ISOLATION IS NOT SELF CARE — WELLNESS MYTH #2

The bathtub is filling. The candles are lit. You settle in with relief. Soon all your worries and stress will be washed away. After your bath you will emerge resurrected, refreshed and ready to serve your family-aging parent-boss-partner-community with grace for yet another day. (hmmmm…did I just say that last part out loud?)

Fill your cup. Replenish your well. Put on your own oxygen mask first. Self care is so important. And of course, it is. Also the message is everywhere all of a sudden, isn’t it?

In my last post: You Are Not Broken: One Wellness Myth We Must Let Go of Forever

I shared my feelings about a wellness belief that had crept into my worldview. As Thanksgiving Day officially launches our holiday season here in the US, a most stressful time for many of us, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer up another. This one has to do with our ideas about self care.

Google ‘self care’ and you’ll find images of women meditating, reading, sipping mugs of tea, getting facials, and practicing yoga. Google ‘self care for men’ and you’ll get images of men sitting near a lake, sipping an espresso, lying on the couch with expensive-looking headphones, shaving, and again, practicing yoga.

The gendered wellness memes above affirm what we already know, We are overworked, over-managed, and emotionally drained. It’s time to step away and enjoy some well-earned rest and relaxation. They also have one thing in common. Everyone is recovering alone.

It’s not the message that’s the problem. It’s the subtext that is concerning: You’re falling apart at the seams, and in order to function you will need to remove yourself from others so that you can get yourself together and return to us. Disappear. Into the spa. into nature. Into a good book. You’ve earned it. We look forward to having you back (even if we don’t actually have your back.)

In other words, your selfcare is your responsibility. And it’s a solitary pursuit.

I enjoy solitude. When I was younger I made my living waiting tables. This made for late nights and lazy mornings. While my roommates and partners over the years I shared apartments with left for jobs with more regular hours, I found myself blessed with alone-time during the day. Though having children relieved me of those long swaths of quiet time completely, I remember those earlier days with fondness. Ahhh. The luxury of having time before I was worn out. Those were precious hours in which to rest, exercise, play and most importantly find peace. My life is more complicated now.

Perhaps your self care routines (if you’re getting them in) don’t fit the narratives described above. Perhaps you’re even chuckling, ‘Self care. Yeah right!’

But when you envision yourself or someone else achieving self care I bet you too think of it as a solitary pursuit. It makes sense. The world needs us to be good listeners, attentive partners, supportive friends, and present parents or caregivers. If we’re going to sustain ourselves it seems reasonable we’ll need to prioritize some alone-time. However…

“Selfcare is not a compensating tool for a lifestyle that’s beyond your personal bandwidth.” ~Catherine Miller

What if your self care routine exists as little more than a way to keep you from succumbing to the accumulated stress that is a direct result of your participation in a system that isn’t working for you?

Are you merely coping, escaping, or numbing? Or are you rising from the ashes like the phoenix that you are?

Are you healing? Are you growing? Or is your self care routine propping you up, smacking you across the cheeks a few times and sending you right back into the rink?

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do self care. Your current self care routine may very well be saving your life. Please don’t stop taking care of yourself. Because though you’re not broken, the system is and it’s not your fault.

I am drawn to profound shifts in perspective. Take Travis Heath’s TED talk on changing the way we see distress and distressed individuals in our communities. Contrary to our view of how mental health works, Heath radically suggests that our distress lives not within us, but outside of us. If this is true, he postulates, then the solutions to our distress also do not lie within us, but outside of us.

If we follow Heath’s logic we may come to see that we are missing the point in our efforts to care for ourselves and others. We are ineffectually applying individual solutions to help individuals, rather than community solutions to help individuals.

It’s perhaps obvious why we’ve come to locate self care within an individual. Most of the images from the google searches I referenced above come attached to marketing campaigns. We’ve been conditioned by the marketing engines of the Wellness Industrial Complex to associate images of people enjoying self care in isolation as the norm. These images suggest that we have individual agency over our state of being and can obtain profound levels of peace and ease all by ourselves. This serves the WIC by helping it sell the products and services that make it the $4+ billion dollar industry that it has become.

