#164: Rethinking “self-care”

Especially what it's missing

I’ve been eating dinner at 9pm for months now. I’d like to blame Avi’s work schedule—he gets home around then—but the simpler explanation is 9pm is the point at which I’ve finally corralled the will to feed myself, or else worked up enough of an appetite after my 6pm snack (which I’ve eaten to avoid making dinner in the first place). Cooking, for whatever reason, is a high-effort task for me. Even when I enjoy it. I’d sooner clean my entire apartment every day while simultaneously writing an essay before committing to any respectable rhythm with food prep (and basically do). For a long time, I saw this as a character flaw, or something to fix, like a 35-year-old bachelor’s lack of bed frame. I’ve since come to recognize it as a mere fact of myself. Like how some people are better at drawing flowers than playing baseball, and vice versa.

Naturally, pregnancy has not brought out my latent inner-chef. I’ve never been less interested in cooking nor the domino trail of tasks that precedes it: picking what to cook, first of all—a question of both nutritional and spiritual import—then cross-referencing it with what you have, what else you need to cook that week, how long you have to cook it pending your calendar, building an efficient grocery list, shopping that list, unloading what you’ve bought, then reading the recipes in advance so as to plan your days around following them and executing them in a timely manner. Obviously you could break anything into infinite subtasks and make it sound hard; for many who aren’t me, cooking isn’t actually such a big deal. Avi, I’m thankful every day, is one of those people.

I share this only so it hits you, with the full force of its tenderness, that the other night, I found three small bowls of chopped ingredients in the fridge (onions, tomatoes, garlic), prepared by Avi that morning so that I could make myself dinner. Lately he’s been trying to cook before he leaves for work: soup or stew I can later reheat, that sort of thing. But this time was different. This time he’d picked a recipe for me to make myself, chopped everything in advance, then texted me the link for when I got hungry that night. When I opened the link hours later and saw how genuinely simple the recipe was—even without his mise en place—I nearly cried at the sweetness of the gesture. Avi and I have a running joke that he calls every recipe “simple,” but this one really was. And I knew then that this favor was distinct from him merely helping me. He was helping me help myself.

In the days since, I’ve been thinking about that distinction. How could I, in return, use my skills not just to help Avi, but to help him help himself? The question suggests a slightly different course of action than simply doing something for him (also useful). It’s a way of thinking about care that defies the traditional bifurcation of care for the self, care for the other, and presents a third, less overtly outcome-driven mode: help in the form of a knowing nudge. Help that requires a deep understanding of someone, but less obvious interference, less hints at charity. In thinking about care this way, I’ve realized that help-to-help-the-self is one of my favorite kinds. It’s sitting with a friend as she cleans out her closet rather than cleaning it out yourself.

My friend Michelle did that for me a few months ago. She came to my apartment and watched me clean out my coat closet, offering opinions and words of encouragement while tucked between pillows on my couch. Technically speaking, I was capable of doing this on my own, but for unknown reasons, felt unable to do it. Her presence transformed the chore into something else—a creative project, a laugh. My college roommate and I had a term for this, “quiet company,” coined when we discovered it was inexplicably easier to do things with someone else hanging around, even if they didn’t technically help at all. Sometimes I forget what social creatures we are. How much of a difference it can make to not be alone—to help or be helped through the mere act of coexistence.

What I’m wandering toward is another way to think about “the myth of self-sufficiency,” a popular American ethos that presupposes it’s possible, or desirable, to become completely independent and self-reliant. There’s of course the reality that none of us are truly self-sufficient—that even the most worldly, bootstrapping among us would stall out without social, economic, and governmental support (and do). But what the vulnerable state of pregnancy has shown me is that this conditionality applies to even the simplest acts of self-care. It’s not that I’m unable to care for myself at all, but that my ability to do so has never been more reliant on external factors: friends, family, doctors, therapists. This kind of support is distinct from “assistance” in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s enablement.

The self-care myth is seductive. The calls to care for ourselves have never been louder, more urgent, more prescriptive, more convincing. It’s nice to imagine that with the right routine and the right state of mind we might single-handedly change our lot in life. The counter-intuitive truth is that the most productive forms of self-care—adequate rest, nourishment, agency—require a decent amount of social and economic support from our families, our bosses, our communities, our government. I assume this ingredient is often left out of the exhaustive self-care how-tos because social safety nets are a harder problem to solve than “seven ways to develop a good habit” or whatever. And also because the most affluent peddlers of self-care have a way of rendering their support systems invisible (goop, Ballerina Farm, etc).

In “The Myth of Self-Reliance,” an essay for The Paris Review, the author Jenny Odell writes that, following the release of her book How to Do Nothing, she was confronted with the limits of some of the habits she’d preached in it, like making time for slow walks and quiet reflection. “Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude,” she writes, “a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. … [R]eally all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the ‘over-soul’—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half ‘model minority,’ a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.” She calls this the “self-not-self paradox”: the simultaneous infinitude of our individual spirits and the innumerable reliances that enable them to thrive.

I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly “high-functioning” person and have, throughout my life, viewed periods of lower function as dark marks to be mined for lessons, or else disregarded as out of character. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve attempted to view these downswoops more generously—not as failures of will or spirit, but as necessarily ebbs in the general flow of my life. But still this view frames me as something of a closed circuit: cycling through periods of generation and recession according only to my own resources. It fails to understand me as part of something bigger than myself; a broader energy exchange, maybe, between me and everything (and everyone) else.

I suspect this is why I haven’t always understood what about my own actions precipitates good days versus bad ones. Why they sometimes seem to arrive mysteriously, unmappable to any supposed right or wrong-doing on my part. Pregnancy has, in some ways, intensified this curiosity—my body subjecting me to a mercurial process I can’t fully see or control—but it’s demystified it, too. Whether through bowls of pre-chopped ingredients in my fridge or the reinforcing presence of a friend, I’ve become more attuned to the infinite ways I receive help and require care, and return them too. And through this, the concept of self-care has come to seem all the more mythic: not a practice honed in solitude, but co-created and enabled. A communal project that defies its own name.

My favorite article I read last week was “What Is Mom Rage, Actually?” by Merve Emre for The New Yorker, a critical look at the idea that “mom rage” is necessarily a result of patriarchal and capitalist forces. Last Friday’s 15 things also included my ideal New York fall lunch, a perfect tote, my new depraved little snack, and more. The rec of the week was best books to listen to (versus read)—a small but worthwhile category, in my opinion.

Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley