Burnout v. Betrayal

“I’ve got a little beef with self-care.”

photo credit: chelsea shapouri, unsplash

I have this François de La Rochefoucauld quote hanging in my cabin:

We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

It feels especially poignant these days. So many are feeling the weight of the world. I’ve never been so grateful I’m not on social media. The violence is extraordinary, in Gaza (and Ukraine and on and on and on), and also on the internet.

I love the quote and also think it’s only half true. I’ve had a handful of conversation with friends over the past few weeks around the themes of social responsibility, the “privilege to look away,” and personal mental health. I definitely don’t have the answer for where to find the line of caring enough, but I’m pretty sure once we’re so caught in a loop of trying to find that line that our own mental health is suffering, we’re of no use to anyone. I’m not sure human brains can truly conceive of genocide, not sure we can or should be able to picture every single dead child. When we start taking on the misfortunes of others as our own, it’s time for a reboot.

Tressie McMillan Cottom & Dr. Pooja Lakshmin

Which brings me to self care.* More specifically, to an episode of The Ezra Klein Show: “Boundaries, Burnout and the ‘Goopification of Self-Care.” No Ezra in this episode, it’s Tressie McMillan Cottom interviewing Dr. Pooja Lakshmin about her new book, Real Self-Care. I could go on and on about Tressie McMillan Cottom. If you don’t know her work, make her your obsession this week.

Early in the interview she confesses, “I’ve got a little beef with self-care.” Don’t we all. Lakshmin laughs, then breaks down the concept of self-care (as she does in the book) into two varieties: faux and real.

She defines faux self-care as something external that maintains the status quo, on both individual and wider societal relationships. Real self-care is about internal work.

“[It’s] hard to disentangle the radical roots of self-care from the consumerist way we tend to go about it,” Laksmin says. Think candles and essential oils, injected with high hopes. The right product = you will be ok and totally in control of your life. Sprinkle in that American emphasis on productivity and competition and watch self-care become weirdly competitive. Am I doing self-care right?

Real Self-Care is an attempt to determine where an individual’s responsibility to true self-care impacts the larger social framework. Lakshmin talks about burnout—something we’ve thought of largely as something the individual needs to be able to handle—versus betrayal. The systems let us down. “When we’re blaming the individual for something like burnout, we’re actually exonerating the broken social structures.”

This is almost always the takeaway when we’re talking about existing social phenomena. It’s essentially the thesis of my essay collection: many of our struggles with relationships and sex have so little to do with individual humans, so much more to do with systems failing us by placing outsized expectations on our shoulders and offering no support. Marital unhappiness is a direst result of the dysfunction of patriarchal and capitalistic expectations.

The conversation between Lakshmin and Cottom ranges from bullet journals to when the costs of saying “no” are too high. They also talk a lot about the hard work of boundary-setting. Lakshmin describes the moment a mentor told her she doesn’t have to answer the phone every time it rings. She’d thought it was a given, especially just out of medical school where pagers were constantly going off, that when someone needed something she was immediately responsible to them. For her, “the pause” became a radical act of true self-care.

“The pause” is not a problem for me as it relates to the phone. I’ve been trying to push back against the notion that we should all be constantly available for a hot minute. But maybe we could all use some kind of larger pause agreement. A pause revolution. A secular call to prayer, a societal contract that we’re all going to put our phones down at the same time and give ourselves a moment. Real self-care is “not something to check off your list, it’s something to embody,” Lakshmin says.

It’s not sustainable to believe every time we focus on one thing we’re therefore abandoning all the others. In the end, reading through endless details about a war is doom scrolling. It’s an addictive device doing what it does. I’m not advocating for looking away completely, but truly caring about the world cannot include the abandonment of self. Solitude, play, transcendence are critical to our ability to maintain solidarity without total burnout.

Also, lighting an expensive verbena candle pretty much always makes me feel better. Sometimes candles do have their place.

***

One more thing: Another reading! Tonight!

I’ll be reading from an unpublished essay tonight at the Orcas Island Winery for The Leaping Fool Winter Writers Series. Doors and food at 5pm, readings from 6 to 8 with a break. Hope to see you there!

Optional Assignment:

At least once this week, give yourself time to pause before getting back to someone you really think you need to reply to ASAP.

* I’m trying out intentionally not hyphenating “self care” when it’s “real,” because I respect the self as a standalone entity at least as much as I do pets and plants and hair.