Self Care Has Become an Industry: Hallelujah

I don’t sell any self care products. I am not a life coach, a self care coach, a fitness coach. No coaching over here. I am a writer, an educator, a mother, a wife, and yes, in all of those roles I am, proudly, a woman. I am and have always been a loud proponent of self care. I was pushing women to see movies by themselves, treat themselves to a cup of coffee, do some yoga, and just take a bath with the door locked for years, long before self care became Self Care. Now, self care has become a booming industry. And I say, thank the gods. So sit down, pour a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, and let’s talk about self care.

Judgment Day

Recently, a young woman published an article slamming the self care industry. She tells us to take a good look at our finances. She says we need to get in our second workout, or worry less about our instagram feed. She says to build lives we are not desperate to escape from, into a salt bath with a piece of chocolate cake.

I agree with the basic message. Self care is much, much more than little treats and escapes from reality. Yes, we obviously need to treat the whole package – mind, body, and soul. Her audience gave her a round of applause. “Yay!” They say. “We really needed to hear this message!”

Sure. We all need reminders to face reality. Tough love is essential for people with their heads buried in the sand. It can be the perfect snap back to reality we need when we are hiding from fears that need to be faced. In fact, I just wrote a piece on facing truth and taking personal responsibility to that end.

The Weight of a Woman

The problem is, the two issues, reality/truth and indulgence/treats, do not have to be mutually exclusive. And indulgence, for many, many women, is an essential part of our lives. We kill ourselves, we bust our asses, we raise children, we educate children, we tend to other people’s lives – husbands, parents, clients, you name it.

The weight of a grown woman’s life would make her rich if it were valued as gold. The real reality is that it is gold. The world would quite literally not function without the labor that women provide, free and otherwise. My friend over at Wine and Cheese Doodles weighs this issue quite well.

Women do not take bubble baths, salt baths, spa trips, pedicure trips, etc. to escape from our horrible lives. We do it to get a much needed break from our very full, exhausting lives. We do it to get some time alone in our own thoughts. We do it to take care of our own vessels. We put our own masks on first. Because we cannot serve from an empty vessel, and we certainly cannot save lives when we are suffocating.

There are a plethora of other problems with the original article, from class to gender, and those issues have been summed up by my fellow writer over at Bohemian Nation. My primary issue is with the shaming.

We Don’t Need Convincing

One of the problems I noticed the author, and some other women, has with this relatively new industry is its so called commodification of self care. Do you really need a $20 bath bomb? (I don’t even know what a bath bomb is, but I’ve heard about it. It sounds amazing.) Do you actually feel better for having spent $5 on Starbucks when you could have made your own coffee for pennies? Why don’t you just paint your own toenails? Is chocolate cake going to solve your problems, or are you hiding from you problems with chocolate cake?

These questions, this judgment, handed down on high from our self righteous sisters shame shame shaming us, is counterproductive. First, we don’t need to be convinced that we need to treat ourselves. We know. I say thank you for offering me so many ways to treat myself. We are not mindless sheep being led by the nose, convinced our lives are horrible and that this or that product will solve all our problems. No. I want a piece of chocolate cake because it’s been a really long time since I’ve had chocolate cake and damn it, sometimes I just want chocolate cake. I want someone else to rub my feet and paint my toes.

I enjoy treating myself. I take pleasure in pleasing myself because I work hard, I look hard at my life, at my reality, I fight every single day to make life spectacular for my friends, my family, my students, my readers, and it’s Sunday, and I want to check out bath bombs!

We know life is hard; we don’t need to dig our heads out of the sand. We need a bath alone for thirty (I’ll honestly be happy with fifteen) minutes alone without someone sucking, licking, crawling on us, putting green beans in our hair or Cheerios down our shirts.

And that’s just my life at work!

Support Systems and Communities

What we need, really, truly, is for our sisters to hug us, embrace us, love us in our oddness, forgive us our trespasses, and welcome us into communities. We need a world of women who don’t judge each other, shame each other, preach to each other. We can use some help, sure, kind words of encouragement, yes, a little tough love at times, of course.

The greatest thing about working part time out of the house is that it reminds me that I am a grown, adult woman with a life beyond mothering. I have friends at work who don’t have kids, so I can’t just sit and talk about my kids all the time. My friends at work value me as an educated, accomplished woman who happens to also be a mother.

