Posts Tagged: community care
There is No Self-Care without Community Care
Illustration: Dani Pendergast You know that weird thing that happens when you say a word too many times repeatedly, and it starts to feel funny on your tongue when you pronounce it, and sound funny when you hear it? After a while, you don’t even know if the word you’re saying is real? That’s what the term “self-care” has become for me. Your favorite instagram therapist has a bulleted list of ideas on how to care for self. Cosmetic brands are selling 98% petroleum jelly, 2% lavender essential oil eye creams under the guise of self care. At the end of every hour-long zoom meeting (which let’s be real, could have easily been an email, but I digress,) there’s some kind of self-care lecture and plug. At this point, I… Read more »
Building Resilience through Care
We’re all familiar with self-care at this point. In popular culture, it’s become a great go-to excuse for indulging yourself, a la Parks & Rec style. And for this reason, it’s also become co-opted by brands and commercialized. Brands use it as an excuse for you to buy their products or use their services. And we have to be careful because we are young and we are broke. But moreover, it’s not a sustainable way to take care of yourself. Self-care as we know it in activism is about resilience and the radical act of survival. We need to be able to engage with self-care in a way that can nurture us for as long as we need to continue our work. We can be distracted by ableist notions of… Read more »
