A few days ago, I reposted a meme on one of my social media accounts. It said, “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” (Brianna Wiest).
An old college friend commented: “For those who have the privilege to build such a life.”
About that: Yes. Yes. Yes.
She is spot on in that observation, and I appreciated her bringing the topic of privilege into the conversation. The fact is, it requires a certain amount of privilege to even be able to begin to shift your status quo out of survival mode, and for many, that bit of agency or opportunity is lacking. There are millions of people for whom survival mode is the only existence currently available. For those who are locked in the struggle to simply stay alive and obtain basic necessities, even the tiniest acts of self-care–the extra two minutes in the shower, that ninety-nine cent gas station slushie, the stop by the thrift store to try to find a cheap pair of comfy pants, taking a few minutes to paint your nails with that sparkly blue dollar store nail polish you splurged on, pulling out your guitar and playing an old favorite song for yourself before you collapse into bed, and yes, the chocolate cake or the salt bath--are acts of resistance that can take all the courage and self-love that you can muster for the day…or maybe the whole week.
So here are some clarifications about the audience I think this quote is intended to reach:
To the reader who is living out the pain of just trying to survive each hour, each day, each week, and trying to support yourself and those who depend on you: sweetheart, this quote about choosing to change your whole life is not for you. You are already doing it all. You are already giving everything you’ve got. Already enough. Please, please, just survive. And when you are able to do the small acts of courage and resistance and give yourself the space to taste the tiny pleasures, please know that although what you are able to invest in yourself in that moment might seem small to others, the universe knows exactly how much courage and love it costs you to make that choice, to choose yourself. You are braver than many people will ever have to be–braver than anyone should have to be. I’m so sorry that you have to be so strong and resilient and that there’s no softness in the system for you. You deserve so much more. You deserve to be seen and supported. You deserve a safety net. You deserve the opportunity and choice that many people with privilege don’t even realize they have.
To readers who are actually able to make some choices in your lifestyle: this quote may have something in it for you. But then again, it might not. You might truly need the chocolate cake right now, the random act of self-kindness, the creature comfort. Many of us have had far too little of that in our lives, so we actually need to experience it. The vast majority of the people that I know experienced deep harm as children. The sources of the harm range from emotional ignorance, passivity, and neglect to more overtly identifiable acts of violence such as physical and sexual abuse. In some cases, the harm happened in the home and was perpetrated by family members; in others, it was outside of the home, but the family eco-system was unsafe or inadequate for getting the support and help needed for protection and healing. Either way, given the lack of gentleness, care, understanding, and safety we consistently experienced, most of us learned how to just be tough and suck things up. Life wasn’t kind to us, so we never learned how to be kind to ourselves. Eventually, we forgot how to let other people be kind to us. We forgot how to even receive kindness at all. We learned how to be strong and push through and work hard and move on and a bunch of other essential survival skills, but we never got a chance to practice receiving love and care. This, on top of everything else, is a set-up for trauma, and many of us go on to live adult lives that are laced with trauma. Since this is the experience of a majority of people, the cultural and societal result is that we are a nation of traumatized people passing our trauma along to others. I believe that, just as lack of care was at the root of the harm that came to us, receiving care is at the root of our healing. Therefore, I see self-care, self-love, self-compassion as an important part of healing–both at a personal and a communal level. Self-care can be a way to begin healing.
That being said, self-care will start small. It will start with tiny acts of kindness, small bits of generosity to your self (I’m going to eat/buy/wear this and not feel guilty about it; I’m going to take a nap now), and minute shifts in the way you talk to yourself (try saying fewer mean things to yourself about yourself; maybe even try saying kind or affectionate things to yourself). You might need to practice this kind of self-care for many years in order to build some good self-trust and self-appreciation. It takes a while to accumulate enough goodness inside to start counterbalancing all the years of pain and starvation. This is legit a thing. Take your time being good and gentle and patient with yourself. It’s not easy. It can be so scary and hard. Healing has many stages, and none of them are (at least none of the ones that I’ve experienced so far!) are easy. But you matter. You’re worth it.
Last but not least, to the readers who have been practicing self-compassion and self-care and are starting to feel restless with where you are and desire new ways to grow and shift: you just might be the appropriate audience for this quote. If I may, though, I’d like to modify the quote just a little. “True self-care is not [just] salt baths and chocolate cake. It is making the [small, everyday] choice[s] to[ward] build[ing] a life you don’t need to regularly escape from” (Brianna Wiest).
Here’s the deal: people with privilege sometimes reach a place in their journeys where self-care morphs from being an act of courage and resistance or even a necessary act of self-healing, and becomes a habit of escapism from life patterns that are still stuck in survival mode and old coping mechanisms. Although we may have learned to show some measure of kindness to ourselves, we haven’t yet tackled the work of using our agency and resources to reset our lives and make space for ourselves to show up differently in the world. When your life is still stuck using survival-mode decision-making skills and following patterns from tough times in your life where you didn’t have much agency or opportunity, what often happens is that your moments of self-care often become another coping mechanism for trying to make your distressing life a little more bearable. If this feels like the case with you, then maybe you are ready for the part of structural healing and trauma/survival-mode resetting that this quote is hinting at.
FYI, this part of the journey isn’t really fun. But it might just eventually lead you into a life that is sustainable and in which you actually feel truly alive. It also might lead you to a place where you become in touch with how to use your agency and privilege to do your part toward bringing justice, healing, and love into this world we all share responsibility for. Self-care is a part of us-care.
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