosophy and practice has not changed. In the absence of adequate social infrastructure, we have created a situation where it is somehow considered acceptable, necessary, and even prudent to demand that a significant portion of the workforce, as Kelly put it, to “sacrifice themselves for the rest of us.”
Kelly reminds us that essential workers have always been essential and that “they deserve every iota of praise, especially since so many of them are normally ignored or quietly exploited.” But she also rightly insists that -
“Calling them ‘heroes’ allows those of us who are, unlike them, privileged enough to remain home to imagine that these workers agreed to serve as human sacrifices, that there is an inherent nobility in the risks they’re taking. It gives us a chance to ignore the rotten, hazardous conditions that have been allowed to fester thanks to capitalist cruelty and federal malfeasance, and absolve us of any complicity. But most of these workers didn’t sign up to be first responders, and are now overwhelmed by the magnitude of what’s being asked of them. They keep telling us that they don’t want compliments, they want help, but we have continued to fail them.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/essential-workers-dont-need-our-praise-they-need-our-help/ )
This is a familiar refrain, and it is inexcusable that it continues to be ignored by our society. Last May, Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and researcher in New York City, described his own experiences in the New Yorker. Even as infection rates began to slow, he noticed that essential workers were being required to “expose themselves and their families” to COVID-19 every day, and they were paying the price in higher infection rates. He wrote:
“We’re now debating whether it’s safe to reopen the economy, but for essential workers it never closed. Each morning, during the apex of the deadliest pandemic in a century, these men and women have been venturing out into the epicenter of disease, to cook and clean, deliver food and carry mail, drive buses and stock shelves, patrol the streets and tend to the ill. Many have paid with their health—some with their lives. / It’s becoming clear that essential workers experience a disproportionate share of death and disease owing to covid-19. During one week not long ago, I cared for a police officer, a grocery-store clerk, and a bus driver. During another, my clinical service of fifteen patients included three food deliverymen. (The last time I can recall caring for a delivery worker was more than two years ago: his leg was broken after he was hit by an S.U.V. at a busy Manhattan intersection.)”
Dr. Khullar went on to point out the systemic racism at work, as 75% of New York City’s essential workers are people of color. (https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/the-essential-workers-filling-new-yorks-coronavirus-wards )
The narrative about heroism and the noble sacrifice allows us to avoid this reality, to hide from the rampant racism, classism, disablism, and other oppressive systems that so deeply characterize our society. Hiding behind this image of heroism, we turn away from one another, refuse to understand what is actually happening, and comfort ourselves that all of this is somehow okay. What does – what can? - self-care mean in the context of such disparities and injustice?
Who Is in the Room?
From time to time, I have given workshops on this topic of reclaiming self and community care. And I begin with questions like these, to get an idea of where people are coming from. I’ll ask:
- What connotation does self-care have to you?
- What words do you associate with self-care?
- What are some popular strategies?
- Are there any patterns to these answers?
- Why do we need self-care in the first place?
Part of this is an issue of definitions. When self-care became commodified, an opportunity to make profit, our popular associations of care were largely reduced to bubble baths, spa days, and luxury resorts. Self-care became about some justifiable pampering; we needed to remember that it was okay to spend some money on ourselves and indulge in some guilty pleasures.
But, with these connotations, it’s no wonder that people from oppressed communities have been largely alienated. As Andre Spicer has written, “This once radical idea is being stripped of its politics to make it more palatable to a mass market. As this happens, the central insights associated with self-care may well get lost.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/21/self-care-radical-feminist-idea-mass-market ) Self-care as consumption just creates a further gulf between those who can afford to spend time, money, and energy on products and experiences, and those who cannot. The result is that self-care now has an accessibility problem, and self-care as consumption reinforces oppressive systems, especially along ability status, economic, and racial lines.
The commodification and weaponization of self-care work in favor of the status quo, and the status quo is a social system that relies on and perpetuates injustice. Further, people are so busy surviving that there isn’t much leftover to invest in social change. It is no accident that unhealthy, unsustainable, and unjust work and life conditions serve to both perpetuate oppressive systems and cultures AND leave those most impacted with the least access to time, resources, safety, and energy to devote to movement building.
From Self-Care to Social Justice
But the roots of self-care in social justice movements are much more liberating. As Audre Lorde taught us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” (https://actbuildchange.com/books/a-burst-of-light/ ) When we reclaim self and community care, we find that it is about surviving and resisting injustice, so we can stay in the fight and bring about change. Self-care is an act of defiance against a society that says we exist only to prop up unjust systems, and this defiance dares to envision a world where everyone’s well-being is important and where everyone’s needs can be met. Because, in a healthy, functioning society, self-care is integrated into its habits, relationships, organizations, and culture. You wouldn’t need anything special, except in cases of crisis, trauma, or disaster. Self-care would be the norm, and resources would be abundantly available for when those times of crisis did arise.
