By Riyad A. Shahjahan
For the past two years, I had the privilege of teaching an online graduate summer course on professional development and wellness. I had designed the content to integrate insights from Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC) wellness literature. I also encouraged students, including health professionals, HR practitioners, educators, and administrators, to reflect on and practice self-care throughout the course.
Many expressed deep concerns about burnout, impostor syndrome, shame, and guilt. Their feedback underscored the crucial need for radical self-care, especially for those from minoritized backgrounds engaged in social justice (SJ) work. This whole experience of teaching the course inspired me to share the “why” for radical self-care from a “time” perspective in this blog post.
Beyond mainstream wellness: The urgency of radical self-care
When we think of wellness, images of luxury spa retreats, gym memberships, fitness routines, nature getaways, yoga, or massages often come to mind. Wellness, heavily marketed by the corporate sector, is typically associated with individual choices – following specific diets, meeting step counts, or tracking sleep with devices like Fitbits or Apple Watches.
However, this mainstream wellness culture overlooks the profound social barriers that perpetuate unwellness–sickness, absence, injury, accident, and disability–at individual, community, institutional, and societal levels. Wellness has been co-opted by a corporate industry that often reinforces Whiteness, classism, and the appropriation of Indigenous traditions (Luger & Collins, 2022). Moreover, these wellness trends frequently aim to boost productivity or profitability (Badr, 2022).
We must remember that self-care has deep roots in social justice. Originating as a medical concept in the 1950s to promote healthier habits among patients (Harris, 2017), self-care evolved to address stress in emotionally demanding professions like counseling and social work.
During the women’s and civil rights movements, self-care became a political act essential for transformative activism. In response to the inadequacies of the “racist and patriarchal medical establishment,” marginalized groups used self-care to reclaim autonomy over their health (Badr, 2022).
For instance, Black feminist writer Audre Lorde (1988), during her cancer treatment, famously stated, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (p. 130). Similarly, the Black Panther movement promoted self-care by sharing preventative health resources to counteract the lack of adequate healthcare for Black Americans. Radical self-care was about dismantling oppressive systems to achieve healthy lives for minoritized bodies for their self-determination and everyday being (Badr, 2022).
In essence, radical self-care is inherently political for minoritized communities. As Sara Ahmed (2014) poignantly notes, “we [minoritized] reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday, and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other. This is why when we have to insist, I matter, we matter, we are transforming what matters” (last para.).
Finally, radical self-care entails addressing the uneven distribution of temporal resources or infrastructures supporting wellness initiatives (Sharma, 2014). We need to recognize that unwellness is unevenly distributed, stemming from larger inequities in ability, pay scales, benefits, paid leave, office spaces, office equipment, learning environments, flexible working hours, and job precarity.
Radical self-care calls for a shift from individualistic practices to collective, transformative actions that address and dismantle systemic inequities.
Disinvest in ‘grind’ culture in social justice circles
Grind culture views our bodies as disposable, demanding that we ‘grind’ to achieve more, produce more, and make a difference, ultimately tying our worth to our productivity (Hersey, 2022). This culture, rooted in racial capitalism and linear clock time, perpetuates inequalities based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. It devalues any time not seen as productive, such as breaks, pauses, waiting, or rest (Adam, 2002). Thus, the “crisis of care” we face is also a temporal crisis. The perpetual temporal demands of capitalism erode the precious moments available for replenishment and renewal (Kim & Schalk, 2021).
We need to consider the wellness of minoritized bodies and minimize harm by divesting from grind culture within SJ work. Grind culture infiltrates SJ circles when self-care is dismissed as a distraction from advocacy or conflated with individualistic self-care. In a society driven by grind culture and the endless ticking of the clock, radical self-care begins with the affirmation of the “self” — radical self-love. We are constantly bombarded by narratives of inadequacy, shame, fear, guilt, perfectionism, and trauma, all reinforcing the notion that WE ARE NOT ENOUGH.
Kim & Schalk (2021) highlight that SJ advocacy often promotes “round-the-clock” work that denies the physical, psychological, and emotional needs of working bodyminds, reinforcing capitalism’s desire for constant productivity. In grind culture, caring for oneself is expected to fit into the vanishing “slivers of time” left for non-work and non-activist activities (Ibid.).
Radical self-care involves rejecting grind culture’s obsession with laboring to effect change. Hersey (2022) warns of the tolls our bodies endure in the relentless pursuit of ‘fixing’ things through labor. She reflects, “I didn’t see my body as a place of infinite wisdom but instead saw it as a tool to be used to push, create, figure out, and do” (p. 99).
To truly embrace radical self-care, we must interrogate and disinvest from the martyr and workaholic culture in SJ circles – the notion that self-sacrifice and the negation of self-care make us more worthy as SJ advocates. A recent study on educational activists found that the dominant ‘martyr syndrome’ led to burnout, stress, and anxiety, with many viewing self-care as an “indulgence” or “a marker of privilege” (Gorski, 2015, p. 707).
Rest, pause, and pleasure for the embodied body
Radical self-care entails respecting the temporalities inherent in our bodies by gifting it with rest, pause, and pleasure. Rest as resistance may take the form of temporal agency such as integrating naps, day dreaming, sipping tea, regular breaks from social media, deep music listening, or imaginary act. Embracing the temporal rhythms of rest will albeit look differently based on one’s social positionality. Overall, rest helps us move beyond linear clock time focused on productivity and embracing the temporal rhythms of our body.
Introducing “pauses” in our daily lives helps to disrupt grind culture’s normative tempo. For instance, to help resist grind culture, we could integrate rituals in our daily activities to add intention, meaning, and rest. We could also set boundaries by saying “no” as modes of resistance. As brown (2019) aptly puts it, “Your no makes way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic” (p. 8). In short, radical self-care requires aligning one’s temporality towards some forms of pause and authentic yeses.
Centering bodily pleasures is key to radical self-care. brown (2019) suggests that “we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression” (p. 8). Minoritized bodies’ pleasure becomes a “measure of freedom” (p. 3). Pleasure activism is the “work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (p. 13). To this end, brown shares a number of somatic ways of knowing to center pleasure that range from erotic sex, fashion, humor, passion work, reading, cooking, eating, and other arts, to name a few. In short, acting towards justice should “feel good”, rather than a mere side-dish.
Overall, embracing radical self-care is a temporal manifesto — a call to reclaim our time, honor our bodies, and nurture our spirits amidst the pervasive pressures of grind culture.
References
Adam, B. (2002). The gendered time politics of globalization: Of shadowlands and elusive justice. Feminist Review, 70(1), 3-29.
Ahmed, S. (2014). Self-care as warfare. Retrieved August 28, 2023 from https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/
Badr, S. (2022). Re-imagining wellness in the age of neoliberalism. New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis, 3. https://doi.org/10.25071/2563-3694.66
brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure activism: The politics of feeling good. Microcosm Publishing.
Gorski, P. C. (2015). Relieving burnout and the “martyr syndrome” among social justice education activists: The implications and effects of mindfulness. The Urban Review, 47, 696-716.
Harris, A. (2017). The History of Self-Care. Slate.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Hachette.
Kim, J. B., & Schalk, S. (2021). Reclaiming the radical politics of self-care: A crip-of-color critique. South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2), 325-342.
Lorde, Audre. (1988). A Burst of Light: And Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Ixia Press.
Luger, C. & Collins, T (2022). The seven circles: Indigenous teachings for living well. Harper One.
Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press.
This blogpost is a shortened and modified version of a forthcoming book chapter.
Image credit: Emad F. Shahjahan