Any chance that my hope the odious phrase “self-care” would be expelled from popular use this new decade disappeared when I saw the cover of this month’s Cosmopolitan (UK) magazine.
The cover star is Lena Dunham and the strapline is “on sex, love and self-care”. That she is talking about self-care in terms of a health problem (endometriosis) that took 13 years before it was diagnosed – and left her serious health problems, a series of operations, and feeling chronically run down and low on energy – is a signal that self-care is currently a better option than the care that society currently gives us.
But shouldn’t we be asking for more? Shouldn’t we be moving from the concept of self-care to a broader, more inclusive notion of collective care?
That was, and remains, my hope for this decade.
If a phrase summed up the complicated flawed zeitgeist of the 2010s – it was self-care.
The concept that originated in black activist circles in the 1980s, was later put through the grinder of late-stage capitalism and appropriated by white, corporate feminism and the industrial wellness complex.
It was first used in 1988 by black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde, while fighting against cancer and the political status quo. She wrote “caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”.
But according to the New Yorker, this thought “has led to the popular idea of ‘self-care’, in which there is moral and political utility in relaxing with your sheet mask”.
Want a last minute holiday to Bali? Self-care. Need to hang out at home and watch Goop Lab, while wearing a botanical sheet mask? Self-care. Don’t want to respond to a friend’s text message asking for help? Self-care.
Despite its co-opting by the market, there is a reason why the phrase “self-care” took off so totally in the last decade. In the #MeToo era, a whole range of ills women had put up with in a patriarchal society were re-examined.
Self-care was very appealing for women who were overwhelmed, women who were sick, women who were crushed under the weight of the emotional and physical labour of running a household and working and maintaining a family and friendship, women who were burning out. Which is basically most women.
In a world where so much is out of our control – from political events to climate catastrophe – what can we control? We can control the products we put on our skin and enrolling in a barre class and the food we put in our bodies.
As a result, “self-care” – used as both an incantation and a declaration of rights, was a reclamation of sorts – mostly over women’s time, emotional capacity and agency. The term became elastic enough to cover the woman who was recovering from breast cancer and needed rest, to the day spa that was promoting a special on avocado body scrub.
Yet the problematic nature of the term is rooted in its very linguistic structure: self.
While looking after yourself is great, self-care is still an idea rooted in a neoliberal tradition of looking out for ourselves, rather than seeing ourselves, our health and our fates as inextricably linked to our fellow human beings.
Wouldn’t it be great if this decade we took the self out of self-care and strived instead for communal care?
Self-care is saying “I need to look after me”, while collective self-care is saying “we need to look after each other” (in the words of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius: “What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.”)
Collective care exists outside the market and can’t be captured by capitalism, turned into a product that we buy back and, by definition of its price, excludes many from participating in it.
The fact that it’s collective, means it’s for everyone.
Communal care can include things like being a better neighbour, making yourself available for people who may need support, communities supporting each other emotionally and practically during crises such as the bushfires, to larger, more macro reforms and structural changes in society, such as advocating for universal health care, the introduction of a four-day working week, more affordable and available childcare and a rise in Newstart.
Unless our care moves from the self to the collective (or ideally both the self and the collective) as a society, we will continue to be unwell.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist