Friday reflection
Having your own back
Hello readers!
As I work on my book proposal, I’m increasingly aware of the extent to which helping women believe their stories and ideas are worthy is at the heart of what I do. After all, no LinkedIn strategy is going to matter if you don’t fundamentally believe that what you have to say matters. So it was with keen interest that I listened to a podcast this week that explored the following question:
What if so-called “self care” isn’t about reaching a state of peak, perfect wellness, or buying things to help you achieve that state, but instead is about the inner work of having your own back?
Put differently: What if self-care is about feeling worthy, and acting accordingly?
Like I said, a podcast got me thinking about this. As someone who really does not love being in the car, I was grumpy about having to drive a long distance to get to my doctor’s office, after already driving a long distance to take my daughter to school, and was looking for something to listen to that would make the ride go by more quickly. What I found, scrolling through my podcast app, was this rich conversation between NYT columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom and psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, author of Real Self Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included).
I love the episode title: “Boundaries, Burnout, and the ‘Goopification’ of Self-Care.”
The cover of the book, "Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included)" by Pooja Lakshmin
As Cottom says at the top of the podcast,
Today’s multibillion dollar self-care industry has some surprising overlap with the radical feminist idea that care could counter the ills of capitalism’s self-interest*. It is now pretty hard to disentangle the radical roots of self-care from the consumerist way we tend to go about it. The idea of taking care of yourself is not merely virtuous. It’s become a cultural expectation. The Catch-22 of self-care becoming big business is that taking time to refuel, recharge, and reconnect as self-care asks of us ends up feeling like just another productivity chore, the kind that led us to burnout in the first place.
*For example, the work of Audre Lorde and bell hooks. Just one example: Audre Lorde wrote, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”
And, as Dr. Lakshmin says,
(Self care is) not a task to check off of your list. It’s actually something to embody.
(Related: Read my conversation with embodiment coach Jay Fields.)
In other words, if you get a facial, but on the way home you internally berate yourself for not getting something on your to-do list done, for not being a better mother/sister/daughter/wife/friend, for not being in better shape, etc etc… what’s going on there? Have you truly cared for yourself, in the ways that matter most?
The kind of self-care Dr. Lakshmin talks about resonates with me deeply. It’s a lot harder than, say, getting a pedicure, but my goodness is it also more meaningful. She identifies four pillars of self-care:
Setting boundaries
Self-compassion
Alignment with values
Exercising power
She’s quick to note that all of these things become more or less accessible in different seasons of our lives; for example, those caring for young children and/or aging parents experience constraints that others don’t.
And Cottom noted the interplay between these pillar and relative levels of privilege; for example, being able to set a boundary and say “no,” comes with risk, and the less privilege you have, the less realistic it may be for you to absorb that risk. For example, if I’m a single parent and my boss texts me after hours, I may have to put up with it rather than jeopardize my employment by waiting until business hours resume to respond.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t exercise self-care. Dr. Lakshmin notes, there’s power in the pause, and that’s available to everyone. The pause is that moment when you notice there’s a boundary in play, and maybe you can’t hold that boundary in this moment, but you CAN say to yourself, “I want to change my circumstances so that within a year, I can hold a firmer boundary around when I am and am not available to my boss.”
In other words, making progress within each of the four pillars listed above is not a zero-sum game.
My favorite moment of the conversation came when Dr. Lakshmin said,
“And when you deconstruct these choices…and you decide to make choices in your life based on your own values — not society’s values, not culture’s values — that that’s actually deeply subversive.”
When I heard that, I literally yelled, from deep in my belly, “YES!”
In the end, self-care is fundamentally about loving ourselves enough to take our own counsel over anyone else’s. I wish the following quote were from a woman, but it’s perfect enough that I’m sharing it anyway:
“To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
- Robert Louis Stevenson
What do you think about all of this? Do you agree that real self-care is subversive? Why or why not? What has your own journey with self-care looked like? I’d love to hear from you…share your thoughts in the comments!
You are a mighty force -
Amanda
"Self-care is fundamentally about loving ourselves enough to take our own counsel over anyone else's." - Amanda Hirsch mightyforces.co