Kick Self-Care to the Curb and Embrace Life Support
We’re Talking About Language y’All.
The word self-care is bullshit. Straight up, there was no other way to say it, but it’s just a dumb way to identify and talk about things. Even the people championing the ideas and concepts behind self-care find the word too small, too narrow, or too misunderstood.
A Description of Self-Care
So, until recently, when I used self-care to describe an activity, it could have been any number of things. For me, the list isn’t limited to the following:
Taking care of my body - the sub-tasks for this one are myriad.
Proactively taking a break before my brain takes one for me.
Having hard conversations with people I want to keep in my life.
Going to brunch with a friend.
Paying bills.
Talking with my coach.
Sharing IG memes.
Walking around the block.
Referencing my calendar before saying yes to something.
Applying paint to canvas.
Some of these tasks often find themselves lumped into the “adulting” category, and some are about “childing.” Some of these tasks are easy, while others require more energy and intention. Yet, all fall under the umbrella of self-care, and, quite frankly, they don’t seem to fit very well.
Issues with the Word Self-Care
First, I dislike wasting my time and energy arguing with myself that self-care is not selfish every time I use the word. I’m not the only one, especially when we live in a world with unrealistic expectations about everyone’s capacity and willingness to do stuff. Furthermore, when I’m not fussing at my brain, I’m having the self-care is not selfish talk with someone else. Seriously, sometimes it feels like we spend more time defending the idea of self-care than actually doing self-care.
Self-care isn’t just about one of us.
Second, too often, I have to go digging for why doing some of these things is valuable and even vital with myself, my friends, and my clients. I know and love way too many people for whom the idea of taking care of themselves is a complete anathema to how they move through the world. Growing up in a culture where everything - including God’s grace - had to be earned left some pretty warped agreements in my head, and the word self-care doesn’t identify why I would even consider it essential (even if it’s not selfish).
Third, the parts of the word self-care don’t actually do a great job of identifying what we’re actually talking about. The “self” part of self-care is too dang narrow. The work I do under this umbrella covers more than my experiences. By doing the stuff I do for self-care, I’m making the world better for y’all too. Even if it’s just making it so I’m not cranky when I pass you in the parking lot. The “care” part is often hard to circle. Mainly because I classify having hard conversations, giving space for my feelings, doing stuff I don’t want to do, and other potentially awkward/painful stuff as self-care. They usually don’t feel like caring at the time.
And, finally, a somewhat trivial issue: the collective definition of self-care has defaulted to mani/pedis and massages. None of which I’m against. And, yet, they represent only a tiny portion of what self-care actually is.
So, where does that leave us? Basically, with a term that is, at the end of the day, awkward and bullshit.
New Language
After a lot of mulling it over and a few attempts at alternative languaging, I found a phrase that I don’t argue with, has the why built into the term, and provides room for a more expansive definition.
The realization that sealed the deal for me was this:
All the stuff I was calling self-care was stuff I was doing so I could have a life that I wanted to be awake enough to experience. I did the things I needed to do in order to have a life I wanted to live. And, friends, that’s not self-care.
That is Life Support.
I know that sci-fi limits the elements of life support to food, air, water, shelter, and heat. And, with some slight shifts in perspective, we can open up those seemingly narrow elements into something robust that naturally includes all of the “self-care” tasks more comfortably and logically under one term.
Why I Love Life Support Language
First, it reframes the whole picture of what I’m doing so that it’s bigger than me. It’s not simply supporting my life today; it’s helping me to create a life I want to experience and cherish.
Second, as someone who wants to leave a mark on the world, I don’t want that mark to represent pain and anguish to folks. So, to not show up as a raving white bitch, I need life support. Those life support tasks I listed above are the stuff that helps me show up with grace, integrity, courage, and curiosity that I value.
The life I want to experience includes a bit of silliness.
Lastly, it’s a very real reminder that support is available, contrary to my childhood lessons. I need support. I need support. You need support. None of us are islands. Even at my most independent, I never stopped being a peninsula. I still had some connection to land because I didn’t do all of it myself. At the end of the day, I didn’t, you know, grow my own chickens, kill them, and then butcher them so I could eat them.
American bootstrap sensibilities aside, whether we were hunters and gatherers, living in feudal villages, or part of a town, we’ve never, as human beings, been self-sufficient. So our lives need support.
We need support.
Life’s challenges necessitate support without having to have a (d)ucking fight with ourselves about the fact that it’s not selfish.
Life requires we support ourselves.
Life requires the support of others.
If you want to know more about how Life Support better represents the ideas often espoused when talking about self-care, stay tuned to the next series of posts. It’s already changed my life; I hope it can help you too.
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