So, with the commodification and weaponization of self-care, we’ve begun to shift our language to community care. This is meant to bring our attention back to the ways that self and community care have been, and can be, radical expressions of resistance - of our insistence to survive, persist, and organize in the face of direct, structural, and cultural violence. This reclamation can in itself be a radical act: building social capital, cultivating community, redistributing resources, modeling partnership (against domination), and making organizing more resilient, sustainable, and just.
And this is how I’d like to see more people re-envisioning community care, especially for those of us in positions of relative power and privilege. We can leverage the growing acceptance and popularity of the self-care movement, even one oriented around consumption, to make self-care more accessible to people who belong to marginalized and oppressed communities.
Over the years, I’ve collected a few working principles for supporting this kind of shift.
1. Both activism and taking a break can be expressions of self and community care, especially for people from marginalized and oppressed communities, and our strategies need to include room for both.
I start here because sometimes, in our enthusiasm, we create pressures and expectations on ourselves that contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue. Sometimes, my activism is exactly what I need to help me channel my anger and feel empowered. At other times, I need to step away and process my emotions and experiences. I don’t step away often, but I might take a break more regularly if our movements were set up in a more sustainable way, so that activism included encouraging and supporting self care.
2. Self-care should flow out of and embody values and aspirations.
Though sometimes characterized as selfish, self and community care connect us to our deepest understandings of love and justice. Identifying those needs and aspirations can bring clarity and be empowering. As we continue to build and adapt our movements for social change, we need to dream and plan: what kind of world are we creating? What will our communities look and feel like? How do we want to be treated and how will we treat others? We can design self and community care practices that move us in the direction of our dreams and begin to make those values and aspirations a reality.
3. Because an unjust society profits from our lack of self-care, making us more vulnerable to exploitation, we need to integrate both accountability and support for decisions related to our well-being.
Especially for any of us who belong to marginalized communities, we have typically been well-trained in neglecting our own well-being. Surviving this present moment is often a more pressing task. Radical self-love and self-care need to be normalized, including both 1) the legitimacy and necessity of taking care of ourselves and 2) the methods and resources for doing so. And if you happen to have extra resources, you can contribute to this change in social norms by directly supporting marginalized communities.
4. Self-care strategies should be flexible and will change over time as our circumstances and needs change. This means that reflective practices are often essential.
I hope that this is an obvious one. Care will look different to different people at different times. But I’ve witnessed some self-care shaming at times, and that hurts us all. Additionally, we need to remember that self-care practices are often culturally defined, so that we can treat these kinds of conversations and one another with respect. As we go along, we can learn how to best support one another to better identify our needs, so that we can each choose the self-care practices that are most likely to meet our needs in healing and empowering ways.
5. We don't have to judge ourselves for using coping mechanisms that we understand are not sustainable for the long-term. However, we can become intentional about replacing strategies that are helpful in the short term but maladpative over time.
This is another area where there is often self-care shaming, but that ultimately undermines the whole point of self-care. We probably all have coping strategies that, if they became habits, wouldn't be healthy for us. Feeling guilty about those coping strategies doesn't make me any less likely to indulge in them, and often would just make matters worse.
Obviously, there’s a balance here. Ideally, I’ll manage my stress successfully so that I won’t rely on coping strategies that aren't healthy, and I don’t want to make decisions that harm myself or others. But even when we feel the urge to do something that is ultimately unhealthy, we can be compassionate with ourselves, seek to understand the underlying need, and make the best choice that we are capable of making.
6. Expanding our attention also bridges self-care to community care. We are building communities and movements that embody and cultivate the type of society where self and community care are available for all.
Oppressive structures and cultures are the biggest barriers to self-care, and we wouldn’t need a self-care movement if we lived in a wise, compassionate, just society. The longer we are delayed in accomplishing this work, the more people will suffer. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the gaps in our support for self and community care, and that calls for creativity, persistence, and solidarity. When we advocate for hazard pay, we are supporting community care. When we demand extension of unemployment benefits, that is community care. When we insist on disability justice and accessibility during the pandemic, that is community care. When we work together, giving each other rest and sharing resources so that the work can continue, that is community care. Social justice is self and community care.
This is also how we connect self and community care with the social change practices of mutual aid and dual power, but that’s a reflection for another day. In the meantime, we can begin by deepening our understanding of the relationship between creating communities and societies that promote and support self-care, and creating communities and societies that live up to our values of equity and justice. We can commit ourselves to building that society – one that we desperately need to help us navigate through the mazes of unjust systems, pandemics, and climate change, and one that refuses to tolerate the exploitation of the earth or our fellow human beings, so that we might truly know the joy of caring for one another.