As the dark cloud of President-elect Donald Trump grows closer and closer, the call for self-care has defined the post-election melancholia amongst liberals and Leftists. At such a critical juncture, it is important to reflect on the concept as there are multiple incarnations of self-care which each hold varying degrees of usefulness.
On one hand, individualistic self-care necessitates a narrow, focused examination of the self and what the self needs. This form of care privileges the individuality of the problem and the usage of an entrepreneurial spirit to fix the problem. While this form of care can be useful, it is not a political project in that it focuses on the individual disconnected from the social structure.
At the current juncture, self-reflexive and community-oriented care is necessary to lay the foundation for political action.
Self-care must be self-reflexive in that the injuries we are trying to heal derive from systems of power. Self-reflexive self-care is therefore not only about mending wounds, but about identifying the power structures that generate the violence we are trying to overcome.
Self-care must be community-oriented in that individuals must look beyond their injured selves to create networks of care to support the community. As anti-racist scholar Sara Ahmed argues, “self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities, assembled out of the experiences of being shattered” such that we can begin the “painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other.”
Communities of self-care are political acts in that they create networks of care when society writ large has failed us. A self-reflexive and community-oriented form of care will be an umbrella throughout the downpour of the Trump administration.
