Self-Care Is A Privilege That Shouldn’t Be One
Capitalism and its constant emphasis on productivity being tied to one’s worth takes a toll on one’s mental health, so self-care is important, but it’s often a privilege communities of color don’t have access to.
Before I researched more into what self-care actually was I thought about my perceptions of it from when I first heard it. I saw white women meditating, going to their yoga classes, and doing aromatherapy whenever I thought of the word self-care. I saw them repeating mantras and daily affirmations to themselves. I saw them work their asses off but also take days off for themselves where they did things they love. I saw a lot of white people in my visions of self-care from my early teenage years. Self-care was quite honestly an abstract concept to me. The perceptions I had of self-care still creep up onto me when I utter the word self-care, no matter how hard I try to push them aside. Of course, my conceptions are generalized, but I had to ask myself why were they there in the first place? Why did I not see lower-income disabled BIPOC (like myself) in my visions of self-care?
An answer to my questions begins with looking at what self-care has come to encompass to me.
“One main problem with self-care generally is it’s based in a racialized and (cis)gendered middle-class value system that often revolves around leisure and an assumption of privileges that most people just do not have.” -Rex Leonowicz
The keyword there is leisure. Free-time is a privilege afforded to those who are at the top of the social hierarchy. Being Latinx, unemployed, lower-income, disabled, queer, and first-generation I’m closer to the bottom. If I replace just Latinx from the above statement with Black I am towards the very bottom of this social hierarchy. BIPOC who are apart of several marginalized communities have less access to self-care, and even more so Black communities. Why? These are the most oppressed and marginalized groups under our current system. With all the cards stacked against us, how can we engage in self-care, when much of it relies on putting your worries aside for a bit and decompressing? How do you decompress racial trauma and anxiety while living in a world that constantly perpetuates it?
Decompressing these things is even harder when tools and education are not readily available. Healthcare is hard to afford. Therapists that can relate to your background are hard to find. Therapists who are affordable and close by are also hard to find. You can’t take the time off work, or you always have to bring your work home. You live in a house with so many people and have no space of your own. You are bombarded with news and videos of racial injustices without trigger warnings. You are bombarded with questions that rely on you to educate others. You are constantly worrying about if your family or friends will get deported. Self-care would seem hard in all these situations, right?
It is. I don’t have much leisure. When I do have “free-time” it is spent with my anxiety, depression, and OCD. It is spent with non-stop worrying and feeling like I can’t do anything important or productive. It is spent focusing on things that are counter-productive to my self-improvement. It is spent making sure my activism does not die out and I’m continuously helping out vulnerable communities. It is spent sleeping in for who knows how long because sleeping is the one thing that speeds up my days faster. It is spent making sure my mother has enough care and love as she has similar disabilities to mine. It is spent looking for scholarships, internships, and anything I can find that can provide some financial support for my family and me. I am a white-passing Latinx along with my mother, so it’s not that I necessarily worry about this part of my identity and what it can bring me, but I worry about what being Latinx can mean for my family and people in my community who do not look like me. The ones who have thicker accents, darker skin, and are undocumented. I worry about them every day. These are not assigned tasks, but they are very much a part of my daily routine. It’s hard to carve out self-care for myself though I know it also an act of self-preservation. Self-preservation is vital when your community is consistently attacked, but it’s also hard to fully grasp when the system was designed so that BIPOC folks could never maintain a full grasp of it.
Self-care is vital. It is essential to everyone’s survival, but self-care should be defined by the individual and determined by what they have time for and access to. There is not a universal method of self-care. You should include it in your life in some capacity, but you determine how that looks. You can determine how that looks. Your well-being is of the highest importance. We need you here.
Self-care is not something insidious by any means, but what is insidious is the ways in which barriers are created and maintained to keep out more marginalized communities from accessing it. When talking about self-care remember it is a privilege. Not everyone can do it on a whim, and even if they can, forming it into a habit is difficult. Self-care is hard to access and even harder to maintain, but finding some ways to incorporate in one’s life is vital to one’s survival. The system doesn’t want you to survive, so as Audre Lorde said before her quote was co-opted by markets, social media influencers, and corporations, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
“ Particularly for Black women, we don’t have time to take care of ourselves. Many of us are poor, many of us are working ourselves into graves, early graves particularly, and many of us put everybody before ourselves. So standing and saying that I matter and that I’m important and that taking care of myself is important is a radical act because so often, we’re expected to take care of everybody else, that we’re supposed to come last, almost as if it’s a familial expectation. And so saying that I matter, that I come first, that what I need and what I want matters I think is a radical act because it goes against everything that we’ve been conditioned to believe.” -Evette Dionne
It is a revolutionary act, yes. However, what is counterrevolutionary is to assume everyone has access to self-care, knowledge of self-care for their communities, and the ability to readily practice these routines. We shouldn’t solely focus on making sure everyone knows self-care is important for their well-being but should also be focused on getting rid of the barriers that make self-care less accessible to our BIPOC siblings.
Self-care shouldn’t be a privilege. Let’s work together to make that a reality. Share resources. Donate to the organizations providing self-care and therapy for those more marginalized communities. Put in the time and labor for these communities because if you are a staunch advocate for self-care, you should also be a staunch advocate for social justice and equity.
Understanding intersectionality in self-care is vital to actually make self-care accessible for all. Acknowledge the barriers, acknowledge the privilege of leisure and free time, acknowledge how self-care tips are too often by and for white middle-class folks than any other group.
Investing in your well-being is easier said than done, but remember you are vital. Our system does not recognize that yet, but they will soon. We all have a responsibility to make sure they do.