The greatest thing about being a writer is the groups of other women writers who are so welcoming, who want to teach, to learn, to collaborate. Women have befriended me, given me excellent advice, shown me new ways to write and new groups to join. Women have shows me their work and applauded mine. These women are sometimes so much like me I can’t believe we haven’t already met and become best friends, and others are dramatically different from me. But because we have all agreed to be part of a loving, accepting, kind community, we have found ways to bridge our differences.

The greatest thing about my mom communities is that we can bitch, share, laugh, roll our eyes, and know that we all adore our children and would jump in front of a freight train for them. The little monsters.

Self care, a big part of self care, is having women in your life who will remind you how great you are, how strong you are, how powerful you are. They will tell you to have the damn cake today, and then get in your two workouts tomorrow. And you can never have too many of those women.

Yes, We Are Sick

The author of this article says that a society that needs a self care industry is a sick society indeed. Yes. She is right. We are sick. Where she is wrong is in attacking the solution. The Industrial Revolution created a society led by men, for men, about men. Women have been driven like mules ever since. We work outside and inside the home and when we try to carve out time for ourselves we are shamed. When we are not shamed, we are told to rest up, get the pedicure or the facial, explicitly so you can get back out their and work our asses off some more.

The self care industry has stepped up to remind us that we have nothing to be ashamed of. Take the bath, eat the cake, take care of yourself and respond to your needs too. Do it because you can, because you should, and just for the sake of doing it. Leisure. The communities that have grown up around this industry, this issue, this concept are brilliant ones. Scary Mommy is a huge internet sensation. Women are loving this new platform where we can bitch about our kids or our husbands and know that it is all in good stress relieving fun.

We don’t hate our lives. We aren’t miserable. We are busy. We are crazy overwhelmed. And we don’t want to be anymore. We still live in a society that tells us we can’t slow down, and we are trying to figure out how to change all that. America tells us that we not only can do it all, but that we must. And the reality that many of us are facing is that we don’t want to. At least not all at the same time.

When we can all laugh at our frustrations and our struggles, when we can have a glass of pinot noir on the internet together, we can begin to form bonds.

Everything in Moderation

I am obviously not advocating drowning all of our sorrows in bottles and bottles of wine or hours and hours of baths. What I am saying is that the vast majority of us recognize our realities quite well. Many of us recognize reality all too well. There are real women out there who are locking themselves in bathrooms and crying. Women are experiencing post partum depression that leaves them paralyzed in the face of the enormous pressure put on us, incapable of functioning in their roles as mothers for months or years. Some women simply leave, the pressure mounting so high that they just can’t.

If a bath bomb for a half an hour on a Sunday, a yoga class alone, or yes, a piece of chocolate cake, makes life more manageable, sell me the damn bath bomb, sell me the yoga class, sell me the cake. Because I will still get up and take care of my kids, I will still go to work, I will still pay my bills. The self care industry isn’t making me hide from my life, it is helping me escape it for a blissful moment or two.

Escapism: You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing

Self care is an acknowledgement of us. There were days when novels were dreaded as dangerous for young minds. Women could become corrupted by the novel, the written word, fiction. We escaped into fiction to take a break from life. Literature is now not only acceptable, but considered by many “elite.”

Then came television. “Oh  no,” they said. “It will rot our minds.” Today I and many women cannot wait for Olivia Pope to uncover or create a new Scandal. We can’t wait to figure out How To Get Away With Murder. We escape into the mysteries of Grey’s Anatomy.

Self care reminds us that we need, desperately, to love ourselves, to believe in ourselves, and yes, to care for ourselves. We are not stupid. We can see quite plainly when we are being sold a lie or a gimmick, and we get pissed, offended, and we move on.

Self care helps us form tribes. The internet works to unite women from all walks of life around the globe. We are waking up to our need for each other, for our need to be kind to each other, and to ask for kindness in return.

What we don’t need, what we have never needed, is a woman who should be an ally telling us that what we are doing, how we have chosen to care for ourselves, is wrong. That the way we are practicing our self care is not enough. That we need to do more, do better, be better. We get enough of that from men and from ourselves.

From our sisters, we need love.