With brands, celebrities, your therapist (IRL, or virtual), publications—pretty much everyone!—emphasizing the importance of self care, it’s easy to start making lists of things to do to take care of you. You might read about pointers like taking a bath, drinking tea, slowing down, turning off your phone, yoga, journaling, aromatherapy, affirmations in the mirror. You might see your favorite influencer or best friend post the good food they just ate or a hike they just took, looking radiant and carefree. It’s vital that we all find ways to be easy on ourselves, to find pleasure in our lives, and to treat ourselves with the compassion of a friend. Self care is so important.
But it’s not everything.
Because there is no self care without community care.
Everything we do on the individual level is intertwined with the interpersonal, with the communal, and the systemic. Each level of our lives is a reflection of the next, intertwined, and scaling up or down. adrienne maree brown writes about this as a principle of Emergent Strategy, illustrated by the fern, which appears the same at any scale. You can zoom in and out, and the form of the fern’s leaves reflects the whole. The whole reflects each individual leaf. “When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal,” she writes. “Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the micro to macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards.”
Have you noticed when you are better taken care of, you are able to give more to others? It works in both directions, in true fractal fashion. When we all have more access to the things we need, and the community intimacies we crave, we can take better care of ourselves.
Through fractal awareness, we can recognize that all of our individual care must be applied to the collective. Taking a cleansing bath in the evening requires all our neighbors—down the street, across the country, and across the world—have access to clean water and win in struggles against the destruction of our rivers, lakes, and oceans. Tapping into a yogic practice requires solidarity in the liberation of all South Asian peoples. Feeding ourselves with nourishing produce requires food sovereignty, rematriation of indigenous lands, and reparations for Black people, who built the American economy and agricultural systems.
Often, many who preach about and can access self care are of a middle- or upper-class background. Some of the resources marketed around self care are costly, and sometimes simply being able to devote one’s time and attention inward is a luxury. Life under capitalism is often worrisome, and sometimes distraction and entertainment is the only self care we have the bandwidth for. For those of us with more access to rest, ease, and wealth, committing ourselves to the autonomy of us all (which often includes letting go of our wealth) should be something we embody with fierce generosity.
Often, our ways of caring for ourselves at the individual level don’t get at the root of healing what makes us anxious, scared, angry, unheard, lonely, sad. So much of our grief is caused by systemic issues: oppression, work, upheaval, climate catastrophe. So much of our grief is tied to feelings of loneliness, or not being able to meet our needs by ourselves. Extreme individualism is very much ingrained in Western culture. But humans, all creatures on earth for that matter, aren’t meant to accomplish anything entirely alone. How much would be lifted off of your psyche if you didn’t have to work so much, if you could access affirmative and comprehensive healthcare, if you had a community apparatus to catch you in an emergency, when you just needed a little help? Struggles for structural change, abolition, racial justice, gender liberation, land back, are all a part of making self care accessible to all.
Strengthening the health of our communities strengthens us all.
Social justice advancement can be part of your self care plan! Volunteering, organizing, regularly donating directly to gofundme’s and mutual aid campaigns, can all be investments you make in community care. It’s important to avoid turning mutual aid efforts into charity in order to self-soothe: you can’t meet people’s needs while patronizing them. You have to listen deeply and actively in order to solve problems creatively, and get free. Commit yourself to realizing the world of your dreams, in which everyone has equitable access to pleasure and autonomy! What must change in the present in order to realize this vision?
So indulge yourself, take your naps, get your nails done, dress yourself in something that really makes you feel connected to your body. But be sure that these rejuvenating practices are in the best interest of the collective. We are our most cared for when we are all cared for!
by Jaye Elizabeth Elijah