A friend and colleague shared a tweet with me last week that pointed out a simple truth that there is a certain amount of privilege associated with self-care. In this case, it was the privilege of knowing you need care, what kind of care, and having the resources to do something about it.

“Why do I rally against the rhetoric of self help in academia? It isn’t because it doesn’t work for those with stress or mild anxiety or any other condition, it’s because it puts the responsibility to stay well and get better on those who are too unwell to participate.”

I’ve written before about self-care as capitalist plot, and it is. Capitalism doesn’t care all that much for individuals, save as how they can be leveraged to produce wealth for other individuals. Pushing us all to self-care is along the same lines of creating self-repairing, self-correcting machinery to reduce costs in producing widgets. After all, if a machine is self-repairing, it doesn’t need technicians and mechanics to support it.

Of course, there really is no argument (as far as I can tell you) that self-care is a personally good thing to do. It is definitely a private good and in your best interest. Self-care does take resources, it does take privilege. If nothing else, it takes the privilege to be able to stop and breathe, to stop activities that add no value or are harmful.

When one is suffering from depression, anxiety, chronic pain, or other disabling condition it is next to impossible to self-care your way to a better space. You need help identifying your situation, your needs, and a way to get those needs met. I certainly needed those things.  Having someone point out my depression, the way I was ignoring it, and what I could do about it, made all the difference. I still needed to act on that information, which I did, and I needed the resources (medical care, insurance, counseling) whcih I had. So I got better.

Unfortunately many people don’t have those resources, including a friend or colleague that helps them to identify their problem or needs. That’s why self-care is so often for those with privielege. We need to create systems where everybody has access to the tools, information, and support they need to perform self-care. We can’t just preach about it or write about it and tell people to just do good self-care.

In fact, I would make the point that good self-care is a collaborative effort since it relies on the support and/or input of others. For this reason, we should being about self-care of the community. How do we take care of all of us, by taking care of ourselves through taking care of others? It seems delightfully mutually supportive and cyclical. The only problem is that we would have to give up all the divisions among us that we love to cherish, shout about, and chew on in deep, dark thoughts that are really antithetical to good self-care.