On Self Care
By: Rachel L
Tags: Opinion, Society, Personal, Essay, Self Care

On Self Care

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

A hot bath with candles lit: self care! A day off with friends and family: self care! A cathartic session of yoga and journaling: self care! A carefully-curated Instagram picture of a charcuterie board, full of wonderful goodies that you only bought for the aesthetic: self care?

These days, it’s much easier to perform self care than it is to experience it. What I mean by that is this. Yesterday, I bought a canelé from the bakery and laid it onto my nice china along with a cup of tea for the sole reason of taking a picture of it, showcasing an invisible audience that I was really “taking care of myself.” But was I really?

While I munched on the canelé a few minutes later, I contemplated its frustrating staleness and wondered why on earth I had ever thought I would like such a thing. The picture had turned out great, but who had I taken it for? My small follower count and even smaller circle of friends? They couldn’t care less about what I had eaten at 3:21 PM on a Saturday afternoon if they weren’t going to be shipped a canelé of their own. Myself? If I’d eaten it already, I didn’t need more proof of the fact that I’d eaten the canelé. I could feel it. In my stomach. The friendly ghost in the attic of my house? As a ghost, he probably wouldn’t have anything worthwhile to say about a piece of cake. The homeless cats that loiter outside our yard? It just got more and more absurd.

So why had I taken this uselessly beautiful picture in the first place? Because of the newfangled modern pressure to take care of ourselves, performative self-care has been more popular than ever, especially on social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest that make it easier to romanticize a single moment. In fact, several of the accounts I personally follow post these “capturable moments” on repeat. A golden ray of sunshine. Light wood. Plaid tablecloth. Flowers. Lace. Bonus points for a puppy or a kitty, lazing photogenically. Having been flooded with these aesthetic snapshots, we feel pressured in turn to turn our own days into but a series of moments. Smiling faces, artfully frumpled pillows: some cut-up, desecrated visions from a wholly-lived day.

Moreover, while some self care activities have been given the cold shoulder, others have been elevated as the ultimate good (See: bullet-journaling, baking, picnics). It’s not a coincidence that these activities happen to be the more Instagramable ones, too. I’ll give a hundred bucks to the first Instagram influencer to post about how they spent a nice, relaxing day at therapy sorting out racial trauma or crying cathartically about their middle school bullies to My Chemical Romance and Blink-182. It’s embarrassing and pathetic to be in therapy. To have racial or in fact any kind type of trauma. To unironically listen to “Welcome to The Black Parade.” The truth is, most popular depictions of self-care is aesthetic, productive, and astonishingly white, because only then can we feel sympathy for those who need it.

But while submitting to this narrow definition of self-care, have we lived? Have we loved ourselves — not our ideal selves, but the terrible self, the singing-out-of-tune self, the my-roommate-complains-about-me self? Have we stepped without fear and shame into the light of true self care? I, at least, don’t think so. Instead, practice radical self care, thinking not of what others would want you to do, but what you would like to do. And if you discover that a stale canelé is the last thing on your wish list, that is more than okay.