We need to move the self-care conversation into community care. We need to move the conversation from individual to collective. From independent to interdependent.
Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home- alone- and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that “self-care” to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break; where we are continually reminded of our own trauma or exposed and absorb secondary PTSD, and where we then feel guilty or punished for leaving work early the night before to take a bubble bath.
Self-care, as it is framed now, leaves us in danger of being isolated in our struggle and our healing. Isolation of yet another person, another injustice, is a notch in the belt of Oppression. A liberatory care practice is one in which we move beyond self-care into caring for each other.
You shouldn’t have to do this alone.
”-
Excerpt from Communities of Care, Organizations for Liberation
by Yashna Maya Padamsee.
I like a lot of things about this quote, I definitely feel like taking care of each other is something that’s really undervalued. I still think that self-care and spending time alone is really important, though. Alone does not have to equal isolation.
(via cloveflowers)
I like this - and I agree that self-care is still super important. Self-care isn’t about having to do things alone - it’s about knowing what you need and allowing yourself to insist on it without feeling selfish; self-care is about valuing your own needs. Community care is about valuing the needs of others without forgetting your own needs are valid, too.
(via therotund)