freibiergesicht replied to your post: self care is important, but when I start to notice that someone’s self-care tends to consistently mean:this is why i hate the term self-care tbhyeah idk, I would like for there to be more discussions about responsible and productive self-care, that don’t take place in a really weird capitalist “I took a bubble bath! SELF CARE!” kind of framework or a “I’m going to walk out of this meeting where someone is telling me how my racism makes them feel and if you challenge that then you clearly just aren’t respecting my right to SELF CARE!” kind of framework
but I just
never see that happening
so to be honest I’ve done a LOT of distancing myself from the term recently and I just stay far away from it and feel weird about it in general. sigh.
I feel like the concept of “self-care” has been entirely appropriated by upper-class white kids and used to justify a lot of really individualist, virtue-of-selfishness kind of stuff, only of course couched in all this social justice/radical mental health language, and that makes me angry and sad - and often, taken advantage of.
yeah like what about how self-care isn’t always fun or comfortable or easy
kind of a tangent but: also I can’t help but be reminded of how as a teenager I was so so happy to see dumpstering/DIY/poverty etc treated as things I didn’t have to be ashamed of anymore, only to realize that a lot of ppl were tourists or slumming or w/e, and like that’s fine I don’t want to be all “oh Im a *real* punk” or whatever bc that’s annoying & its more complicated than that, and rejecting consumerism is good & feeling free & exploring is good, but can we please not forget that these things aren’t just fun ways to spend your twenties
because now I’m reading discussions about the “ethics of shoplifting” in which not a single person mentioned that some people shoplift because they must
so yeah, I was like “fuck yes self care let’s do that let’s talk about combatting burn-out & taking deliberate disciplined steps against depression & overwhelmed-ness” but then all of a sudden it mutated into this other weird thing about “whatever feels good for me right now”
And as I try to get better at self-care so that I don’t die, I still find myself forever puking at the term, for these reasons among others.