In addition to the SSRIs that over one-third of us now take to manage our anxiety and our depression, as a society we have become acclimated to purchasing books, apps, tools, online courses, supplements and a variety of other products to help us each individually regulate a nervous system that is most likely overloaded by the very system that is now in a position to sell us the solution. Of course I digress into problems inherent in a capitalist model and the inequities and imbalances its motivations keep in place. Ugh. A topic for another day. But before you unsubscribe…

Please join me in a thought experiment.

Imagine a perspective where we come to view our distress as a completely appropriate response to an experience of inadequate access to resources, equitable environments, and community support. If we burrow into that perspective AND reject the distractions of the marketing messages from the WIC, we just might find ourselves gradually adjusting our worldview, and with it our actions, towards other options for self nourishment. We might find ourselves naturally choosing self care strategies that have to do with resting back into the support of our communities. As we seek out and also strengthen those environments with our participation, we may also find ourselves motivated to address ways in which those support systems could be improved. In other words, we might find ourselves prioritizing environments where we experience community support, and then become inspired to help steward the very communities that sustain us. Oops. We just became involved.

In that scenario community care is self care.

In an interview with Jane Goodall about her new book The Book of Hope, Goodall reminds us that though the problems we are facing as a global community are daunting if we all focus our energy on smaller challenges within our local communities the change will be impactful. She advises us to look around and “…see if there is something you can do, and then roll up your sleeves and do it.” In her mind community care is also global care. Cool. That’s a double whammy.

So yes, take time for yourself. We all need this, and some more than others. Yes. Seek quiet. Seek rest. Recharge. Renew. Enjoy a bubble bath every once in a while for sure. But recognize that removing yourself from your world temporarily will not release you from your suffering. Or any of us.

Because isolation is not self care. Community care is self care.

I think we can all agree that in our lifetimes we have not seen our communities so deeply divided as they’ve become recently. We can sense that what we’ve been doing isn’t working. Our planet is dying. Our children are on medication. We are in debt and people are arguing all around us. Some are even dusting off their pitchforks and worse. Under the anger is fear. Fear clouds our judgement and in its presence we make choices we wouldn’t otherwise make. It’s time for change.

In the presence of a storm safety requires shelter. A person without a home must pull a coat, a blanket or a tarp over their head and huddle close to something stable until the storm passes. This is what some of us are doing with our self care model. We’re pulling the blanket over our heads and waiting out the storm. It is no wonder the wellness industry has honed in on selling us stuff. In a stormy environment of social, environmental, and political unrest we will try almost anything to feel safe. The personal retreat offers us the illusion that we have within us the ability to dissolve our distress all by ourselves. It is a fantasy of empowerment.

I have a proposal.

“We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.” ~S. Kelley Harrell

Instead, let’s take our fear and distress and transform it into positive action. The definition of compassion is not empathy, as many people believe, it’s action motivated by empathy. This is different from action driven by anger and outrage. Though there is a time for that. Positive actions that nourish members of our community and our environment also nourish us. This is the kind of action that leaves us feeling energized, inspired, and full of gratitude. Research shows acts of altruism especially when expressed through community engagement have positive impacts on our physical and mental health.

You don’t have to quit your job, sell your home, move onto a commune and buy an electric car. You don’t have to stop using plastic or stop eating meat (though you might consider exploring those options). All you have to do is show up a little for your community.

If you haven’t, aren’t or won’t — -for whatever reason — before you let that wave of guilt roll through you because I’m suggesting you add yet one more item for your become-better-human-to-do list. Pause. Take a breath. This can be fun. And rewarding and meaningful. And nourishing. That is totally and 100% possible.

We are of the world and we are in the world. Because we are of the world and we are in the world we change the world. Just by being. There is no other option.

In a few weeks we will enjoy the darkest day of the year, and begin another trip around the sun. I feel scared.

The defining event of 2021 for me personally was the moment I decided to close my business. It was an entity I loved and was proud of, and that gave my life meaning. The loss hurt. During my early recovery I prioritized plenty of alone-time. But now that’s not enough.

I am now choosing to explore a new community. One that’s working on an equity and accessibility problem that I’m also interested in working on. This work will challenge me. And also nourish me. I expect to get uncomfortable sometimes, but I am choosing to trust that the community will support me when things get hard. My objective is to add value, to learn from my peers, and to show up for something I believe in. My expectation is that through this experience I will grow regardless of outcomes I cannot foresee.

It’s an experiment. I’ve not historically been an activist. But I’m doubling down on Heath’s message because I’ve come to believe community care IS self care. Perhaps you’ll be joining me.