Today’s #stickfiguresunday is all about the complexity of self-care and the many factors that have to be considered. Self-care is so much more than any one action, or set of actions.
Self-care includes long-term, short-term, and emergency actions. It includes individual, communal, and structural action. It is soft and easy, *and* hard and demanding.
Self-care is always dependent on our available resources – social, emotional, financial, physical. Self-care also depends on our histories and our particular intersections of trauma, oppression, and privilege.
We are always practicing self-care – people are *always* responding to their struggles and challenges, even when those responses are not socially acceptable or recognizable as self-care.
One definition of self-care, the one that I use, is that self-care is any action that honours our needs. This includes actions that may not be sustainable long-term and that may not be socially sanctioned – self-harm, addiction, dissociation, and others.
One definition of sustainable self-care, which I use, is that sustainable self-care happens when we bring awareness, compassion, and intention to these actions.
Many of the ways we talk about self-care are geared towards financially privileged cisgender white women, and these exclusions and erasures can be so hurtful. Our conversations need to expand, our definitions need to develop depth and nuance.
Community care is a critical part of self-care – so we need to keep asking, which communities are being left out of these discussions? How can we deepen and extend the conversations? How can we honour and acknowledge the self-care that is being practiced by poor, fat, neurodivergent, racialized, traumatized, and otherwise marginalized folks?
Image description: A stick figure stands. A thought bubble reads, in colourful text – social? emotional? physical? financial? mental? creative? trauma? spiritual? collaborative?
Below the thought bubble in various shades of green – What IS self-care? How can we practice self-care? How do we talk about self-care?
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