The Dichotomy of Self-care

We've been talking about self-care a lot in this session of the Pause Project Workshop. Something that has been coming up for many of the participants is what we've been calling The Dichotomy of self-care.

We know that self-care is important, we know it gets commodified, and we also know that it's kind of tired, like a word you say a million times that ends up losing meaning. It’s also something that is inaccessible to so many of us for reasons beyond our control, such as systems of oppression like white supremacy and capitalism. AND there are also ways it’s inaccessible even just within the accepted and mainstream framework of self-care. One of those ways is this dichotomy. 

The dichotomy of self- care is when we only engage in caring for the parts of ourselves that we deem desirable. This might look like only wanting to care for ourselves if it means cooking a meal or going to the gym, while feeling like it's a failure to care for the parts of us that need Netflix and oreos, or jerking off to some porn, or staring into space and allowing ourselves to feel unmotivated. When we consider this notion, that there are desirable ways to care for ourselves and undesirable ways to care for ourselves, we start to see where we bring the possibility of failure into a self-care routine. But believing you can fail at caring for yourself is antithetical to self-care, and if the possibility of failure is a foundational piece to self-care, it's likely that we will run into self-care that feels unsustainable and even unattainable. We will be in conflict with the parts of ourselves that feel harder to look at, and in this way we miss huge points of full-self care. 

Here we will call full-self care (you can name it whatever you want, and there are some other prompts for you to consider at the end of this piece) the practice of trying your best to care for all the parts of you. The easy to look at, the hard to look at, and the parts we wish didn’t exist. 

When I consider my own full-self care, I know there are parts of myself that I don’t like to look at, that I wish I didn’t have to hold. For instance, my anxiety. 

I have lived with anxiety most of my life. My anxiety feels like a weakness, and at times it leaves me feeling like I can’t do all the things I want to do. A few years ago I decided that in order to start caring for myself in my anxiety I had to start really looking at it by naming it. So I created the habit of saying, either out loud or to myself, “I am anxious right now.” Like being in the car on the way to the beach with my girlfriend and just saying to her “I am anxious right now and I don't really know why.” And that has helped; it’s created validation and connection in my relationships and laid the groundwork towards caring for myself even when I am anxious.

What I realized this week though, is that naming it isn’t enough for me, because I am still not thinking of my anxiety as a desirable, or even neutral, part of myself. I am caring for it only to the point that I can ignore my anxiety, all while wishing or willing for it to go away. I realize that for me an imperative part of full-self care means moving towards the notion that my full-self deserves to be loved, including my anxiety. That my anxiety exists within me, and that honoring that part of me would mean to care for all of me. Knowing this means reimagining what it really is to care for myself, and that it might not always look aspirational like getting to the gym. It might mean cancelling plans and watching The Bachelorette. And the work I am doing here is letting go of feeling like that is a failure. 

In the Pause Project Workshop we are moving through these questions around guilt, shame, and self-care in conversations and with journal prompts. Here are some of the journal prompts we used during our Monday group call. See if any of them speak to you and get you thinking about your own full-self care. 

What does self-care actually mean to you? 

Is that what it is called for you? Could you name it something else?

Are you doing self-care on your terms, or on the terms of others? 

Are you only showing care to the parts of yourself that you believe to be desirable?

Can you name one part of yourself that feels hard to look at? What do you imagine care for that part of yourself looks like?

Before we buy into a socially acceptable idea of self-care, we can take some time to look at what we actually want and need, and which parts of ourselves we are caring for when we do specific things. We can also work to extricate feelings of guilt and shame from our care while committing to showing up for our full selves. I hope some of what I have written here is of help to you.